Pizza Question

Why, in the year 2007, would Caruso Pizza, located about a half mile from the site of the World Trade Center, issue receipts with the date "09-11-01"?

missed dream

woke up throughout the night thinking, i should write down this dream. this is a strange one, or a twitchy one, i thought.

i do not believe that dreams contain mystical or magical messages, but I do think they occasionally say something about yourself and about your anxieties and buried introspections. this dream had something of that about it, and i woke up half way thinking this would make an interesting note-to-self for later.

i had a longer dream last night, and i remember that one well. i have had this other dream in some form or other many times over. i often dream of being sentenced to death. the verdict can not be appealed, and the sentence is always in response to some indiscretion never clarified in the dream, but which all seem to agree was pretty inconsequential. in these dreams i get death on a technicality.

the only time i remember a reprieve of sorts was when someone told me, on my way into a gas chamber, that "no one actually dies in there."

last night, though, the dream had me going to the electric chair, and i was given a final day in the city to eat all i want and go wherever i wanted. my final meal was supposed to be a can of sardines, but when i opened the can it contained some kind of large beans.

i was accompanied this day by a man and his son. they worked for the state, and their job was to make me feel like this was any other day and that nothing bad was about to happen. i woke up asking the man if there was any way out of this, thinking about the pain of the electric chair.

details change but the focus of the dream is always the death penalty.

since childhood i have regarded institutionalized life-or-death decisions with some sense of foreboding. growing up in Florida, the death penalty was a frequent point of contemplation at my high school. the topic came up so often and so conspicuously that over time i came to regard it as inevitable.

History

So many projects on the table, so little direction. So much to say, so few means with which to say. Other days it is the opposite: So little to say, yet so much means with which to say it. I hit tab a few times in my SSH window and consider the list of 1877 possibilities. Commands I'll never use, functions whose purpose I will never know. There is 'tic,' a command whose man page is a wall of unfamiliar words. Why do I have the 'sb' program? Oh, to transfer files via ZMODEM, of course, which I haven't done in 13 years. Good to know the functionality is there should I get a phone call from a BBS in the past. I type 'history' at a command prompt and see the list of mundanities that are my recentness. Commands (tail -f, pico, perl -e, vi, uptime, w, grep) repeated and repeated until they form a tower of null, a sky-high column of forgotten keystrokes, tasks of microscopic significance consuming the meta spaces of my life. Here is to another day of feckless endeavors.

The Deeps

Speaking of The Deeps, and speaking of of casting about, I was in a graveyard once when I spotted this poem on the tombstone of Jane Fowler Jones:

The Unknown Deeps

There are deeps we cannot fathom.
In the blue sun-lighted sea,
Though we mark each surface ripple,
All beneath is mystery.

Thus the soul may seem as tranquil
As a sea without a wave.
While there are to thee unopened
Deeps as secret as the grave.

Cast into the sea a pebble.
Cast into the heart a word.
It is all alike -- thou can'st not
Know what mighty deeps are stirr'd.

Jane Fowler Jones
Who died June Twelfth, 1902

Casting About

Today is directionless. Yesterday was, as well. I have had fun setting up the Mailbox Locator but of late I can hardly stand to think about it. I recently posted about 750,000 payphone numbers to my old stand-by (the Payphone Project). I did this after a friend told me that a patient had gone missing from the mental hospital at which she worked. The patient called from a payphone, and no other resource except the Internet allowed them to match the location of the payphone to its phone number that showed up on the caller id. That, I think, is cool, and adds wings to my claim that the phone companies have no reason to keep this information confidential.

Maybe it is the beautiful weather that has me casting about like this. I could stand up and sit at that piano across the room to finish learning Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. The WTC is one of the great mountains of piano music, and one does not choose to approach it in its totality on a whim.

But playing other composers' music is a re-creative act. I am in a mode for creating, or for rummaging through that part of my mind. To say that one is creative is not a compliment. In most situations creativity is an annoyance. It bothers people, especially those who ask a lot of questions.

I could do something more substantive with my random words project, or with the dictionary server I finally got around to setting up. So many fabulous words have turned up in the randomness of things: Shockdog is today's crunchy sounding word. It makes me think of the sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz," which is notable for the fact that it contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. Jackdaws. Shockdogs. Maybe today's project should be the creation of a sentence that uses the word Shockdog and contains all the letters of our alphabet. That would be a noble achievement.

What is a Jackdaw, anyway? Ah, it's a bird. I think I knew that at some place in life.

I heard something interesting on Paul Harvey this morning. You know it will be of transcendental significance when Paul Harvey announces that you need to give him your "undivided attention" as he reads you this next news item.

The story is that the design of the neurons in our brains are amazingly similar to the design of the known universe. Here is what he is talking about.

I resist weepiness over the notion that the universe is in us, and we are in it, and our tangible connection to distant nebulae and galaxies is as direct as our connections to our parents. But I do find found it interesting how patterns repeat in nature. Patterns and principles repeat in life. I once read a description of how the Internet works, and I thought its design contained a good metaphor for human relationships. Minimizing points of failure is a baseline principle in network design, as are redundancy and backward compatibility. Substitute a few words and generalities and one could apply the same ideas to all manner of existences, hopefully without reducing it to a pithy maxim.

I have read that scientists, with all their knowledge and information, are more likely than others to believe in God. I wonder how true that is.