swine, 10/8/99, 8:50 AM

http://www.sorabji.com/w/wayd/1999/2922.html Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

Rooms

This is this this is, is this this?

Bad poetry, bad cold, snot pouring forth.

Song on the jukebox is "Year of the Cat" which is an old favorite from my late-night radio days in Tampa. Ah, here's that great saxophone solo.

I think this is the first song ever played on the new Magic 96 in Tampa. That first song might also have been Wildfire. Whatever the song I remember feeling proud or somehow on the leading edge of radio knowledge in Tampa the night 96 KIX FM switched to MAGIC 96. I think the format and playlists of the new station were very similar to the old but I felt like I was at the forefront of radio in Tampa for having been listening at the moment the station channged its format.

One thing about radio that seems to be unchanged since that 1980s Magic 96 midnight is that stations change format abruptly. The DJs rarely know they are soon to be fired and audiences are rudely surprised.

A story I tell often -- and which surprisingly receives a fair amount of disbelief -- is that my sister and I were watching TV at the exact moment MTV first came on the air. I guess "on the air" is a misnomore for a cable channel, but we were looking right at that channel the moment it changed from static to a test pattern to the Buggles singing "Video Killed the Radio Star".

I got things done today but I can't remember what. This, that, here, there. Tired and achey from this stupid cold. I don't get colds. Not now, not ever. Last night's sleep was crazy. Insane and crazy, to evoke a Paul Zindel line from one of his adolsecent novels I read as a teen. I had a long and rambling dream about moving in to a 3 bedroom apartment with as yet unknown roommates. I had first dibs and was choosing my room. None of the rooms had doors.

I have had nearly identical dreams in the near past. In one dream I am choosing from rooms in a palatial house in a rural area. In another dream I am choosing from rooms in a glamorous 5 room suite in an overpriced residential hotel. In all these dreams the rooms get bigger and bigger as I see each next one, and the dream ends with me deciding if I want the biggest room or a smaller one.

Most times I can tell what my dreams mean but with these I do not know.

MBT

Sitting at the Bel-Aire Diner, accepting complements for the fabulous foldable keyboard and waiting on a grilled cheese w/bacon sammich.

I am waddling around town in a new pair of MBT shoes. I say waddle because these shoes have a buoyancy that takes some getting used to. I stocked up on big bandages after wearing them and tearing up the back of my ankle -- whatever that region is called. I will not likely exchange these shoes partly because the fit feels perfect but also because I stepped in dog shit and might have trouble returning such soiled items. I just need to break them in.

The radio is on here but I can barely hear it over the general noise of people and activity. I keep hearing a voice, though, that sounds like Dan Tullis, who "just talked to Joel Clark" in what I think is a strangely contoured radio commercial for life insurance. The point of the commercial is to demonstrate how cheap life insurance can be from one company, but as Joel Clark's explanation reaches its climax his voice shrinks, and it seems to sink into a deep silo or a bucket. By the time he quotes the actual price it sounds to me like Joel Clark has drowned.

It was Dan Tullis' voice, not Joel Clark's, that I heard mixing in the air at Bel-Aire.

Ants

Read about ants today, and how they communincate via pheromones and how a collective consciousness forms among them, this consciousness designed to support the inadaquecies of the individual ants.

It was cool, and not altogether new to me, but I hadn't read about it in a long while, and not since reading some of the Julian Jaynes attempts at defining human consciousness as something of a meta phenomenon. The description of ants' collective consciousness evoked Jaynes, whose influence (I'm told) is surprisingly marginal.

So then I ventured out onto that big old Internet and found a video of some scientists who poured cement down the top of a giant anthill. 10 tons of cement to fill the colony's network of tunnels and chambers. They let the cement solidify and then they excavated the structure. The resulting cement sculpture was a masterpiece, better seen than described.

....

Today my project waas to find quiet, tourist-free, secluded places in midtown Manhattan where one could read or work or do whatever. I found 2 such spots, one right on Broadway and another nearby. I read about the ants at the place on Broadway.

In the Gut

I guess I haven't used this keyboard in a while. It was buried so deep in my coat pocket I had to work to get it out. It was under a wad of napkins, some business cards, and some glossy postcard-size flyers for places I've been through lately.

And pens. For some reason that pocket was stuffed with pens. Red, blue, black, and green. These are pens I bought in a moment of imagining I would make good on my lifelong goal of transcribing Bach's Wall-Tempered Clavier. That project would require a multi-colored array of pens, for to distinguish the individual voices of the fugues.

I quickly came to the conclusion that Bach's fugal writing is not the best vehicle for learning how to write fugues. That is not a new or unique insight. A certain type of musicologist has long complained that Bach never wrote a perfect fugue, and that the physical dexterity and spiritual riches Bach felt lived in contrpuntal music resulted in music whose structural freedoms made fundamental theoretical study almost pointless.

So for me to continue the transcription project would be for the purposes of servitude and worship. Maybe "worship" is too strong a word, but transcribing anyone's music for purposes other than familiarizing yourself with it comes close to servitude and evokes images of monks transcribing the Bible with calligraphy pens and being forced to start from the beginning if, at page 3,982, they forget to capitalize the G in God.

....

I am at a dive bar, seats filled entirely by old men and people like me on their way to becoming sad old men sitting alone at bars.

Nothing much has been happening lately. I noticed a sharp pain in my chest a few weeks ago and have lately noticed it again. It wouldn't seem serious enough to be angina, but I've been so lazy lately that some evils could be blubbering up from these innards.

I read once that Horowitz did not like eating in public restaurants because music was usually played at such places. Music -- especially live music -- disturbed his innards. I don't know how severe that condition was (he was evidently able to deal with it enough to eat at public places as often as anyone might) but I have experienced the same thing. There is a certain turning of the gut that accompanies my experience of music and great oratory, as well as most creative efforts. Not to be crude (who, me?) but taking a dump can have the effect of vacating (hah) my creative energies and ideas. There is something about tension (or accumulation) in my lower tracts that seems to be connected to creative energies.

Accumulation. Man, I just can not talk about shitting without everything sounding like a pun of some sort.

Someone here is doing crossword puzzles, writing answers into a giant book of puzzles. Coincidental to the above ruminations on my turgid innards I find that the very sight of an crossword puzzle grid stirs something in my gut the same way I imagine Horowitz's gut spun when hearing a string quartet play over his steak dinner. I experience similar sensationis of anticipation and hunger when I see a blank piece of paper or a blank page in a notebook. The seemingly infinite possibilities lingering in the platform of a blank surface has astonished me since childhood.

Daggumit, I have to take a dump.

....

Hokay, it's an hour or so later and II am still at the sad old man bar. The real old timers have gone home (or wherever) and it's just me and another middle-aged loser on our shared path to oblivion.

The police appear to be raiding the bar across the street. Siren lights flail fear into this place as the guns and clubs are wielded at the other place.

I knew a kid in grade school who claimed he could identify sirens. He claimed he could identify a Berlin siren from hearing it for a split second, and after 3 or 4 seconds he claimed he could tell you what type of crisis to which the police car or ambulance was headed.

I never quizzed him on this, but his claims of siren prodigy occasionally surface in my obviously idle mind. I imagine the Siren Master at work, reclining, smoking a pipe, casually but authoratatively telling the tale behind a range of seemingly cacophonous siren sound samples.

"It's a Tokyo ambulance headed to the home of an elderly nun who tripped over a power strip."

"It's a Detroit police car, There was a disturbance at one of the chopshops."

"Do you hear that dull dripping noise in that siren? That's an Israeli police cab responding to a possible terrorist attack."

One siren sound provokes a stern frown and sadness from the siren prodigy.

"That one's coming for me."

Curses

Strange dreams last night in which my brain was connected to my web sites, but faulty connections and vagaries of the Internet caused much of the text to look like dots on the Amsler Grid (The Amsler Grid is the pattern used for Macular Degeneration tests, and if you're seeing splotches and empty space on that grid like I do then it tends to mean you have a troubled macula).

I could barely disengage from the dream, which evolved from a hotel conference room. Sitting in that conference room I decided to go get something from my hotel room, but when I got to my room I discovered I had left my room key back in the conference room. I cursed at this discovery, and my curses were picked up by NYPD surveillance microphones and I was quickly detained for questioning.

The cops, staring at me bug-eyed, explained that it was a new spin on the "broken windows" theory of fighting crime. Instead of waiting for windows to be broken they instead mine public spaces for profanity, asssuming that we who curse are on our way to breaking windows and from there the inexorable path is carved to serial murder and coke-fueled terrorist rampages.

I explained that I was only trying to get into my room, but lacking a room key or other proof that this was my hotel room they escorted me from the building and placed me on a bus. The bus was very long and mostly empty save for 3 children and a payphone inside a glass cabinet. The children somehow managed to make $8.98 worth of calls from the payphone withouut having to pay for the calls, and we all got a laugh out of that.

The dream rambles on from there but now that I'm awake I find it conceivable that law enforcement could reach that level of bottom-feeding in the name of preventing crime.

Typing

An e-mail from a friend yesterday reminded me of a lingering memory of Leslie, who commit suicide last year.

I and several other web people of the time were invited to be a part of a project which seemed intriguing on the surface but in which I quickly lost interest. I was always skeptical of it but had nothing to lose in seeing what it was about. The organizer invited people who he described as the most original and artistic people on the web at the time, and Leslie was not one of them.

I remember how she winced when I told her I was in this project. When I heard that she had killed herself I started mining my memory for signals, for indications of her discontent, and there were many but that little incident came to mind first. She did not articulate any anger about the matter, but she didn't have to. I recognized it. I think one must be a pretty unhappy individual to let nonsense like that eat away at you, and I would know because I know how it feels to let these petty poisons rot and how perposterous it looks to anyone not inside your head.

I walked to my 181 today to get "2666" by Roberto Balaño and a set of DVDs by a director whose name I forget right now but who was recommended by a friend. And I finally got a copy of "The Last Great Necessity," a book about the transformation of cemeteries in America from places of memory to businesses and places to be avoided. The memory of humans is largely consigned to museums and libraries, but it was not always like this. Or so the book summaries say.

My vision has been playing games with me all day. I should give the retinal guy a call, but it's only been a couple of months and I'm supposed to wait a year before seeing him again, and of course there is this pesky holiday coming on. He said to call if conditions seem to get worse quickly (because my type of macular degeneration is known to accelerate very quickly) but I can't decide if conditions really are worse or if I'm just imagining it. Blindness would be bad but I could cope. I would go apeshit if I went deaf.

That e-mail correspondence which reminded me of Leslie further reminds me that I rarely respond to e-mail any more. It feels like labor to communicate with people via e-mail and typing, and it always has, but I seem to consign myself to a world in which substantive communication is most often left to typing.

I woke up screaming from a dream yesterday. In this dream I stepped into my living room and saw that my computer was gone. Stolen. To scream over something like that probably sounds neurotic or work-aholic (I am neither) but if that computer and external drives disappeared my livelihood would essentially vanish with it. I have some offsite backup but not enough, and rebuilding from a metaphorical lightning strike would take weeks and full restoration would be impossible.

But after I woke up and assured myself no burglary had happened I thought about that dream. The table, with the computer and monitors gone, looked nice. I liked it like that. I imagined what I might do if all this IV-level access to the Internet was yanked away, and the possibilities seemed tantalizing. It seems like I am trapped in this lifestyle, a self-sentenced prisoner.