Received 05/16/2008 19:57
nothing
all i did today was nothing.
total nothing.
BIG NOTHING.
Everything on these pages (except for this sidebar) comes straight from my Treo 700p. This would not merit any mention, except to point out that I have no spell check, no easy access to a dictionary, and no practical ability to beautify text with HTML markup. If grammar and spelling errors are your peeves then tranquility awaits you elsewhere. It is pretty close to using a typewriter. I consider this section of my site to be an exercise in technological restraint. I switch between the Treo's onboard qwerty keyboard and a foldable full-size keyboard.
These pictures show the Treo atop the Think Outside Bluetooth Keyboard. I don't use that keyboard any more, as it never worked well with the Treo 700p.
Pictures from my earlier Treo cameras can be seen here: Treo 600, Treo 650.
Received 05/15/2008 22:21
suddenly
I walked today, and I ran some, too. I wanted to walk from here to Rockefeller Center but I didn't think I had the time. So I ran.
It's about a mile to the bridge, about a mile and a half to cross the bridge, and a mile and a half or two miles from the bridge to my 181 at Rockefeller Center.
It's all about the 181.
Ah, so I went looking for the bar on 7th Avenue, the bar I thought was named the Slaughtered Lamb. It was never called the Slaughtered Lamb (that's a recent-college-graduates bar on 4th Streret). I don't remember what it used to be called but now it's called The Irish Bar. Occasionally I have overwhelming desires to be at that place, but those desires vanish as quickly as they rise.
I used to go to that place when I worked in midtown. I don't know if that helps explain the fetishistic compulsions.
Whatever the explanation (I am sure it is a deep, profoundlypsychological explanation that explores the numbed muscles of my unconscious) I wanted to be there today to watch the Yankees/Rays game. No luck. They had soccer on every screen. Football, rather. Fütball.
The place looked different from how I remember. Cleaner. It smelled like a hotel lobby.
Jimmy's Corner On 44th Street is likely the only place of its kind in midtown. Genuine. Earthy. The Wakamba Lounge is another favorite. Of mine.
I went to Patelson Music Store and purchased blank music paper. 64 double-sided pages of blank orchestra score. This month I reached the end of some blank paper books I've been writing into since high school. Today's masterworks intermingle with adolescent yawps.
I recently found myself writing comments (comments like this) into a book that had stuff I'd written when I was 13 or 14.
Someday all my books will be filled. All the blank books I bought at the mall in grade school will retire, exhausted and weathered from the vigorous lifetime.
I remember stocking up on those blank books. I bought them with righteous, expectant goals of starting a story on page one and finishing on the last page. Perfect fit. Then, the sequel. Pick up the next book, fill it to perfection, move on.
Piles of books, empty, would be filled (to my perfection). Or my heavings. Turgid ramblings. Piles of turgidity.
Speaking of which, I am in a place that is loud. Too loud for me to think straight, crooked, or upways. Disjointed thoughts.
When noise mistracts me I remember, with some regret, making fun of a substitute bus driver in grade school. He begged us to be quiet, saying that he was having trouble seeing the road. I loudly asked, how hard can it be to see through all that noise? There was hearty laughter all around from the other kids in my class who thought me hie-larious. Eventually I would learn that noise really can obscure one's vision, via the volume-hammered inability to concentrate or focus.
I got recognized last night. RECK-A-NIZED. It is unfair to suddenly be with someone who thinks they know a lot about me while I (suddenly) know nothing about them. (Suddenly) we are best friends. I am starting to resent all the invisible people in my life.
I need a haircut.
Received 05/15/2008 22:05
Back page
Received 05/15/2008 16:04
House of Leaves. Louse of Heaves.
The story of the baby whose grave site I photographed for mother's day takes another turn.
L. noted that the infant's somewhat unusual last name was the same as the author of "House of Leaves," a so-called "experimental novel."
L. sent a copy of House of Leaves to my 181.
At a glance it reminds me of Ronell's "The Telephone," and fits my belief that novels should be free to lurch from prose to poetry to pop-up art and to anything else needed to express things.
Things.
Received 05/15/2008 13:38
Taste of Thai
Received 05/14/2008 21:54
O!
These last few days seem to disappear. I get into a habit of writing about my fascinating existences, a habit more accurately dubbed a fetish for its unhealthy ineptitude. These days that writing is on paper, not on screens. I mostly write about the previous night's dreams and whatever asssociations that inspires. Some days my hand can not write fast enough, other days it just wheezes along, making shit up as it goes.
This week the afternoon arrives and then the sun sets and I am still scrabbling for something constructive to accomplish. Too much to do? Or not enough direction? I don't know.
I wish I could have had that bank account set up today. The more I think about it, though, the more I see that it was doomed from the get-go (or "git-go", as I like to hear that expression) simply for lack of rapport with the banker, not to mention his unabashed ignorance of these type of funds. I am too fragile in my approach to this stuff to take much conflict, and stubborn, corporate ignorance is a form of conflict I can't much handle.
At least it lets me appreciate how everyone I've dealt with in these matters has, up until now, been more or less competent. Except for me, of course. Actually the old-guy stock broker was way out of his league with this stuff, and uninformed about the complexities of the trust that my dad actually left -- versus the relatively simple trust he drew up in 2002.
Anyway... Who the fuck cares.
I did stock up on pork chops today, per earlier declaration to that effect. Pork chops and sardines. Man I hate sardines. It's like taking medicine -- it's nasty to me when the tails are still on the fishes. It's like I'm eating a still-living thing, and the fishes seem to flip and flap their tails as I take them down. Then they swim into my innards and form schools, clogging my body with sardinular activity.
These days I cut the tails off before placing the sardine portions on a tasty Triscuit©.
Even the word "sardine" has a dour, frowning aura about it.
I eat that stuff for the sake of my eyes. My macularly degenerative eyes. I almost said "for the sake of the children."
O I hate the burps. Sardine burps. A dismal, unhappy taste.
These days I spell "oh" O, when "oh" is used as an "OH!" expletive sort of thing. I think O, naked as it is, is more expressive of shock and surprise than Oh. It evokes the shape of the mouth as it exclaims the sound of O, and the bugging out of the eyes.
A friend in high school once said that in addition to being the 15th letter of the alphabet O is sometimes (rarely) defined as a woman's vagina. I took his word for it but to this day have not looked that up for myself.
O!
Back in the day I used to amuse myself by calling voicemail systems and dialing extension 5000000000.
I would listen to the automated voicemail voice says "extension 5 Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh ... " is not available. I imagined she (the voice) was being whipped and tortured as she yelled OH! in response.
To keep the abuse going all I had to do was dial extensions in the octillion range.
Imagining a German nazi dick-tator scenario I would throw a nine into the mix, imagining the woman being whipped and paddled interrupting her OHs with NEIN (German for NO).
NEIN! OH! OH! OH! OH! NEIN! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! NEIN! OH!
That was extension 90000900000090, by the way. That extension did not answer.
Received 05/14/2008 16:28
Whoosh
I just attempted to open my trust account, per the directives in my father's living trust. Oh man that was aggravating. The banker indicated that he knew how to deal with trust accounts but it became immediately obvious that this was not true. He even questioned the name of the trust, which is irrerlevant. I cut the guy some slack, in that trust accounts are a relatively specialized thing. But still, the assumption from this guy was that I did not know what I was talking about, even though I could not have explained the logisitcs of the account more clearly. I was like dude, there is no more paperwork. This is all there is.
So I'll just plan a Russian roulette approach and try again tomorrow with a different banker.
I could and should have waited for the other banker, the one who set up my previous trust accounts.
waaaaah.
On the other hand there is an upside to this. I discovered that I'd been looking at the wrong account all this time. So, while I previouusly thought I had a lot more cash on hand than I expected, it turns out there is even more than that. Good thing, too, I had my eye on some new upholstery.
I called my lawyer afteer leaving the bank, and his assistant explained that "that banker needs to be educated." Whether she meant to be ot not she was really quite funny about it, responding in prickly lawyer-ese.
I'm at the Starbucks, eating an apple fritter. I am wearing my Charlie Brown shirt. It's the first time since forever that I've worn a non-blank t-shirt.
....
I was talking to L. about this vision I've had for a new type of printed novels (though I am sure this has been done on soome level). To me words are interrupted by page breaks and other strictures of the printed matter. I imagine a book in which the material itself is part of the story, or part of the story-telling.
Avital Ronell's "The Telephone" has been on my shelf since the early 1990s, and while it is not as earthy as what I invision it was, I think, what got me thinking about this. Words and expressions should be shaped, colored, and crafted to their meaning, as should the material on which those words are recorded.
In some ways this is accomplished by the way paper responds to the physical experience of being written on. The coffee and sweat stains, the curling of the papers, the manner in which lines break and words crush together.
That level of expression could be brought to the printed page as well.
Not cheaply, of course.
....
Pork chops are on sale this week at the Bravo supermarket and I intend to stock up.
....
Once in a while I have a sad, despondent, desperate desire to be at the Slaughtered Lamb pub on 7th Avenue. I can not explain why, but that desire just overcame me again.
Whoosh, now it is gone.
Received 05/13/2008 21:47
Aha!
And the Rays take full ownership of first place in the AL East! 11
straight home game wins! A whoot, a thoot, a whoot-a-thoot-thoot!
Received 05/12/2008 21:31
Hookers and drunks
Today makes me realize how good I feel when my mother feels well. For most of the past several years she has not been well, and she makes no attempt to disguise the facts. For that reason conversations with her have been major downers, and that's putting it mildly.
Yesterday was different. All the wit and humor were there, and we could have talked all day. To be honest it caught me off guard. Recent conversations trailed off into exhaustion for her. I expected more of the same from recent years, but yesterdaay we joked about how only her hand got tired from holding the phone so long.
What I thought would be the big event of the phone call, then, ended up being kind of a dud. A footnote. I carved out some money to pay off her enormous medical bills. I thought that would make her happy, and I think it did.
I felt weird talking like a moneyman, saying things like "I can make that bill disappear." I didn't say it with any flourish or energy. It was barely even audible.
I had t follow it with "If you want me to..." From previous conversations it made some sense to imagine she might refuse or be contrary about it.
I could have done this sooner. I did not fully realize that until last week. But that's no bother now, and it makes virtually no difference. None, in fact.
So today I had all this positive energy. Not because of that money matter but because of everything else. We talked about piano music for so long. I sometimes forget how much piano music means to her, and how much she was a part of my years learning the repertoire. Some of those things that sound cliché on Mother's Day cards end up being true for me. She is a foundation.
....
The last time I was at this pub I typed into this keyboard something that I eventually sent up to this place on the Internet. I stopped writing because of the hookers. They sorta cornered me but I got out, noting their bemused smirks. Chagrined. If I had taken a half second longer to squeeze past they would have said I must be gay. I could see that comment coming in the fat one's eyes, and I am certain it came after I left.
And to think I actually felt interesting that day. The sobering reality is that I am only interesting to hookers and drunks.
....
Watching the Yankees game at a quiet, sparsely populated puB. Correction: I am watching the Rays game. Tampa Bay has a damn good team this year, I've been saying so since spring training. And tonight they are proving their mettle by schooling the Yankees on pitching and smallball style of play. The Rays have swept both Boston and Seattle, and I think they can sweep the A-Rod-less/Posada-less/starting pitcher-less Yankees as well.
....
I was going to go to a lower east side poetry event tonight but the time got away from me. Before I knew it I was still sitting at my desk while the readings began.
Straight poetry readings are a mixed bag anyway. I like the variety show format, where anything goes. Poet followed by classical violinist followed by armpit musician followed by Abraham Lincoln imitator followed by master juggler. *Master* juggler. Jaster muggler.
Received 05/11/2008 23:50
Mind over mother
Talking to my mother today and rediscovering why I feel like a child. She feels the same. It must be in the genes, this self-contained ping-pong match of children's thinks.
Atop all things I am most proud of the ways I make her laugh. I have always been proud of the giggle fits and chortles I draw from her. Some nights I laugh myself to sleep at things she laughed at 25 years ago. Man o man the garbage bag murder makes me laugh to sickness before I can even finish typing this sentence.
Her mind is strong, where the rest of her is not. Her laugh is hearty where the rest of her is not.
And, just like a girl, she ended the conversation by saying she wanted to talk again, to talk more.
Received 05/10/2008 22:53
Maybe it is love
I feel like I had an interesting day. It felt interesting before, during, and after. It is slipping away from my memories already, like the dreams I had last night.
I dreamed that I woke up in the middle of the night in the house I grew up in in Tampa. I stepped from my bedroom into the hall to turn off the light in the hallway.
As I reached for the light switch the light turned off. By itself.
Looking down the darkness of the stairwell I heard a voice say something like "You don't need to worry about turning off the light."
This was presented as a good thing. The tone of the voice suggested that modern technology knew when the light should be turned on or off.
Advanced!
I tried to turn the light on, though, and the automated system turned it right back off. Twice, thrice, I don't know how many times. I batted the light switch to the on position over and over, but the automated thing kept turning it off.
I stopped. Looking down the stairwell again I heard a gentle cackling. It diid not say the words but it communicated to me that it was in charge of the lights in the stairwell outside the bedroom in which I grew up.
I screamed, trying to silence the stupid thing that was doing this. I thought if I screamed and bounced around in the stairwell it would get scared and leave, turning the lights on as it left the house.
That is when I woke up. Screaming with that sublingual, pigeon-like gobbling of waking up from a nightmare (but not bouncing off the walls).
I did have an interesting day. I imagined talking to someone about it, but everyone I know is busy.
I will share the day's tremors with my stack of Mead filler paper.
Sitting in a bar by myself. No one here knows me, though the bartenders occasionally try to get my chit-chat going on. That is nice of them, though I feel inadequate. My voice is not loud enough to be heard over the AC/DC song on the jukebox, and even if it was loud enought o be heard conversations with me usually require that I complete 2 or more sentences.
Otherwise I give up.
As I just did.
Boo hoo.
Ah, the song just switched from AC/DC to The Band, The Weight. Good song.
Often lately I wake up from my dreams thinking "I need to change my life." It would not take much. Move to another street. Find another bar. Issue press releases announcing my days as interesting as today. Get a Dux bed (spelled D-U-X). Throw away my thousands of Time Inc. magazines. Throw away the Ascot-Chang shirt I bought and never wore. Throw away everything, then buy it back cheap.
I actually do know a few people here. Conversations from months ago, mostly forgotten. This is the place where the fat bald 60-something dentist holds court with another beautiful 20-something babe every single time I see him here.
To his credit, though, he seems to be sucking face with the same girl tonight as the last time I saw him here a month or so back. Maybe it is love.
I know that is what it is.
Received 05/10/2008 16:42
Flowers at the boneyard
Sitting at Bantry Bay Public House, across the street from Calvary.
I guess I should not be surprised to find that the Saturday before mother's day is quite the day for flowers being placed at the big cemetery. If florals are your thing, then cemeteries are your place for the next couple of days.
Earlier this weeek I was at Calvary when an e-mail arrived from a woman asking if I knew where in Calvary an attached photo was taken. I happened to be standing about 30 feet away from the spot in her picture.
The correspondence continued, and I learned that she had arranged to have flowers placed at the grave site of her brother, who died at 1 year of age -- before she was born. The flowers were to be placed Saturday, the day before mother's day. It was the mother of the child who wanted this done.
She told me that she and her family pray to the child, this brother she never knew. They prayed not *for* him. To him.
I found the child's burial spot that very day, and agreed to return today to get photos of the flowers at the grave site. All in the family are too far away to travel to the cemetery, so none will be able to see them for real.
There is a lot I do not know about this scenario, but I am sure it's all good.
So while I am no sucker for flowers I was happy and a little inspired to re-visit the grave site today and find a carefully, artfully placed assortment of flowers at the grave. For some reason I was skeptical that this would happen according to plan, but there they were, and here I am getting some pub grub and swilling a pint of Brooklyn Lager, closing the circle on one of the more random lightning bolts of communication in recent memory.
Received 05/10/2008 13:11
Venezuelan restaurant
Received 05/09/2008 23:54
Things
At a hipster pub, listening to Billie Holiday songs on the jukebox. Assuming I have properly memorized the playlists here I believe the next song up is a Shirley Bassey disco remix/montage. Not montage... medley? That makes it sound like an inconsequential marketing gimmick, like a Lipton© sampler.
There she is. Shirley Bassey, on the disco remix. I discovered this near-kitsch singer on Usenet back in the day, same time as I found Melanie Safka and ... and others.
Christ it is nice to find a place where I can think -- a place other than my kitchen, with its unevenly ticking clock and howling refrigerator; a place besides my shower, with its moodily hot water and wide open window.
Those are the best thinking venues I have at my handy. The kitchen table evokes images of prison and solitude. (See earlier ramblings.) This place is seated by people I know but there is a comfort level here. A comfort of precedence? What do you call that when people you never met know a lot more about you than do you know about them? It is unfair is what I call it, but that is in a different spirit. After the handshakes and backslaps it becomes a comfort thing.
I was thinking about Anne Rice today. I think it was Anne Rice who, after a small plane flew into the side of an upper east side high rise a couple of years ago, I think it was Anne Rice who emerged to tell a reporter that it might have been her apartment that got hit. She told the NY1 reporter that if that was her apartment that was on fire that she just wanted to know that anyone inside was ok.
"Everything else is just ... things," she told the reporter, shaking her head impetuously before settling on that nervous word: Things.
Things.
I guess she suitably dispersed her "things" so that a plane ramming into her residence did not destroy her life as would a plane landing in my living room.
It might not have been Anne Rice, but it was someone like that. Talking about .things. to a local news reporter.
I've got too many things. I should have nothing. Nothing but my kitchen table, a stack of blank paper, a smaller stack of covered pages, and a scurvy of pens used to create the theater.
I mean, the things.
Received 05/09/2008 13:36
Crisis averted
Aha. Crisis averted. I just dropped this keyboard, and it sounded like it had been smashed to bits. I imagined all the little plastic keys scrambling to get away, running all over the place to escape the prison of this keyboard. Only the batteries popped out and it looked like the battery connectors were wrenched asunder. Batteries restored, all is well.
Received 05/08/2008 20:46
Wobble. Gobble.
Today was an hour long call with my attorneys, regarding the last gasps of paperwork needed to close up dad's estate. At a couple of points I got a little wobbly-voiced, not over anything about dad but about my mother. Long story that, and I've no mind to think about it right now, but I expect to have a nice Mother's Day surprise for her.
I am about to come into a lot of money. Much of that money is on paper (in the form of real estate), but there is a lot more cash than I thought.
This could have all happened a couple of years ago. Certain bottlenecks have intervened (my own apathy among them) but the principal culprit has been the accountant. Today I formally replaced that tiresome fuck.
I remember semi-dating a girl a few years ago, before and after dad left us. She was a shameless gold-digger who poured on the heartfelt outupourings in the weeks after it happened. It was strange being purused l ike that -- if "pursuit" is what you could call it. I knew what was happening but I didn't care. Was I jobbing her more than she was jobbing me?
Why am I thinking about that?
I am not. Now I am not thinking about that.
We named me Property Manager today. The building is jointly owned by the trusts of my sister and me, and the principal trustee (me) elected me the manager.
The vote was unanimous.
Sleep has been episodic for me lately. I look forward to waking up and writing. More and more lately I also look forward to writing before going to sleep. Writing on the stack of blank Mead filler paper I found in the lobby of the apartment building. Pages being filled, pens being emptied -- sometimes I think the act of writing is more theater than substance.
When I sit down at that table to write I imagine that it is in a prison. I imagine what my life would be now had I spent the last 18 years in jail. That is not an imagined or arbitrary scenario. I was probed by the FBI and Secret Service soon after graduating college for crimes considered so complicated at the time that only option seemed to be to throw the book at me.
Another long story that -- another story for which I have no mind at this time.
But had these past 18 years passed in a cell then maybe I would have written. Written constantly, and read everything. My mind would be a full puzzle, not this vacant jumble. And I'd be getting ass-raped every hour, on the hour.
Yes, life would be different, would it not.
My episodic sleeps of late are interrupted by imagined sounds of voices. Cracking sounds, like starchy handclaps. Today I bolted awake making that molten sound of waking up from a horror dream. I imagined in the dream that someone had entered my room and was reaching to pull the covers off me. That woke me. I screamied like the pigeons clucking on the window frame at the Parc Lincoln. I used to hear that sound all night long. A dull, throaty gobbling sound, those pigeons stood guard on the window frame all through the 100° nights.
Now I make that sound myself.
Received 05/07/2008 23:42
At the heterosexual bar
Received 05/06/2008 21:58
Qob
Today was out. Outside. Outland. Confluence of random energies singled into quarters of my minds.
Junkle droof. Blurrfish. Oushtart. Bläsh kull grommund dreskin qiffle. Muttle fluz, müttle fluz.
Muttle fluz.
Napper livruq drabbim porf.
Ikkliuc joz wull frangowl nopplé, shohegac picc puvaxid qob.
Qob! Qob!
Napper livruq qob!
Clouzog horp yik sqaag hust, koob bilsk fuzk gilleftroub crefqit fenstishrem pungoovbosh hukt spreem.
Hauvid wakkis ploq hish nummvört jicq, miggop vunt spoy crouxpun vizod brobbax.
Qob! Qob!
Napper livruq qob!
Uqown plish jub dreeplon basjevoon yabblez toosh pabb qob.
Ivijubboq fuh braasq lik gippizk jabbok richkub nazzib theppuc kliz nipcoz qob.
Received 05/06/2008 15:20
Crazy
At Calvary for the first time in a while. While here an e-mail arrives from a woman wanting to know if I know where in the cemetery an attached photo was taken. I can barely make out what's in the picture, because this Treo's email program resizes it so small. Nevertheless that blunted image I all I need. I recognize the spot and find it immediately. Section 53, facing the Empire State Building. What strange timing.
In other news there are police here at the grounds today. Why?
Received 05/06/2008 14:14
Outside sandwich
I am at a diner overhearing a couple of twenty-something girls excitedly agreeing that "TUNA MELT IS THE BEST THING EVVVVERRRRR!"
The phrase "rock 'em sock 'em" just wandered through my mind. Why would that be? I recall no use for that phrase, no moment at which I articulated those words in that order. I know the word rock. As in "I am a rock." I know the word sock. As in "Sock it to me sock it to me." I know the word 'em. As in "Fuck 'em."
Is the phrase supposed to be "rock and sock 'em?"
Who the hell knows. Welcome to the magnificent ruminations of a 40 year old waiting for a turkey sandwich.
I use the word smashmouth at times to describe certain styles of piano music. Composers like Pabst, Thalberg, Tausig. Scharwenka. Alkan.
It is breezy and warm today. 77°. This is an outdoor dining event. Cars whoosh past, polluting. A waiter brings the incorrect sandwich to me. A BLT. We share mutual bemusement. A woman who looks like a fatter version of a woman I dated last year walks past. More confusion from the kitchen. My turkey triple-decker sandwich is presented to me -- without bread. What? A breadless sandwich is, well, that does not exist. How long will this madness continue? Stop the insanity, stop the insanity.
Now I am told it will "be right out." this is stirring abandonment issues and panicy impatience in my guts. I long ago recognized the façade of customer service as the joke for which it is. Just gimme the sandwich and scrub the ridiculous smile from your face.