I have not seen it myself yet but that picture of the amazing stained glass probably does no justice to how much I love the thing. I finally found it after first spotting it in February 2006. It was not exactly tormenting me but I spent 6 or 7 hours trying to find it again.

That stained glass is unusual for Calvary because the door to the mausoleum that houses it is completely without glass. So you can see the stained glass inside (and get photos of it) without reflections of your wrist or mouth in the door.

And the stained glass piece seems to be in immaculate condition. That would be unusual to begin with(the glass is about 100 years old) but it is made more remarkable by the arm's reach within which this beautiful stained glass work sits.

Anyway. I am sunburned from today's cemetery trip. I have been restless these days, and the last few days I wandered off into directionless walks just like the old days.

Remembering a conversation from the other night, in which the three of us sought out new universal truths, universal answers to obvious questions.

The most obvious specimen from the genre of answering obvious questions with universal truths: "Does a bear shit in the woods?" While a bear, an individual bear, is not *constantly* shitting in the woods, the answer to the question is always yes. A bear is always shitting in the woods. Somewhere, dear reader, somewhere in the woods -- as the sun sets, as the beer pours, as the twig is bent -- somewhere a bear shits onto the surface of our shared earth, our shared earth.

We entertained other possibles answers. Is Hitler evil? Well, not if you, y'know, worship Hitler. I argued against "Does shit stink?" Shit, I argued, does not always stink. I thought vegetarians' shit never stunk? No no no, Mark, you should eat some asparagus and report back.

"Is the pope Catholic?" seemed like a slam dunk. While there may have been popes who could be proven to have been (by technicality or political motivations) non-Catholic I think it is universally safe to say that at any given moment in time the pope is Catholic.

"Three strikes and you're out?" Instantly shot down. First of all, you can foul tip the ball and the catcher can drop it, giving you a chance to beat the throw to first base. This happens all the time, with many pitchers on the books as having scored 4 strikeouts in an inning. But even metaphorically there is no universal substance to the three-strikes rule.

And the conversation went on and on.

It was nice.

housematehorror
Horror stories from the world of shared living spaces. EEK!

I spent much of the day standing on sewer grates, looking for examples of artistry in the placement of paint splotches on the openings to the sewers.

Somewhere in the New York City bureaucracy is a job in which someone drops splotches of paint on the sewers. The splotches indicate that the sewer has been treated for West Nile Virus. A city employee, committing mosquito genocide, drops an insecticide bomb into the sewer, and records the gesture with a couple of paint splotches.

I do not know what (if anything) the colors represent. Lately the paint splotches seem to be white. The artistry comes from the paint splotches dropped on top of already existing paint splotches. Large green spots, topped by smaller, centered red spots, look like bug-eyed cartoon drawings.

Other splotches look artistic on other merits. Sometimes the dripping paint that oozes down the curb forms an elegant passage, dried in mid-ooze. Other times I swear the people who placed these paint stains were trying to say something, to who I do not know, but today I took receipt of the message for future interpretation.

It's a photo essay I've wanted to do for a long time. Maybe it's a little overly precise but I think the series of photos of these paint droppinigs will reveal something.

I am passing through an anti-zeitgeist phase. For most of my days I just touch the surface of understanding things. Lately I find myself looking beneath.

I think it has something to do with this project of learning the Well-Tempered Clavier. This is complex music whose meaning reaches far beyond the notes on the page or the sound of the music.

Many of these pieces have been in my hands since high school, but I never really knew them. I never felt worthy of them, nor do I feel worthy of Bach's other great keyboard pieces.

Long story short (hah) I am getting through to the meaning of this music, and the intellectual rigors required to so are perhaps drifting into other pursuiits.

I see failure, though. I do not think I can memorize this series. And I do not think that I can be free with the Well-tempered Clavier until I can play it in its entirety from memory. Today I can not get through one single piece from memory. Most of the fugues I can not even get through the first entry of the counter-subject from memory without crashing.

I did not approach this project with failure in mind, and it is far too early to resign. But this weekend I had a glimmer of failure in this pursuit.

I began learning the fugues in the way Bach's students learned them: I started copying them out by hand. From the first minutes spent copying the D-Sharp Minior Fugue from Book II I felt the difference in understanding. I felt a different experience.

That is where I am this day with the WTC project. Hah, I remember feeling so clever when I moved to New York and spotted those subway station signs directing passengers to the WTC.

dwseason4
A journal where the alternative fourth season of the TV show Doctor Who is being written.

lol_comics
Keep youself smiling at the little things with some funny comics.

bikes
A community for everyone who loves bicycles, motorbikes, and more.

Well, I just found a lengthy bit of mental droo that I thought I sent three or four days ago, but I guess not. Now the sequence of my accounts is wrenched awhack.

And none are concerned.

I am at a new old bar in my neighborhood. It's "new old" because it's the same place as before, just renovated.

I find it strange to inhabit a space after it has changed. The change here was not so radical, but memory tells me that the table at which I sit now is on the spot where karaoke stars used to sing their songs. To my right is a row of tables, a space that used to host a dank room with a pool table.

This new place now has televisions everywere. There are two to my right, one to the upper left, and seven or eight to the left. A couple of large wall mirrors create an illusion of even more televisions. You could close your eyes in this place and still see televisions.

The payphones and the ATM are gone.

A hipster pub near here closed down a few years ago. Eventually that small, dark bar was replaced by a huge, brilliantly lit grocery store. It has been a few years since the bar closed, and over a year since the grocery store opened, but when I shop for pork chops therr I still see the things that filled that space when it was the hipster pub. I still see the bar and the bartenders moving through the space where the cash registers and the cashiers sit today. I look to the ceiling, so brightly lit today, and see the barely visible exposed innards of the building as I saw them when the bar was open.

It can be like looking at someone you thought you knew, or someone you once knew, only to find that person dismissed.

I had a dream last night Sam C. died. Sam is someone I went to school with from early grade school through high school graduation. We were never really friends, and we do not keep in touch.

By "not exactly" I mean that his name (and the names of others) surfaces in my e-mail once in a while when there is activity on an e-mail list for alumni from my high school graduating class.

His name rises up along with a few dozen names of people I knew in school. Sam is among a dozen or so from that high school class who I knew from the 3rd grade.

It seems odd that Sam would rise up in my dreamlands, but there he was, not rising up at all but instead fallen down dead of congestive heart failure at 40.

In the dream he had owned a sandwich shop. The sandwich place did not open that day on account of his death.

I looked through the glass doors of the sandwich place. No one was there. I imagined him behind the counter with the white chef's cap on his bald head. I remembered his huge, butt-like nose.

I turned around and found that the sandwich place was in a mall in Tampa. I stopped to talk to some people about Sam's passing. After talking to said people I found that one of them had stolen my camera. I could not figure out which of the people had taken my camera, but I did not care. Cameras, like all electronics, are disposable junk, so I dismissed the loss of the camera with plans to get a new (better) one.

That is how I woke up: planning a trip to B&H Photo to get a Canon G9 to replace my point and shoot lost in the morning's dream. I was planning that trip to B&H until I remembered that Sam had died.

Or had he?

I looked up Sam's name on the Internet newsfeeds and found no death notice. I found nothing on the blogs, nothing on Usenet, nothing in my e-mails.

I do not know Sam at al any more so it made no sense to pursue this with a phone call or an e-mail, or with anything more than that paper-thin surface of knowledge known as a search of the Internet.

I never fully woke up today, so it is not until now, 10:30pm, that I write this out and alert myself to the fact that Sam is (probably) alive and well.

Dreams can last a long, long time. If you do not sit down and talk to yourself about your dreams they can linger forever, like underwear on the flagpole, twisting in the winds.

The other day I paid rent on my parking space. It has been one month since I got the treasured reserved parking spot in a driveway on my street.

Having that reserved spot has fundamentally changed the pace of my life. It has not changed my life -- no one thing can ever do that -- but it has changed the paces of these weeks.

I had thought that I would use the car a lot more, knowing that I have a place to park any time of day that I return. Instead I let the car sit there, gathering pollen blobs and other detritus from the large tree that looms.

The payment of the rent on the space took an amusing turn, though I didn't thinnk it was funny at the time. I called the woman who rented me the space. We agreed to meet at my car in 5 minutes. I got there first, and started the car engine. A man appeared, and knocked on my car window. He gestured at me to give him the money, which was visible in my hand. I did not know who he was. I say "You don't look like Susan." All the while he is gesturing at me to just give hime the money.

I call Susan, who laughs and says that's her husband. He and I laugh about it as he takes the money and says "Thanks for the money, I'm going to the bar!"

Maybe it's not as funny as I thought, but it seemed high-larious at the time. I imagined I was being mugged by someone who somehow knew I would be sitting there with 200 dollars cash.

The arrangement for me to park there is so informal that it's a little weird. No contract, no papers, no nothing but 200 bucks cash per month and a parcel of land on which to store my vehicle. I don't live there so I guess there is no reason for the property owner to deal with me any more than to get the damn money.

I feel boring. My words today shall hum with the boredom that is me.

I walked all over the place yesterday, directionless, like the old days. I don't do so much aimless wandering these days. Not as much time. I walked up Northern Boulevard then over to Sunnyside, and back again. No point to the journey, which covered only familiar ground.

Someone was having a garage sale. I saw the sign and expected the garage to be at someone's house or apartment building, but the garage was one of a few dozen garages in a large building that contained nothing but garages. A long row of garages, originally intended for cars, but now mostly used for storage. I do not know, but I imagine this is the case because cars and SUVs have gotten large enough that many of them do not fit into the garages built 30 years ago, nor do they fit between the narrow alleys and driveways that lie between buildings.

Heartburn sucks. For much of today I felt like I was on fire inside and out. I forgot to take the Prilosec two days ago. I noted no ill effects for this, so I thought I'd try going two days without. Bad idea. Bile and acids, brewing in the cauldron of my lower digestive tubes, seem only to be deferred by the work of these Proton Pump Inhibitors. The heartburn now is far worse than the heartburn before I started taking Prilosec. I never used to feel like I would burst into flames. Then I started taking Prilosec.

I should check in with the doctor about all this. I do not want another tube-down-the-throat procedure, though one could have far worse things to confront.

Can the acid and bile just be drained? Poke a hole in my side and pour it out? Use it as a bean dip substitute? Sell it for hundreds of dollars a fluid ounce.

Today was a good day for my new web server. One of those social bookmark type sites linked to something, sending a firehose of unexpected (and, frankly, unwanted) traffic to a part of my site run by software which is the likeliest of any softwtare I use to collapse under heavy volume.

There was no collapse. There was not even a slowdown, as far as I could tell.

This new web server is a bit over the top for one single web site. I may add others later, but for now the specs on this one box are similar to the specs on the boxes we used at cnn.com. CNN, of course, had dozens of load balanced servers, while I have just the one, but it's still a little ludicrous to have this much horsepower waiting to run only one domain.

Whatever. It passed a test today.

As announced, as promised, this is boring. My life hums with this today. Serene breezes of tranquil boredom.

knitted_wedding
Follow one woman's quest to knit an entire vow-renewing wedding. Encouragement is encouraged.

brigits_flame
For writers interested in an ongoing competition that tests your narrative chops.

hollow_art
A longstanding art, icon and base archive centered around RPGs.