A1

Library of the Living

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:53:51 -0500

A few weeks ago, for a couple of days, I felt like nothing. That could be called an improvement over other days on which I feel like less than that.

If someone mentions a future event I have to sooth the tiny panic lurking in my guts -- panic at the possibility that I might not live to see it or any future event. I have no specific reason to think that my immediate future is in peril. Apparent facts are not relevant. The platitudes of daily life are erased, leaving nothing to support the flimsy obliviousness to life's futile march. These mornings the strength to craft a simple thought is like doing push ups on two broken arms. The weight even angers me. If you tell me I need to cheer up then you do not what you are talking about.

My life would be incoherent without these episodes. Depression and the singular physical sensations it produces (pain, numbness, a feeling that something is genuinely falling apart) make more sense to me than life's fatuous illusions. I would argue that this capacity for consummate discomfort with the shell of life allows for a more realistic view of the world.

The panic takes many forms. During this bout I opened a book of Li Po poetry. A sentence in the introduction describing the Tang dynasty as "a most brilliant era of culture and refinement, unsurpassed in all the annals of the middle kingdom" did not uplift or inspire. It humiliated me as an example of how much knowledge I will never possess or even comprehend. Time has no future, only the wasted past. The sound of laughter fills the air, but the laughter is at me, and the laughter comes from everything. Cars drive past outside, like patient breaths, self-satisfied and eternally remote. The sound of running water cackles, heaping disdain on me as it passes down the drain. Every drop of water is a century. The sound is cruel, I feel it should stop, but it pressures and destroys my ability to think.

I've been writing a poem about a place in which the evolution of human knowledge marches toward nonexistence. What passes for knowledge is front-loaded into the young while the elders have nothing and say little. Tiered levels of communication based on age endure out of the earthly excuse that wisdom is shared among peers.

At present I call this poem "The Library of the Living." The library is a Borges-ian structure housing the books and writings of every living human. One could never find the beginning or the end of the place, but as with the specter of nonexistence one would never so much as contemplate it.


At the Library of the Living
the authors sat at tables
near their books. 

This structure housed 
no published works,
no books by the dead, 
no works stinking of
immortality.

The young had filled more pages then they had read.
The shelves of the elders were nearly empty.

Maintaining the earthly lie of wisdom
a few elders had slim notebooks
of lightly littered pages, 
a few sheets in a drawer.

As the supreme elder I had nothing.
No stories, no poetry, 
no waste of the written word.
My pages had 
evaporated into the silent present.

As I aged I made fewer spoken utterances,
my last spoken words an obscure tomb, 
untranslatable glyphs of breath
decrying the coercive relationship among 
words written, spoken, and unknown.

Through translation earnest and fearful,
my words were passed among the others:

	Thought
	is made trite the 
	moment it is uttered.
	No words are immune to banality.
	All words signal
	a disdain for the shell of life.

By my decree:

	To live is to fail

the ancients were dismissed.



But the dead responded with fire.

	Fire. 
		Fire. 

Lianas of angry fire 
raced through the stacks, 
mad snakes of lightning
snapping up books like 
rain washes chalk from a sidewalk
leaping from room to room 
wrapping shelves of books,
incinerating them.

Some tried to escape but 
most looked to me
as I welcomed the flames.

Too wise for panic but firmly terrified 
they listened and reported to those who fled:

	This is how the story is told.

The young put it crudely, but heroically:

	If the building burns then so do we.


The Library of the Living vanished
so the dead could survive.

I do not know if this poem is going anywhere. I lack depth of knowledge in Lacanian linguistic theory and Taoism, the magic combination of specialties that might give me more guidance. I don't know why I make myself the supreme elder in this poem, except that I had a dream a few weeks ago which evoked a similar setting.

I read William Styron's "Darkness Visible" a few years ago after a friend described it as the seminal book of our time on the subject of depression. It may seem strange but I found that book irritating to read. I don't blame the author, who I suspect would understand my reaction. The overlay of story-telling seemed pretentious, and when I read it those years ago I felt the author used blame, anecdotes, and drugs as salves to obscure his own free will.

My clearest memory of this book has little to do with its content. In August, 2005, I woke up in a cemetery with "Darkness Visible" lying on the ground in front of me.

The sun, rising over on an already 90-degree morning, burned my eyes. I had not been asleep there for more than a few minutes but I had been up all night, passing 32 hours without sleep. When the sun started coming up I drank half a bottle of cheap wine left open overnight.

As Hemingway might have said: The wine was rancid. I drank all of it. Then I went outside.

That is a long and torrid story, though, as the many pages of text to follow would have proven had I not just erased them.

O

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:06:22 -0500



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Told

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:47:23 -0500

I have nothing to say about something once I've said it. A story told once is told for all time.

I don't know whose philosophy it might embody, but I believe that a story told is a story told, whether heard by one, by millions, or by no one at all (the story forgotten the instant it was whispered through the creator's mouth).

Stories told in my mutterings to self, experiences written into a notebook, secrets shared with a random drunkard at a forgotten pub – tales like this are told, and to repeat a story or even an idea is some kind of compromise.

I have felt sickening remorse at telling a story and feeling it was wasted. Stories from raw thickets of my gut, saved at an early age for someone I could trust, stories that make my throat tighten just to think about them – some of these stories have slithered away to people who could not care, the consummation of these stories were grotesque failures.

But those stories can not be told again. A story told is a story told.

I tend to forget there are people on the other side of this screen. Live humans thinking things, doing things, looking at this mental rotgut and squinting.

On an obscure level I imagine that story-telling and the gift of memory exist in a realm of purity where readers do not exist.

I am reading a volume of Bukowski's poetry these days. He disappoints me when he stops telling a story and addresses his audience. Words like "reader," "critic," and "writer" sound laborious and heaving coming from Bukowski.

"gold in your eye" would have made its statement more impressively without the finger-wagging at the "critics / the writers / the readers".

They are good, though, the Bukowski pages. He and Robert Lax have me writing poetry, something I thought I would never do again. I forgot how much power a blank line can carry, or how simply indenting a word can infuse it with new meaning. I like Lax's ideas of the poem as an object of contemplation, the words turned into a thing.

Bad poetry, though, slithers onto the page and molders there like an unflushed turd. That, in fact, is how those stories felt after I wasted them.

Men at Forty

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:33:22 -0500

This is my journal entry for today, my 40th birthday:

(Explanations reserved for darker corners of my notes to self.)

Today I followed through on something planned in childhood. I read Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty" to see how it resonates today compared to when I first found it over 25 years ago.

 MEN AT FORTY

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

I do not find this poem grand and lofty like when I read it so many times at 13 or 14 years of age, but I still like it. The language falls a little flat for me, and the "mortgaged houses" come through like an unwelcome return from reverie to reality.

Funny, I felt the same about those words at 14 as I do today, though I may have lacked the words to articulate that criticism.

I forgot the lines about rediscovering the face of the boy in the mirror. I do that. I see the boy not just in my mirror but in the faces of men I know who would seem to have moved far along from childhood. Few things change about a person as the years gather, and the man at 40 differs little from the boy at 12.

The line "They are more fathers than sons themselves now" seemed ominous to me as a young person, suggesting that fatherhood transformed a person in ways beyond their control. Indeed, that sense of dread seems to have sustained and even fulfilled itself. I think I would make a good father, but I have managed to avoid any situation in which fatherhood was even a remote likelihood.

The opening lines have, in numerous circumstances, proven to be words to live by. I don't think of it as verse, but as advice: "Close softly doors to rooms you will no longer use" is a metaphor that reaches into all manner of circumstances, whether I am leaving a place or a place is leaving me.

"Something is filling them" are the words from this poem that have sustained their strength over time. This line has surfaced in my mind thousands of times since childhood. Something is filling me, and maybe this "something" will finally cull the echoes of youth that linger in my mind like wind chimes.

I feel that that "something" complements the "Western Wind" of the great 16th century anonymous poem (which I prefer in ye Olde Englysh):

WESTRON WYND

Westron wynd, when wilt thou blow
The smalle rain down can rain
Christ yf my love were in my arms
And I yn my bed again

In the anonymous poem the western wind symbolizes death itself, or its inevitability. To me the "something" of Donald Justice's poem represents the distractions (euphemistically re-named "achievements") that occur before death, or the fulfillment of a life's earthly promise.

My love for the Westron Wynd poem comes partly from how I found it: Randomly. In 1992 or 1993 I discovered the "finger" command. If you typed "finger sorabji@panix.com" and hit enter you could read my .plan file. For years my .plan file contained a long poem by Ed Dorn, at other times it contained pithy quotes and dada-esque nonsense.

I will not get off on the tangent of what a .plan is or what "finger" does except to say that I believe the .plan represents the Internet's first blogging platform.

Having spotted their e-mail address on Usenet I "fingered" someone in a far-off country (I think it was Korea). My screen went dark except for those four lines of poetry and the "anonymous" signature. It was dramatic how the screen completely cleared, save for the poem, and it was astonishing how this poem (itself reaching me across so many centuries) had traveled completely around the world from Seoul to my screen in New York.

After all these years of virtually living online I find that I still do not take for granted the miracle of electronic communication.

Faces

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:55:33 -0500

I was seven years old in the summer of 1975. At a hotel in Bangkok, I was with my family among a herd of Americans ordered to evacuate Laos. Hundreds of Americans, mostly military, filled the lobbies and halls of the hotel (wish I could remember which one).

Activities were organized to keep us young people occupied. A conference room became a movie theater where we watched American television (something I had little memory of ever seeing until then). I sat with the other youngsters on the floor toward the front of the room. My mother sat with the grown-ups toward the back of the room.

The room was dark.

At some point this is what I thought happened: I thought my mother stood up, walked to the front of the room, stood in front of me and looked into her purse asking "Where did I put them?"

Sitting cross-legged on the floor she looked unbelievably tall to me, her face barely visible in the darkness of the room. Standing in front of the bright movie screen her face was further obscured by shadows.

I said something to acknowledge her question, and she stepped from the room into the corridor where brighter lights let her see inside her purse.

Her leaving like this did not make sense to me. Minutes passed and she did not return. I repeatedly turned away from the movie screen and toward the door, expecting to see my mother return, losing track of whatever was playing on the screen.

I don't know how much time elapsed, but after some time I stood up and went into the corridor to find her.

The problem was that that was not my mother. My mother, sitting at the back of the room, was looking right at me the moment I stood up and left the room. Puzzled as to why I just up and left without saying anything, and concerned about a 7 year old wandering around a vast hotel at a chaotic time, she came after me.

She found me looking over a railing at the crowds of people milling around in the lobby below.

She asked what I was doing. I explained "I thought you left!"

I explained what I thought had just happened, describing the woman with the purse.

My mother thought this incident extremely odd. For her part she had no memory of seeing anybody but me leave that room, and maybe she was a bit miffed that I would mistake someone else for her. How could I not recognize my own mother? I probably lacked words to articulate that this other woman's face was in the dark and that was why I didn't recognize her. "She sounded like you!" I remember saying.

I remembered this incident today (speaking of faces) after a correspondence with the author of Faces of Laos, an unusual picture book I found in my father's desk drawer after he died.

I have known of this book for as long as I can remember. I saw it on the coffee table in the living room in Vientiane, and it appeared on bookshelves and in drawers throughout my childhood. It was always kept in a safe or prominent place.

Seeing the pictures again after at least 2 decades I was amazed at their quality. As a child I did not recognize their artistic merits, nor did I understand their significance. Numerous searches through library card catalogues and publishers' catalogues returned no information about this book. Internet searches on the author's name and other identifying information from this slim volume also returned nothing.

I scanned the pages of the book and posted the series to my web site. I did this mostly because I felt these amazing pictures should be seen, but I also did it with the vague hope of making random contact with Americans stationed in Laos in the early and mid 1970s.

Months later I got a letter at my Post Office Box from none other than the photographer himself. His son had stumbled across the pictures and sent him the web address. George Archer was happy to see these pictures on the web and declared no commercial interest in the book or the pictures, quelling my concerns about copyright and such.

Last week another correspondence came, this time from the author's former wife. It was she who organized the photos and coördinated a gallery showing of the photos at the American-Lao Binational Center in 1973, and she was equally if not more excited than her former husband to see the pictures online.

She was also, I find myself thrilled to know, the dedicatee of the book. The identity of "mela" was a mystery that nagged at me any time I saw that page. Though not a source of deep dismay I thought this tiny mystery would get lost in time -- if it had not been lost already.

I found this book in the desk drawer in which my father stored significant objects and mementos. This drawer contained pictures of my sister and me, military medals and honors, and other such things. The presence of "The Faces of Laos" in this place of honor surprised me at first, as my father was not much for the arts or photography. But he was proud of his two tours of duty in Laos, and I know he recognized the uniqueness of this volume.

Looking out the window

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:54:37 -0500

Trying to erase from my memory the sounds of yesterday.

Filling the stairwell of my apartment building, a woman cried "DON'T DIE ON ME I NEED YOU OH NO!"

Catherine's father died.

Fire trucks and ambulances appeared outside my window. Noticing this I was alarmed to see a stream of firefighters and medics file in to this building. I opened the front door of my apartment to see a grim parade of uniformed young men headed upstairs. Their lack of urgency seemed to betray the fact that none thought they were on a rescue mission.

Catherine yelled "YOU CAN'T BE DEAD IS HE DEAD?"

One of the medics perfunctorily assured her "We're working on him."

Her screams were gut-wrenching to hear. They filled this building and wafted into the street outside. She was not dying but it felt like she was, as if her screams were his. I remembered my own reactions when, standing on this very spot, I took word that my father had shot himself through the head. Catherine, though we hardly know each other, had been so kind to me in talking about that.

Ten minutes later I looked out the window again and saw Catherine standing in front of the building, her face raped by tears, turning around aimlessly, joking about her (and her dad's) illegally parked car. "Look at that! Our car is there! Haha!"

The body lies in state until a detective arrives to investigate and rule out foul play. Natural deaths receive lowest priority over murders and suspicious circumstances. Sometimes the family, with nowhere else to go, stares at the corpse for hours until blood and pus burst from their father's eyes. A police officer acquaintance of mine (who explained all this to me) described cleaning blood from a body's face and eyes so a daughter could give her father a good-bye kiss before the detectives arrived and took the body away.

I looked out the window and saw the stream of firefighters and medics who had recently entered the building proceed to get back into their vehicles. I expected to see the body taken out, but the ambulances drove away empty. I remembered then that these first responders likely left the body in place for others to evaluate. To be honest this made me a little uncomfortable, and I left this building for a while.

It seemed like something should have stopped, but nothing did. Looking out the window I saw the man across the street getting ready to go to work as a limo driver. A man I've spoken with but whose name I do not know walked past hurriedly, as is usual for him. The hum of yellow cabs and other traffic resumed after the firemen re-opened the street. It was nice to think that at the very least a city street would be shut in recognition of one's passage. Catherine left from the building to stay with family somewhere else. As soon as quiet returned to this building I heard people coming home, talking and laughing in the hallways, unaware of the earlier events.

Looking out the window today I think I saw a detective come through this building, taking pictures and seeming to gather facts from the owner of this property. Or maybe not. Maybe the old man's body lies there now, exploding.

Filled with emptiness

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:10:22 -0500

I got a job organizing confessions that were either non-coerced or not given under oath. I am unclear of the status of these confessions or of their value, but the job interested me enough to make an elaborate 2-trains-and-a-bus commute to the office.

The subway train conductor announces the World Trade Center stop. I take the escalator to the WTC Concourse, which I find either fully restored or never destroyed. The buildings are gone but I find myself looking up for them.

I realized I left my bag on the train. The bag, and a scrap of paper in particular, had the information about my new job. It was the only way I could know where to go, who to call, or the name of the company. I remembered none of these things.

An emptiness filled me, and in the mental weakness of the moment I imagined that this paradox presented a philosophical abyss that none could rationalize.

I went back down to the subway to see if I could find the bag, realizing then that there never was a bag, that the job I wanted was in the Twin Towers, and that the scrap of paper I sought disappeared 15 years from now.

Filled with emptiness. Awake it sounds like a feeble philosophical dilemma, even a cliché. In the dream it caused dry heaves of the soul, which come to think of it sounds like another cliché.

Johnston Mausoleum

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:51:27 -0500

For as often as I have wandered the grounds of Calvary and other New York City cemeteries I have, with the exception of groundskeepers and cemetery workers, never approached any live person. I go to these places (Calvary in particular) for the beauty and the serenity, not to meet and mingle.

With some trepidation I walked up to a gentleman at Calvary on Saturday. He did not appear to be mourning an ancestor. He was taking pictures -- lots and lots of pictures -- of the mighty Johnston Mausoleum, a structure that has interested me for many years.

The Johnston Mausoleum is bigger than many houses. It is so large that it would appear to have functioned not just as a crypt but as a full chapel. Conspicuously visible to drivers on the nearby Kosckiuszko Bridge, this great tomb even makes an appearance in "The Godfather" (See my then-and-now analysis of the funeral scene of that movie here).

I approached the man at Calvary because of his apparent interest in the mausoleum, and to ask if he knew anything about it. I thought he might be a researcher or historian. He knew as much as I, meaning nothing. I offered up my theory, based on a burst of misguided research I did about a year ago, and that ended our conversation.

Having never met anyone with a mutual interest in this palatial crypt I found that the encounter, however pointless, re-energized my interest in the question of who built the majestic Johnston Mausoleum.

I found my answer, and the story is indeed interesting, as the tomb is occupied by prince and pauper alike.

John Johnston, the head of the dry goods firm of J. & C. Johnston, Broadway and Twenty-second-street, and one of the best known merchants of this city, died of heart disease Sunday evening at his residence, 7 West Fifty-third-street. He was born on the banks of Lake Erne, County Fermanagh, Ireland, in 1834, and came to America in 1847. Settling in New-York, he obtained a situation with Ubsdell & Pierson, engaged in the dry goods trade on Canal-street, remained with them for 17 years, during which time his sterling qualities secured him rapid promotion, and in 1864 left their employ and, with capital saved during his term of service, started the present house of J. & C. Johnston, on the corner of Ninth-street and Broadway. The depreciation of values following the close of the war caused widespread mercantile disaster during the earlier years of the firm's existence, but Mr. Johnston's able management and rare financial ability carried it safely through this very critical period, which saw the downfall of many old-established houses.

The firm, which included Charles Johnston up to 1880, when he died, was uniformly successful, as was also the branch house of Johnston & Reillys, which was established in Albany, and this success was mainly due to the business ability, consummate tact, and unbending integrity of the gentleman who has just passed away.

Personally Mr. Johnston was a public-spirited, open-handed gentleman, greatly beloved by his employes, some of who have been with him since the firm began business, 23 years ago, and have watched its growth from its humble beginnings. He was noted for his public spirit, his generous, though unobtrusive gifts to deserving charities, and his friendship for his employes in his large business. He was entirely self-educated, but was a diligent and discriminating student. History, literature, and mathematics were the favorite pursuits of his leisure hours, and of the last two he had attained a knowledge seldom possessed by those outside the ranks of professional scholarship. The affection which he bore to his brother Charles was remarkable, and for some years after the latter's death he could not divert his mind from his loss, and as a consequence much of the responsibility of the business has been borne by Robert A. Johnston, the youngest brother, who has been connected with the house since 1864. The business will be continued on the same principles upon which its now deceased projector founded it.

The funeral will take place to-morrow morning at 8 o'clock, when solemn requiem high mass will be celebrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral by Mgr. Farley. Mr. Johnston was a Trustee of St. Patrick's Parish for many years past, and were it not that Archbishop Corrigan will have to sing the requiem mass at the funeral of Vicar-General Quinn later Wednesday morning he would have been pleased to take part at Mr. Johnston's funeral. The interment will be in the family chapel in Calvary Cemetery.

John Johnston died May 17, 1887, seven years after brother Charles and seventeen years before his other brother Robert A. Johnston. John Johnston's full obituary from the New York Times (which I transcribed) appears to the right, and summarizes the life and fortunes of a man much loved and respected by his peers.

John Johnston led the J. & C. Johnston company, and the J. & C. Johnston department store at Broadway and Twenty-Second Street was a popular source for dress silks and other fabrics. The store was among the most successful of its time, prospering during an era when similar companies frequently went bankrupt.

The fortunes of J. & C. Johnston took a drastic turn for the worse after John Johnston's passing. Responsibility for the company passed to Robert A. Johnston, at whose helm the business failed. The bleak account of Robert A. Johnston's demise, also transcribed from a New York Times obituary, recounts a spectacular fall from grace:

"Mr. Johnston possessed millions when the business came to him through the death of his brothers, but he lost all in a few years, and in 1888 the house went out of existence. He retired to his palatial home at Mount St. Vincent, on the Hudson. Later the place was sold at foreclosure and the house burned, the owner having a narrow escape. Since then he had lived alone in a barn on the property, refusing charity. He was found sick with pneumonia and insane ten days ago."

This obituary makes tantalizing reference to the mighty structure that has fascinated me for years: "[Robert Johnston's] body ... will be immured in the magnificent family mausoleum built many years ago at a cost of $300,000 in Calvary Cemetery."

The dismal circumstances of Robert Johnston's death did not cost him a space in the family mausoleum. I find it arresting to know that the mausoleum's presence today echoes the success and personal fortunes of the Johnston name, while at the same time housing the man who wasted it.

No mention of survivors is made in any of the Times obits for the Johnston brothers. The obit for John Johnston says he died of "heart disease" while the write-up of the funeral service says that he "died suddenly." The latter words, I know from experience, are often code for saying that a death was a suicide.

That is just some gawky speculation, though. I am good at gawky speculation. I expect to fill in more and better facts for this story.

This story may interest me far more than anyone else, but it is nice to share for anyone else interested in the story behind the great Johnston Mausoleum at Calvary. I have several photos of the structure at the Mausoleums and Stained Glass section of my Calvary Cemetery photo series.

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Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:08:51 -0500

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238889

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:32:56 -0500

I saw receipt #238889 and did some research to see what that number might teach me. My findings follow.

Goliardo

This image is exactly 238889 Bytes, and comes from a series of photos titled La Posada Del Goliardo (The Inn of the Goliardo).

Relying on various automated translation tools I find that the word "Goliardo" "was used during the Middle Ages to refer to certain types of clerics vagrants and poor students pícaros that proliferated in Europe with the rise of urban life and the emergence of universities in the thirteenth century" source)

Deferring to English reference sources I find that our English word "Goliard" has a similar definition: "a wandering scholar in medieval Europe; famed for intemperance and riotous behavior and the composition of satirical and ribald Latin songs."

I never thought to ask how Goliard Concerts (a local chamber ensemble) chose its name. Until now I thought Goliard and Goliardo etymologically connected with words meaning church bells, though I draw a blank trying to remember the word in my mind that sounded something like Goliard and had a meaning related to bells.

Further research into the meaning of "Goliardo" leads me to the film career of Goliardo Padova. According to numerous sources this actor played the painter in the Bernardo Bertolucci movie Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione).

SPFPA

Quantcast, a company describing itself as "the World’s Only Open Internet Ratings Service," recently ranked SPFPA.org at #238,889 in its index detailing audience reach of Internet web sites.

SPFPA (Security Police Fire Professionals of America) describes itself at "The First Line of Defense Against a Terrorist Attack Representing over 30,000 Security Police Professionals Nationwide.

According to WHOIS records, SPFPA.org is based in Roseville, Michigan. The Mayor of Roseville is Harold L. Haugh.

Mayor Haugh has been married for 37 years with four adult children and three grandchildren.

Joe Viola

Parabox Media's Product ID# 238889 is Angels Hard as They Come, "a melange of sex, violence, leather, and souped-up Harleys with a note of topicality added in by having some of the bikers dress and behave like hippies."

This film was directed by Joe Viola, a director who shares his name with a woodwind professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The Joe Viola Era is an essay which includes this photo of Joe Viola and several of his saxophone students playing their instruments in a stairwell.

Beef Chocolate

Food Down Under's recipe #238889 is for a "Spanish Roast."

I read the list of keywords as a complete sentence, and mis-read one word and thought this tagline was "Beef Chocolate meets Spanish."

I just ate some chocolate, and later I will eat some meat, but I am not an adventurous culinary explorer such that I would choose to eat a single concoction of Beef Chocolate, such as a Beef Chocolate Bar or a Chocolate Meatloaf. "Chocolate Meatloaf" sounds more like the name of a 1970s acid rock band than an edible cuisine. It reminds me of the "Meat Shakes" hoax which I and many others fell for.

Meat Shakes were, purportedly, milk shakes with various types of finely ground bits of meat mixed in. The menu included Steak Shakes, Pork Shakes, Vanilla Ham Shakes, and a Green Salad tossed with "Meaty-Mystery Bits!"

The Locations page of their web site listed a location at 51-35 Northern Boulevard in Queens, and I admit that one day on my way to the Staples up the street at 51-10 Broadway I did keep an eye out for the Meat Shake store only to find a McDonald's at that address. The presence of a McDonald's further illustrates the depth of the hoax: A closer look at that list of locations page shows that most if not all of the addresses actually lead you to a McDonald's.

"Meat Shake" is a song by the band Ugly Duckling. As a promotional gimmick they set up the hoax web site for a fast food chain named Meat Shake. The song (excerpt here) parodies the fast food business.

Piaractus brachypomus

The U.S. Geological Survey's Specimen ID #238889 is the Piaractus brachypomus. According to the USGS, "Many Piaractus taken in U.S. waters have been misidentified and reported as the red piranha Pygocentrus nattereri."

The USGS further adds that the Piaractus is a popular aquarium fish, and its appearance in non-indigenous waters is likely the result of aquarium owners dumping the fish into lakes and rivers.

One such non-indigenous find occurred on September 5, 1993, at the retention pond at the Stoneridge Apartments in Gainesville, Florida.

It is possible though far from certain that this image, borrowed from Gainesville-Rent.com, shows the retention pond into which the USGS says that non-indigenous Piaractus was found in 1993.

What follows is a list of incidents known or said to have occurred on or in relation to September 5, 1993 (the day a Piaractus was found at the retention pond at Gainesville's Stoneridge Apartments):

Dave Perry read the Cleburne, Texas Times-Review
Toastie watched some NFL football and then went to the Perkins Library at Duke University.
Theresa A. Mullins entered the room of an elderly woman who was attempting to hold onto the bathroom sink to keep from falling
Moishe Miller called Sally Weiss
David V. Herlihy claims Pierre Lallement invented the bicycle

Coming in at exactly 238,889 bytes is the scanned image of the Clark, Lucinda C. through Climer, Bertha page of the Index to the Applications Submitted for the Eastern Cherokee Roll of 1909 (Guion Miller Roll).

According to Archives.gov, the Guion-Miller Index "includes the names of all persons applying for compensation arising from the judgment of the United States Court of Claims on May 28, 1906, for the Eastern Cherokee tribe."

This index includes names of all who applied. Those rejected are on this list with those accepted.

U.L.

Comment No. 238889, in response to Zenab Eve Ahmed's "Chastity and choice," begins: "I'm waiting for your reply to my comments on this thread. I have no intention of disappearing. Meanwhile, you keep harping on the Quran vs the Hadith, as if the argument somehow validates your viewpoint."

The posts ramble on in that disembodied way of most comment boards, and includes reference to a St. Petersburg Times story about a Tampa woman's conversion to Islam.

The St. Petersburg Times is located in downtown St. Petersburg at 490 1st Ave South, about 5 minutes away from Tropicana Field.

I grew up across the bay in Tampa, but have not been to "The Trop," which is the home of Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Rays have consistently ranked among the worst teams in baseball for all of the franchise's existence, but my baseball memories of Tampa are of a higher order.

I went to at least one spring training game at Al Lopez Field, a baseball field that I think was located on Dale Mabry Highway where Legends Field is today.

The New York Yankees play their spring training games there today, but when I was a kid that field hosted pre-season games for the Cincinnati Reds, awesomely known to my 12 year old self as the "Big Red Machine".

At one game in 1978 or 1979 the Reds played the Kansas City Royals at Al Lopez Field.

My clearest memories of that game follow:

Johnny Bench hit a home run, and waved to the crowd as he rounded third base and headed to home plate. For years I bragged about the all-American experience of having seen Johnny Bench hit a home run.
A woman sitting behind me made fun of U.L. Washington's name. Throughout the game she repeatedly muttered "Yew Ell" in a sarcastic hillbilly droll. I had a U.L. Washington baseball card, and to this day I can not see that card or contemplate Washington's name without hearing that woman's voice.
Yew Ell
I also remember my dad sitting next to me, on my left.

Tasty Pizza

Receipt #238889, the receipt which started this journey, is from Tasty Pizza. The receipt documents my purchase of a double pepperoni pizza, ordered for delivery.

I do not frequent Tasty Pizza much any more, and I have no explanation as to why. They make good pizza, and have been in business for many years now.

I probably lack Tasty Pizza in my life because they are not located on my way to anywhere else.

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this journey through the number 238889.

That. Is. All.

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:16:33 -0500

I am trying to avoid distraction today. It is not the big things that distract me. Tiny distractions cause enormous drains on my focus and energies.

Accomplishment, a wise man once told me, is simply a matter of doing things.

I learned this from a composer who described his decision to move to a shack in Vermont to write the great American opera.

He did what many composers do: "I wrote for a couple of hours one day, maybe an hour or two the next. For a couple of days I didn't do anything."

He had Spartan business cards printed up with only his name and the word "Composer" underneath. No phone number, no address. He handed them out while attending pretentious avant-garde concerts to which he could scam tickets.

I don't know what prompted his breakthrough (or if his eureka moment came from a single incident) but he wisely realized that the bulk of his time spent "being a composer" included little time actually composing.

"Composers compose," he discovered. "One day I realized that if I wasn't composing 10 or 12 hours a day 6 and 7 days a week then it was just a waste of time."

His statement impressed me with its dumb simplicity. It further suited my belief that few things in life are complicated.

What is the difference between writers and non writers? Writers write every day. Non-writers write as the mood strikes. To put it another way, writers write and non-writers do not.

The difference between photographers and non photographers? Simple. Photographers take pictures, non photographers do not take pictures.

Am I a composer? I was a few weeks ago, but not today. I might allow myself 24 hours of composerly afterglow in the event that I composed for several consecutive days.

If I continue to write all day today and every day this month I might call myself a writer in January.

At what level of pettiness need such distinctions be made? Perhaps among real writers it comes at dust-jacket time.

(I must stop using "perhaps." It is an uppity sounding bit of hokum).

For most humans I think the distinction between what you are and what you are not is based on the existence of a paycheck for your efforts.

As much as that composer's experience impressed me I came to question the idea of life's all-encompassing commitments. I pondered with some dread the "Chosen Path" down which one travels for reasons eventually forgotten.

To be one thing in life, and one thing only, is that honorable? Is that righteous? Is there only room in life for one distinction?

I dated a woman who said, repeatedly, that all she wanted out of life was a career as a dancer.

She made her point with stuttered emphasis: "I want to be a dancer. That. Is. All."

She talked about it as one would describe quitting smoking, or saving money to buy a house: A single definitive goal.

That relationship seems like a lifetime ago, but it is not. She was so skinny it was like going in on a birdcage. Our conversations had a similar caged-in quality.

Years later I hearkened back to birdcage girl when I, chagrined, discovered that thickly ribbed prophylactics produced a similar effect. That was with a woman I never connected well enough with to share such an observation.

I thought of writing a letter to the makers of that product, suggesting they call it "The Birdcage" and explaining why.

OK, now I am distracted.

I have been thinking lately about those chosen paths, and how the identities we assume in life are often determined by a small number of experiences within a narrow span of time.

I sometimes hear people describe moments in their lives when they knew this was It. This is what they wanted to do, what they wanted to be, where they wanted to go. These accounts are usually told with a sense of triumph, as if the greatest single mystery of life -- what shall I do with my time here -- had been solved.

These accounts can be genuinely stirring, but once in a while these stories are accompanied by echoes of ambivalence. Bullet points of events and milestones delivered in unintentional deadpan, it makes one think life is never more than a list.

Most people I know have an Everything. That Everything is usually sex or gender. Other people's everything is politics, religion, or even sports.

I do not have an Everything.

Most of the time I do not even have an Anything.

Writing blind

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:11:19 -0500

I am, to paraphrase one of the greatest lines ever written, typing blind.

"I am writing blind," wrote the Kursk sailor whose submarine had sunk to the bottom of the sea, slowly suffocating all on board.

Motivated by what none seem to know, but confronting that ghastly fate the sailor found pen, paper and the need to write.

I am not blind in any such dramatic way. I am not writing from the bottom of the sea. I am not trapped in a coal mine or waving for help from the top of a doomed building.

It is, I accuse myself, mere bluster to announce myself this day by robbing that Russian sailor of his words -- words which startled me then as now.

My blindness is more of a legal designation. A technicality. I am typing without corrective lenses, making this keyboard a blur and the computer screen a streaky blob.

It is an ascetic experiment, perhaps, to start my days with no artificial assistance. Gradually I allow myself the trappings of civilization. My civilization.

Colors are more beautiful without corrective lenses. I have never owned glasses through which colors look as nuanced and sweet as they do without.

It is an experiment in silence, perhaps. Of late I am clearing out my spaces, physical and mental. Silence is not always what I hear but what I see. The physical detritus may look like so much junk, but I find the physical trappings of one's life truly are its mental furniture and its mental noise. Most of the objects formerly in this room are either gone or stashed in another room, leaving a space of silence for me to look into.

I try to start each day in silence, and in a place of no technology. No radio, computer, television, or blinking lights. The only exception I must make is my piano, which is digital.

This morning I plucked through my current re-fascination, Chabrier's Idylle, feeling like a caricature for craning my neck to get my eyes an inch or so from the score to read the passages not memorized.

At my first real job in New York I sat at a computer and, having never really used one before (I lied to get the job) I typed blind into a bottomless little window. I made the text too small to read. It was visible only as a squall. Forgetting the words as I typed them I imagined myself creating a time-capsule, my experiences scratch-encoded for future technologies to read.

If typing is not as valuable a skill as before then I wish it at least felt more viscerally satisfying. The thunder and ruckus of an old typewriter is not waiting for release from these cheap plastic computer keyboards, though a line of wildly expensive novelty gifts claim to emulate the feel of the old typewriters.

Grids and girders

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:13:03 -0500

Ah hah. I just did the Amsler Grid test for the first time in too long. I know I was avoiding it.

The Amsler Grid test helps screen for symptoms of macular degeneration and, in my case, any worsening of the condition.

It has been too long between tests for me to say what it might mean, but it looks a little bit worse. Not a lot worse. A few more splotches of a different consistency than I remember from before, though some of the bigger splotches appear gone or less pronounced.

My one-year-after appointment, in which we may determine if I need the surgical procedure, is scheduled for next month. I might schedule the appointment sooner.

I do not worry about it much. Blindness (which would take a long time to arrive via this condition) might actually suit me. Going deaf, on the other hand, would make me instantly go ape shit. I could not live without sound.

I seldom talk about it with friends. I have found it impossible to clearly distinguish between macular degeneration and other more common eye problems. No, I can explain the difference clearly, but as with most places in my life I simply do not talk loud or fast enough to fully express a concept before getting interrupted and talked over.

Macular degeneration is rare but hardly unique among people my age. As a regular listener to the Paul Harvey radio program (and as someone who does not fit the demographic for that program) it is perhaps ironic that I would be tagged with this problem. Paul Harvey regularly promotes products that claim to slow or halt the progress of MD. His promotion of these products is clearly targeted toward the elderly. The Amsler Grid which I keep on my shelf is a sheet of paper commonly carried around by folks in their 80s, an age range I hope never to reach.

Some of my earliest memories of the house I grew up in include Paul Harvey. My father, driving me somewhere, would change the radio from whatever station it was on to catch Paul Harvey's mid-day spot.

Then as now, Harvey would introduce absurd stories about bungled robberies and Chinese women growing horns on their heads with the same steely, holier-than-thou voice he uses when talking of illegal immigrants wanting the same rights as "Us. U.S."

Us. U.S.

For as many times as I've heard Paul Harvey say those words with the deliberate cadence he applies uniquely to that phrase, I have to say that it looks strange as written text.

Us. U.S.

The phrase does not look like it sounds. It would look spitty and indignant if it looked like the way Paul Harvey says it. The esses are curvy and wobbly, not demonstratively righteous and unassailable.

Paul Harvey tells some tall tales. He recycles or re-purposes urban legends at times, particularly in his closing "For what it's worth" coda.

I do not mind this. I detect the character of a Santa Claus or a story-telling grandma who everyone knows spins yarns to make the grandkids happy. But even the youngsters know these lies when they hear them.

Palmbreathers

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:13:49 -0500

When I can not sleep my first trick is to breathe through my fingers, then through the palms of these hands.

That calms my mind and then my body.

This technique often fails, though, at such times when I bolt awake early in the morning or the middle of the night. This happened last night. My brainstuffs, twitchy and warring, sent flashcackles of shutup through my head.

I have read that blindness in humans is not dark but red. Red waves. Pulsating veins. Endless and infinite patterns heaving and whoring. The only darkness is not blindness but sleep, or death.

I think about blindness when, trying to force sleep, I shut my eyes and keep them shut, summoning and perhaps goading into action the red pools of mush that pour through the thin coat separating one's vision from the world.

As an exercise in forcing sleep I interpret the transmogrifications, as a cloudgazer might do while lying in the grass staring into the sky.

Yesterday morning I was restless and wide awake at too early an hour. I shut my eyes and, as seems typical, the first image that formed was of a woman's breast, her hand partly covering it. It faded lingeringly like the ocular shock of a flashbulb.

I waited for her to move her hand, but the hand evaporated. The breasts became telephone cables, then snow boots, then some kind of dead tree. Two breasts formed, no hands covering them. I last remember a shape approximating a screaming face, similar to the album cover for Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Strangely, this image seems to have sent me back to sleep.

Staring into the back of my eyelids usually reveals non-descript patterns: Amoeba-like squalls reminiscent of a 1970s light show or the bioluminescent phenomenon I saw as a child in the canal off Old Tampa Bay.

It was one of the questions of my youth: what are these sensations called.

In high school I learned the answer: Phosphenes.

I am told that pot, LSD, and other such influences can intensify the phosphenes, but in my experience nothing has made them more intense than simple lack of sleep.

The most memorable drug-induced visions I had were in college. Too much pot too fast had me seeing the words that others spoke. Those words, flitting about like worms on a sidewalk, assumed shapes and colors appropriate to their meaning. Sometimes these forms suited the tone of voice used to speak them.

Words spoken with a sneer had orange fire-of-spit underneath, and wriggled limp from the speaker's mouth to the floor where they disintegrated into the carpet.

Slogans and come-ons spoken by television commercial voices stampeded through the room like a bucking bronc.

Sentences spoken quickly were the most exciting. The sentences, too small for all they tried to contain, shattered. The words blasted out in many directions forming a solar system of incoherent words circling the ambitious suns that caused the explosion.

Gretchen am Spinnrade

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:17:53 -0500

For several days last week it seemed all I did for 5 or 6 hours each day was play the Liszt arrangement of Schubert's "Gretchen am Spinnrade" ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel"). It is an addictive little piece which I find to be more theatrically dramatic in the piano arrangement than in its voice-with-piano original.

I usually hear this piece with heavy pedal, but as I rambled through the song yesterday I began thinking that the opposite -- a chunky staccato sound -- more evocatively summons the sound of a spinning wheel. As an alternative to the traditional pedaled sound I had fun imagining I could literally evoke the sound of the spinning wheel.

But wait. What do I know about spinning wheels? I don't think I have ever heard one. My childhood was not filled with countless hours of slave labor spent churning fabric out of the spinning wheel.

Regardless, today I let myself imagine that such a contraption would sound something different from smooth and burbling.

Playing the piece pedal-free makes it more difficult, but today I found that it made the melody sing in a different way. I think the word for the sound was "troubled," a word which also characterizes the text of the song. The traditional way of performing this song is not exactly un-troubled, but absent the river-like flow of sound I think the troubles become more exposed, and tremulous.

Any time I get to measure 97 I think "holy s*** this is strong stuff." Liszt adds a crushing minor 9th to the left hand in M.97 and again in M.99. This stays true to the Schubert original on one level: the first notes of those measures in the original are literally A and B-flat. But Schubert softens that dissonance by safely spacing it 2 octaves apart, summoning nowhere near as much war-like thunder as Liszt brings to the passage.

There is so much good stuff in this song.