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.

Jukebox

When, inevitably, our conversations repeat,
the questions return, idly re-packaged.
The theater of the moment dictates
how the questions are nuanced:
gently re-phrased or sarcastically flourished,
the questioner knowing the answers for years but
taking pride that he still knows to ask.

All have been answered, definitively,
with evidence,
but the questions persist.
Why?
For the sake of the question,
a nostalgia for mystery,
for the hope of stumping all times
with a question that render all answers impotent.

....

Aha, sorry for the John Ashbery wannabe spew. That business of people asking questions without caring to hear the answer, it's in my brain matter again.

Sitting at a pub, the music on the box is The Band, "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Great song.

Today was placid. I am on a quest for placidity these weeks. I missed any trace of it last night, when an unufortunate seating arrangement found me trapped between an unbelievably loud drunk and his pedophiliac-ranting buddy. That kind of company can make one feel like utter dirt.

Today was a brush with placidity. Checking the computer screens once in a while I mostly played through Bach's English Suites and some of the WTC. If you have never played the piano or another instrument then you can not know how fulfilling it is to feel that music passing through your hands and through your body. It becomes an addiction for me, it genuinely does, although like most addictions the satisfactions are ephemeral. As much as it feels like I am crafting something I am, when I stand up, left with nothing. The passages and the counterpoint vanish, consumed by that lately beguiling incinerator that is the present.

I would like to have a day like I had today, but in the sun. Outdoors. A back yard or desert tract with shade and a cooler full of ice, water, sammiches, and shitty beers. Mmmm, sammiches and Fosters in the hot, desert sun with a piano or two in the shade.

The song on the box now is that cheerful late Johnny Cash song about the empire of dirt. The E major fugue from Book II of the WTC reminds me of this song, the way it heaves and rises, then returns to balance without exploding into vomiting. The Johnny Cash song derives its quasi-"Day in the Life"-like crescendo from, I suspect, the production studios and not from Johnny Cash's badass song-writing self. I don't' know where Bach got it. Buxtehude, I guess. Maybe he got it from my pants.

Tomorrow is going to be hot again. It rained Florida-style today. I liked it. Ironically it added to the placidity: growing up in Tampa I came to expect savage, nuclear-strength thunder and lightning storms once or twice a day. The minutes before the storm were peaceful and clear, then came sudden, catastrophic eruptions of lightning and soul-wrenched-asunder thunderblasts, then more peace and clear skies with puffy clouds here or there. It was like living inside a woman's head.

I liked the rhythm of it. The routine of a daily terrorist attack from God during which any electrical devices could and often did explode from power surges. There was something comforting in the regularity of these reverse-volcanoes.

Damn, but the music here is good tonight.

amaozn.com

This weirded me out yesterday. Shopping for air conditioners, I thought I was at amazon.com. I noticed, though, that amazon did not remember me from earlier that day. Normally I stay logged in at amazon.com. That's when I noticed the URL. I was actually browsing amaozn.com, having mis-typed the URL. Amaozn.com is a copy of amazon.com, as this search result page for air conditioners shows:

http://amaozn.com/s/ref=nb_ss_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=air+conditioner&x=0&y=0

The WHOIS info for amaozn.com looks a little fishy to me. Amazon.com proper is registered through NetworkSolutions, a typical registrar for larger corporate entities. Amaozn.com is registered through GoDaddy -- not your typical registrar for the likes of Amazon. Additionally, the DNS servers differ between the 2 domains, as does the contact information. Amaozn.com is apparently owned by Amazon Technologies of Reno, Nevada, while Amazon.com is owned by Amazon.com, Inc., in Seattle.

I doubt there is any news in my little discovery, but I am a little surprised. I would expect that Amazon would fully redirect the typo domains it owns to the genuine amazon.com address. I, for one, would not log in or attempt to make purchases through a site that looks like Amazon.com but is not Amazon.com. Additionally, if I was in the business of earning customers' trust I would not expect them to browse around mutant sites which (I assume) require new logins and account settings.

For kicks I looked up amoazn.com and found a more typical typo traffic-leech type of site.

An attempt to access the top page of amoazn.com redirected me to this blank page:

http://66.39.123.200/a5920/

and the top level URL gave me a strange "E-Greetings and more" page filled with links to content from cellularphones.com and johnsonlane.com (the johnsonlane.com content does not work since that site seems to be down).

A lookup of the IP address is in the URL reveals that it is connected to another TYPO site:

$ host 66.39.123.200
200.123.39.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer amreicangreetings.com

At this point I looked out the window and decided not to waste my day in this manner any longer.

Count, or recount?

A problem I have with this project of learning the Well Tempereed Cllavier is that I do not know anyone who cares. No one in my immediate life would have any desire to sit and listen to that stuff.

I play for my neighbors. Occasionally I turn my camera on and broadcast over one of those webcam broadcast networks. That is usually fun.

But mostly this is a solitary pursuit.

My life is haunted by screen names and chat room handles. Most of the people who pass through my life are people I will never see, and who I would not recognize if they sat right next to me.

It may be a self-fulfillilng aspect of my personality. Someone once described me as "keeping the world at a safe distance." Appropriately enough I never knew that person, nor did she know me.

At any rate, the journey through the WTC has consumed most of my past 10 days. I know of nothing else in my life that feels so satisfying as playing the fugues from those volumes. Sunday in particular, after 6 or 7 hours at the piano with that stuff, I left the apartment feeling serene. Something was passing through me, like air through the tips of my fingers.

When I start memorizing these pages is when I will start to feel free. That is when I can stop learning and starting knowing, when I can stop accumulating and start understanding.

Memorizing fugues is hard. For me, at least. I think it has to be done, though. The further I get in to this music the more apparent it becomes that I must memorize it to comprehend and suitably recount.

But there is a dilemma. There in the last word of the previous paragraph. Why am I recounting the works of others? Why am I repeating and recycling? I am a creative person, not re-creative . For whatever creative input a pianist might bring to the works of others that pianist is an interpreter, not a creator. A performer is a critic, even, if that is possible -- one who makes the work of others understandable and through whose point of view the work is known.

What I have started to see in Bach these last few months -- where he differs from other great composers -- is the lack of ego. Music of Beethoven, Chopin & Stravinsky ultimately belongs to the personality and (not to get too lofty but) the greater glory of the composer. With Bach the deeper I go the more I feel that his music exists for the greater glory of something beyond the composer, and beyond the music itself.

And it feels good. It feels good to play the stuff. It's niiiiice.

....

For some reason the last few postings I sent to this place disappeared. That is no great loss, but the only thing I can think of is that the cron pipes the script to /dev/null. But it's always done that. For as long as I've been posting to these screens from this Treo I remain almost completely ignorant about how the scripts that run it work. That is not my usual way of working, but it is just kinda the way it happened when I started doing this.

I was, coincidentally, looking Last night at other ways of doing this, and I am also looking at trading this Treo for something else. At the Samsung showroom at the Time-Warner Center the other day I saw the Samsung Broadband PDA, as well as their strange Ultra-Mobile PC platters. Those things are strange. Too big to be truly ultra mobile and too small to be much more than a novelty.

I think the future of ultra mobile PC or otherwise functional devices is in foldable screenspace. A device the size of a Treo or other cell phone/PDA should connect to a foldable LCD screen that opens up to a usable size.

....

Strange 9-11-01 Graffiti

What's the story on this weird 9-11 graffiti that I spotted a few times around midtown Manhattan?



It reminds me, indirectly, of the receipt I got from Carusos Pizza and Pasta on Fulton Street. The receipt was issued on June 7, 2007; yet the receipt carried the date 09-11-01.

You're not a pianist

At The Irish Pub on 7th Avenue and 50-something Street. A conversation with the bartender reveals that this place has always been called The Irish Pub. "Always" meaning that it might have been called something else 50 years ago, or before the current collective memory of the place.

This is the place I thought had been called The Slaughtered something. Lamb? Sheep? The Slaughtered Elephant Pub?

The bartender says people still come in asking about Mulligan's, which was an old school pub a half block away. Mulligan's has been gone for 15 years but people still come asking about it.

This place is surprisingly low key for midtown. As I walked over here I was virtually subsumed by a mass of tourists. Well dressed, all of them, it was a procession of well over 100 individuals who seemed nervous about their conspicuousness. The conspicuity of their numbers.

Snipers on their lunch break see this mass of people and think "No one will notice if I lop off just one of them."

That's when the carcasses start piling up in the streets. The mass of tourists thinks its flock has lost something, but none can define what, or who. The casualties are all from the rear of the crowd -- the ass of the mass.

I remember a friend describing Las Vegas as "all of America laid out to dry." Midtown is something similar, but I'm not sure what. America at Sunday School? America at its college graduation? I don't know, but it is not New York.

This is one of the first midtown pubs I ever entered. I never frequented pubs until 2002 or 2003, so I must have passed through here with the corporates after work, probably in 1996 or later.

One of my earliest midtown pub memories is from a place called Faces and Names, near this place. It's called Faces and Names because the bar hires an illustrator to come and draw the faces of the customers. The artist either sells the drawings to the customers or they get put on the wall of the place. The walls are covered with these illustrations, which also bear the names of the illustrated.

I was a that pub on a weekend afternoon -- probably a Sunday -- when I told the bartender that I was a classical pianist. The bartender mentioned this to the other customer at the bar -- a fat drunk woman in her mid to late 50s who could only scream where simply speaking would suffice.

I CAN TELL IF YOU'RE A PIANIST. I CAN TELL IF YOU'RE A PIANIST. I HAVE A QUESTION. ANSWER THIS QUESTION.

She was pointing at me, yelling. I wouldn't recognize it until years later but she was retarded drunk. I had never been around that sort of thing, so I just took her to be an obnoxious loudmouth, fully in control of her sense.

now, of course, I know a drunk when I see one. But that's another story.

Her question, the answer to which would determine whether or not I was really a pianist, was:

WHAT'S THE FIRST NOTE OF CHOPIN'S POLONAISE?

She didn't say which Polonaise but I assumed she meant the 6th, which is one of Chopin's most over-played piano pieces.

In answering the question I struck the counter with my hands as if I was playing the opening notes of that Polonaise.

"E-Flat," I announced. "Two E-Flat octaves."

Before I finished that second sentence she was already ripping me a new one.

YOU'RE NOT A PIANIST. YOU'RE NOT A PIANIST. THE FIRST NOTE OF CHOPIN'S POLONAISE IS F!

She then commenced to sing the main theme from Chopin's 6th Polonaise. That main theme does indeed start on F-natural, but it's not "the first note" of the Polonaise.

She sang and sang and sang the Chopin Polonaise in the stupid, spittled way that drunk people sing. I would not recognize her for what she was -- an all-day daytime drunk -- until years later. Until then I could only be a bit irritated at her accusing me of not being a pianist.

Holding court

Sitting in the kitchen. Underwear, grey t-shirt, white socks. The table holds this writing contraption, two stacks of paper, and a NEW YORK NEW YORK coffee mug that sprung a leak years ago. It finds use now as a paperweight for one of those stacks of paper.

This table also holds, ridiculously, a 2.62 oz. thing of McCormick' Hot Shot Black and Red Pepper.

I do not sit at this table as much as I imagined I would when I set it up in here. It shakes a bit under even the slightest activity, which makes writing onto those papers a , slipping, skidding adventure.

This is, of course, the table at which my family and I played board games and card games. As such the memories of this table are not altogether pleasing, but I guess my memory is selective at times.

I am laying low these days. These are the first days in months that I have not gone out to some place for some level of human contact. The other night was ridiculous. I went to one place, as soon as I walked in people were buying me drinks, buying me drinks, buying me drinks. I wasn't laying attention to how many I had, but I felt OK when I left that place and went to another. It was the same thing at that place. For some reason anywhere I went people were buying me drinks, buying me drinks.

It was a suicidal quantity of booze. I spent the next day feeling like a toxic sponge, with no let-up in the misery from waking up at 11am to going back to sleep 12-13 hours later.

There are, it turns out, a lot of productive things I can do in that condition. Mainly I play piano. Somehow that part of the brain gets a pass and functions just fine. I practiced from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier for much of the day.

I removed the Hot Shot thing of pepper to a less conspicuous place. The table, those blank pages, those things are my mental desert for the night's wanderings.

I got the expected mail from my mother today. I was amused to see that she used two 37¢ stamps to mail a small letter. Those stamps, of that denomination, must be several years old by now, since the standard postage rate went up to 42¢ very recently.

I had a strange encounter with a postal delivery guy a few weeks ago. I went to a corner mailbox intending to drop some envelopes in. A delivery guy was at the box, taking mail from it and placing it into his bag for delivery.

Somehow I could tell from the look in his face that, as he saw me coming, that he waas happy to see me. He welcomed this opportunuity to interact with a postal customer,and to demonstrate his expertise.

Without asking he took the enveloppes from my hand. One of them, rather heavy, had I-don't- know-how-many stamps on it. He looked at it and weighed it. He weighed in the trustworthy, scientific manner of holding it up in the air. Holding the envelope he calculated the postage liability, assessing the job I did preparing this envelope for delivery, and preparing his evaluation of how delivery-ready this package was.

It passed. He approved. The same thing happened with another similarly sized envelope. Several seconds of weighing the thing, studying it, checking for openings or tears. Then, congratulatory glances my way as he approved this envelope for delivery.

Success.

Then came the third envelope. The smallest of the three, it contained a three page document. Three pieces of paper, plus the envelope. Doing my own calculations I estimated that a single Forever Stamp would be sufficient for such a standard size letter.

The delivery guy disagreed. He looked at me and frowned, saying "ooooooh, this needs more postage. I can't take this." I expressed some disbelief, though I found his charade charming enough that I did not want to intrude on his opportunity to hold court. I sensed he seldom had this opportunity to give customers feedback, and I further sensed that he craved this interaction. I gathered that he was fed up with the half-ass job his customers do of sealing envelopes poorly, not applying enough postage, leaving the Plus-4 numbers off the zip codes, and other sins of the postal life.

He insisted that 41¢ was insufficient postage for a three page letter. An elderly man looked at me and said "What can you do?" I think he added "He's the boss."

I ended up paying 82¢ to mail a three page letter. I went home, found another stamp, and placed it on the envelope. I thought about putting 10 or 12 stamps on this envelope, to show this delivery guy how seriously I took his scoldings. I imagined that the act of overpaying for delivery of my letter might appease the failings of his many other customers who irked him so.

It was ludicrous, but I suppose most of us are prone to foisting our expertise onto others when the setting seems to call for it.

It reminded me of the insane round of questioning I got from one of the clerks at the Rockefeller Center station. Someone addressed a certified letter to me in a way that put my father's name first on the envelope. I was listed as Trustee of his estate, but the estate was listed first, leaving my name on the second line of the address. The clerk implied that I could go to jail for this, then asked me, among other things, "Where's your father now?" I responded "Who cares where is, he's dead." She considered that an insufficient reply, then she barked out other random questions, meaningless to the situation, and obvious grasps for authority.

The questions suddenly stopped. She either realized she was wrong and let me have the letter, or she honestly believed she had just spared me criminal charges.

I read that Elvis, toward the end of his life, was in the studio recording virtually 24 hours a day. Why? Because it was the only place in his life where he felt he had any control.

I these these postal clerks were in that frame, seeking control over something -- anything -- in their lives.

This table shakes even as I type onto this little thing. I try to type lightly enough to prevent the shaking. Rattling.

Gone

i like making legitimate use of a new http status code. a few months ago i discovered 503, which proved useful in telling greedy searchbots that they were overloading my site with their bot traffic and could you please try again later.

this week i used 410.

last year i set up sorabji weather for myself. along with a dict server and a web-based universal whois lookup the weather station is just one of those silly thing i've always wanted to do.

i thought i would be clever and connect the weather station to my payphone project, and to my mailbox locator. it made sense, as a search for outdoor objects like mailboxes or phones might benefit or at least be pleasantly complemented from knowing what the weather was like.

connecting weather to the mailbox site proved no problem. landing on my page for a mailbox at 1259 Sixth Avenue at 50th Street shows the current weather and offers links to New York Weather and weather 10019. this set-up is generally reliable because the quality of the database is generally GOOD.

the links from the payphone numbers, however, were another story. the quality of that database is, on its surface, very very poor. however its use was not intended for detailed screening, and precise accuracy was never assumed. collected from numerous sources, including law enforcement, telephone companies, and individuals, the collection is more of a guide than an authoratative resource.

i knew, of course, when i published the entire database of about 750,000 payphone numbers that it was filled with mis-spellings and other seemingly ridiculous errors.

nevertheless, having had success with linking the mailbox locations i thought i'd try the same with the payphones, for whatever value it might bring if and when it worked.

the problem was apparent almost immediately, as my error logs showed all kinds of crazy stuff related to the weather site. the pages tried to pull in weather snapshots for mis-spelled cities like New Yirk, NY, New Yor, NY, and Washingto, DC among thousands of others. searchbots followed these links like anything else, landing on a FRIENDLY http status 200 page telling you that new yor was not found.

the problem was with the status 200 header. searchbots gobbled up these garbage pages like anything else, polluting their indexes with useless typo pages. well, they are not totally useless, but they don't belong in search indexes. i checked to see how many pages from my weather site were indexed and there were thousands. problem was, most of them were nothing pages like Washingto or WSHNGTN. Abbreviated spellings like these were perfectly acceptable in their original context but not too useful for my particular weather site.

i could build my own weather suite. it's not that hard. but i bought a third party app instead. it's proven a bit sour in its way, but it's all good i suppose.

anyway, to purge the search indexes of these garbage pages i still send up the error page asking if you spelled something wrong, but now i send it with http status 410 headers, which are supposed to tell the search engines to remove these pages immediately. i like the wording of it, too: GONE! as in, WHOOSH!

i am interested to see if that works, and how long it takes. i never intended to litter the indexes this way, but i should have seen it coming.

fascinating, no?

no?

wapedia.mobi carrying ads

am i the only one to have noticed that the mobile version of wikipedia is showing ads from taptu.mobi and maybe other places? it's been this way for months. i didn't think wikipedia did advertising.

check wapedia.mobi/en/Johann_Sebastian_Bach for evidence.

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.

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.

Boulevard

I feel like a bit of a twad living in New York and shopping at Target, but I was just sorta there when the pants called to me.

My plan was to visit Fresh Meadows. The Q88 bus to Fresh Meadows leaves from somewhere near Queens Place, a small mall which houses Target.

I describe it as small because it is small. I grew up in Florida where (as in most parts of the country/world) a mall covers many square miles in floorspace and parking lot. The only NYC mall I know that approaches that coverage is the Staten Island Mall, though I hear the Metro Mall in Maspeth (mmm) is relatively vast.

I heard something funny at the Target store today. A voice, which I thought was directed at me, said "Yo, look at this underwear."

Turning to see who might have said this to me, the person clarified: "Vito, come look at this underwear."

My name is not Vito. I turned away, letting escape from my mind the cultural space of men who shop together for underwear at Target.

I walked from Target back to my place. As the crow flies (or as I like to say: as the flow cries) the walk is only about 5 miles, but today it felt far longer. I have been tired and feeling weird the last couple of weeks. My sleep patterns are all over the place, and I bolt awake for no reason I can remember. A couple of mornings ago I jolted awake three times thinking I heard cracking noises -- like pops or thunderclaps -- inside my head. I have also burst awake thinking I heard a split second of thunderous laughter.

I did this same walk down Queens Boulevard last January, after an appointment with an eye specialist. After an hour of prodding my eyeballs with tiny steel spoons and giving me little confidence that my macular degeneration was anything but serious I wound up nearly blind from those wicked drops he used to dilate my pupils. I was badly depressed before and after that appointment (it was one of several), and the long walk back blew past in no time.

It was 70° today. I felt gawky walking down Queens Boulevard with a giant, pants-filled Target shopping bag. They had only the largest size bags at the store. They weerr out of the smaller bags. The guy in line in front of me bought a comic book and replacement blades for a Norelco electric razor. These relatively diminutive purchases were tossed into a mammoth Target bag, a bag big enough for two or three king size pillows or even a small mattress.

My pants filled a smiliarly enormous bag, a bag loudly speckled with bright red targets, Target© branding, and an inane list of things one could do to get additional, eco-friendly use of the bag before disposing of it.

A half mile or so into my walk I stopped and took off my top shirt. 70° was too hot for a heavy Woolrich shirt and a t-shirt underneath. I put the Woolrich into the Target bag, adding to the weight of all those pants (and shorts) and other items I threw in the bag -- including this amazing foldable keyboard.

I saw the Georgia Diner. Since a friend pointed out that the peach in the diner's logo looks like a vagina I can not see it as anything but that. Mmmm.

I saw the POP Diner. A year or so back I ate there with some documentary film makers/songsters. I managed to make myself useful to them by directing them to points of interest at Calvary Cemetery and New Calvary Cemetery, and they bought me a burger in return.

I can not remember any of those fine folks' names...

I passed those hourly rate motels. Queens Motor Lodge is one. I think 30 dollars for 3 hours used to be their Valentines Day special. I haven't noticed lately but their advertising used to shamelessly cater to the hookers/johns crowd.

And I saw a country of other stuff on Queens Boulevard. Who the hell cares. I was tired and oblivious, but felt better as the walk reached the half way point. The pops and snaps in my head receded as the afternoon trailed on. I do not know what is up with those crazy sounds in my head. Fortunately common sense remains to remind me that the sound of a car horn blasting could not possibly have come from the upstairs apartment or from my teeth.

I eventually passed the Flux Factory, an artists' commune and performance space which will soon be demolished. I never quite trusted that place as an art house but I liked knowing they were there on that bowels-like block of 43rd Street. Bowelsian. Bowelsesque.

I have not had as much time for these long walks as in months past. Things pile up. Things. I have been composing at the piano for longer hours -- longer than before. A lot of disciplines are like this, but I believe that composing or writing are creative endeavors which demand hours of time every single day. Composing is something which, if you are not doing it at least 6 or 7 hours a day every day then you might as well not be doing it. Others say that 6 or 7 hours is a joke, and that 12 to 14 hours a day is a realistic commitment if your work is to be taken even a little bit seriouly. I don't think I buy that. It smacks of the collegiate "pull an all-nighter" mentality.

I do not know what I am talking about. Nothing new there.

Strictly business

Feeling soft. Girls touching me. Telling me I am this. Telling me I am that. Looking away. Well, that last part is nothing new. Remembering how nice girls are like space aliens. Unusual and bizarre. Thinking about Monday's ghastly experiment in which I tried to EXPRESS MY FEELINGS through music I wrote. Never again. From here forth it is back to business. Strictly business. In music as in all things. T'ings. Tongs. Ting a tong along...

Foggy memories

My sister told me some stuff today that I did not know regarding the evacuation from Laos. I have some foggy memories from the story having heard it a few times as a young person, but I have sketchy memories of the events.

The day we left Laos our mother showed up at our school in the middle of the day. She told the vice-principal that she was taking us to a dentist's appointment.

That part of the story I do remember. The teacher in my first grade class (Mrs. Coleman) was handed a slip of paper, and she called my name, saying (with a curious look in her face) to report to the vice-principal's office.

There was no dentist's appointment. My father had somehow gotten word that the Americans were soon to be evacuated from the country, and that we in particular should leave Laos immediately. Our mother then got us out of school early and drove us home, where we made hasty preparations to have the household furnishings shipped to the states. This shipment included, among other things, the Baldwin Acrosonic upright piano at which I would learn to play.

The piano and all our stuff (as my mother would often mention) would travel over desert sands by camel caravan at some point on the journey.

The drive home from school was not without indicent. We drove through the center of Vientiane, where a large group of people had gathered to either protest something or maybe to presage the impending invasion of Laos by the communists.

Whoever they were, this mob of people saw us and did not like us. They pounded on the windows of our car, surrounding the vehicle and rocking it as my mother gingerly drove through.

We got back to the house. I remember entering my room and finding a large wooden crate. I pitched anything I could get my hands on into the crate as my sister did the same in her room and as my mother did throughout the house.

The furniture and large objects were tagged for movers to pick up after we left.

I clearly remember that we had to leave the enormous stereo system in the living room. That was where I listened, countless numbers of times, to Elton John's "Caribou" album, Leon Russell's "All That Jazz," and Edgar Winter Group's "Shock Treatment." Those LP records sit on my shelves to this day.

Our early departure from the country conflicts with one of my memories of the event. I thought we were the absolute last Americans to get out of there. In fact we may have been the very first, and we had the large ferry across the Mekong all to ourselves, with plenty of room for our car and as many crates of belongings as we could assemble in such short order.

We spent three days in what I only know as "the General's trailer," located on the Thailand side of the Mekong. I do not know the General's identity or why we had exclusive access to a private residence of such a high ranking officer.

I remember that trailer, though in my memory it was, for some reason, in Tampa, not Thailand. There is a mental association between that trailer on the Mekong and a house we stayed in for a few days in Tampa when we landed there months later. The house in Tampa had a similar layout as the trailer, I think. And it had a television, which we had not seen for 2 years. Bill Cosby was on the TV.

The three day head start ultimately gave us no advantage in getting ourselves stateside before the rest. But it let us get our house full of belongings out of the country and shipped to an air base in the U.S. Most of the Americans in Laos had to abandon their houses and everything in them.

On our third day in the trailer the rest of the Americans were evacuated from Laos, and we joined them at the Chau Pia hotel (no idea if I'm spelling that right) in Bangkok. That part of the adventure has many vivid memories for me, but the strange fun today was in filling in the rest of the experience, reviving and clarifying some foggy memories along the way.

I can see myself forgetting the mob of people shaking and pounding on our car. I would forget that not because of fear or trauma, but because of my 1st grade inability to comprehend what was happening.

I do not know that my behaviour ever manifested these inclinations, but I remember arriving at school in Tampa feeling like some sort of royalty. Having been individually plucked from school that day and virtually escorted from Laos under U.S. Military protection I guess I imagined myself something special. I have foggy memories of either being excused from or thinking I should be excused from a certain 3rd or 4th grade course by virtue of the advanced courses I already took at the American School of Vientiane. I forget how that worked out.

Roger Clemens opened the Floodgates

Roger Clemens has opened the floodgates of government inquiry into his life and the lives of everyone he has known. There is no players union, there is no arms-length Mitchell report. The FBI can subpoena anyone it wants, and those who lie go to jail.

Baseball's house of cards is coming down, and Roger Clemens will be to blame. I look for Roger The Dodger to pull an O.J. drama move.

First Customer of the Day

Today was strange. Everything seemed to go well. I felt good, which was surprising because I basically drank all freakin' day yesterday.

I set to work on a web project I've worked on for a few months. Everything came easy this time. All the mod_rewrite crap, the search engine, even the file system I planned early on seems to work mostly as expected.

In between each of the day's tiny administrative triumphs I went to the piano and worked on that A Flat Minor thing started yesterday. It's got some distance to go but it was cool to re-visit it today and find that it still sounded interesting.

Who can explain the highs and lows? I would not want to explain it even if I thought I could. Today was not exactly a high but after last week it seemed like it.

I was completely dead inside for a few days last week. I felt like nothing, and to be nothing would have come as a relief. Days like these come and go but the disabling feelings of depression hadn't been that strong since the corporate youth days.

Who cares.

....

The morning today was wasted, but it was a fun way to waste a couple of hours. I started writing a word-of-the-day thing about the word "Chickasaw." I have never been much for native American lore but I know that the Chickasaw were a distinct peoples.

I know this because I attended summer camp as a grade-schooler from 1978 to 1980, and at those summer camps the kids were grouped in "tribes." My first year at camp I was in the Chickasaw tribe.

I found a web site for alumni of that summer camp. The site is filled with pictures from the 1970s, and I spotted myself in one of those pictures.

I got too distracted to finish the Chickasaw story, which will talk about the sound of that word versus the sound of the names of the other tribes.

The other day I spotted "Town Car" and started writing an essay about that car name. I changed my mind when I couldn't find any one story to focus on. "Town Car," could be the title of my father's biography, though, and I could fill many screens with my observations on his relationship with his car.

....

That web project I polished off today is a searchable version of Webster's 1828 English Dictionary. The Webster's 1828 is considered by some to be the finest English dictionary ever published. Religious fundamentalists like that dictionary because it cites more scripture than any other dictionary.

Today my 1828 site got its first-ever visitor. Someone found the site by typing "Webster's 1828 Dictionary" into a search engine.

This person looked up several words: Divine. God. Holy. Jesus. If their search terms were any indication then this person seemed to fit the profile of an 1828 Webster's reader.

After looking up several words from biblical verses this person surprised me by looking up FIRE FART.

Fire Fart? Is that from scripture? Is that some Cotton Mather apocalyptic preaching?

I only watch hit reports that closely while working on a new site. I watch the access_log for errors. Today a live person wandered in.

For me that's a really cool thing to set up a new site and be tailgazing when the first visitor arrives.

It reminds me of a time a friend and I road-tripped to Cape Cod. We found a resturant that looked OK, and we stepped in a few minutes after 12 noon.

The place was empty except for 3 or 4 employees, every last one of whom looked at my friend and me with obvious shock and bewilderment. It was a strange welcome, but the mood quickly turned normal and we ordered lunch.

We paid our bill and the waitress laughed, telling us that the place had just opened for business for the first time at 12 noon. We were the first customers ever to enter the place. It was a new building, a new business, a new place. And we were the first customers ever.

My first customer of the today ordered Divine, Holy, Jesus, and a Fire Fart.

Snot shakers

Aha. A company called "Movers, not Shakers", ends up with an unfortunate web address that some would pronounce thus: Mover Snot Shakers dot com.

Lies

Sitting at a Starbucks, thinking I will stay here at this table for the remainder of the year.

I found myself surprisingly wrapped up in the Roger Clemens nonsense yesterday. I was neither fan nor foe of the pitcher, but it interests me when people of great accomplishment in life crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Among a certain sphere of influence Clemens is regarded as an icon, but the icon himself has put nothing less than his legacy at stake by campaigning to the highest thresholds of power.

Everybody involved lied. The congresspeople and senators lied just by being there, their august presence infusing this trivial situation with preposterous significance.

I found the situation with Clemens' wife to be telling. She got an HGH injection from Roger's trainer and soon started complaining about side effects. In testimony Roger claimed to have been angry about his wife being injected without him knowing about it. He was never angry enough, apparently, to confront his trainer about it, nor was he concerned enough about his wife's side-effects to call a doctor or do a damn thing.

To me the scenario suggests that Roger had to have told his wife that these side-effects are normal and will pass -- and who but Roger would know better?

He couldn't take her to an emergency room because that would draw headlines.

Life is filled with High-profile liars. Clarence Thomas. Oliver North. Bill Clinton. I listened to the hearings yesterday and imagined myself in Clemens' (or Pettitte's) position, imagining how I would try to direct the questions toward my prepared answers. Clemens had no skill at that, while Clinton was the master.

Clemens bluntly ignored questions outright and launched into platitudes and retrospective summaries of his life and times, while Clinton turned questions to his advantage with magnificently nuanced haiku.

Lies are cultural. The drug dealer culture (alluded to in yesterday's hearings) is filled with lies and nuanced euphemisms. Burton, the representative from Indiana, has made headlines and soundbytes aplenty with his non-sequitor pomposinations about McNamee's past lies, safely avoiding the truth he seems to have told yesterday. That type of obfuscation is, I think, a lie.

Cling on

Sitting at a Starbucks, reflecting on the abundance of human contact I have had so far this day. A direct conversation with the landlord, friendly banter with someone at the next table here at the coffee shop, and substantive phone conversations with my accountant in Florida regarding my father's final taxes.

Completing that set of taxes has dragged on largely because of the accountant's very limited availability, though my own apathy about the matter has some play. It's just paperwork at this point, and there has been no urgency driving me to nag the accountant since 6 months ago when I sent him a large batch of papers.

I did go through the motions of nagging the guy, but it was genuinely pointless.

Going to my 181 today to see what other tax-related paperwork awaits. I have not visited the 181 in a while, but any time I do I remember how it used to be located 4 or 5 feet to the right of where it is today. They renovated the post office space to make room for a passport counter, moving my 181 and surround boxes several feet to the left.

Having received mail there for about 15 years when this shift happened I found it disconcerting, and I still do.

A similar thing happened in Tampa. I don't remember how old I was when the postal service changed our zip code from 33612 to 33613. That must have been 25 years ago but to this day I still have to correct myself when addressing letters to Tampa. I specifically mumble to myself "It's not 33612 any more. Add one. 33612 + 1 = 33613."

Maybe it's OCD, or maybe it's a way of clinging to the past.

Looking out my window

Trying to erase from my memory the sounds of today.

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

Annie's father died today.

While some of us puttered around doing nothing, thinking we were doing something, the old man on the third floor dropped dead of a heart attack.

The fire trucks and ambulances appeared outside my window. The firefighters and medics filed in to the building. I opened the front door of my apartment to see a grim parade of uniformed young men headed upstairs.

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

The medics, perfunctoraly, assured her "We're working on him."

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

The body lies where it expired until a detective arrives to investigate and rule out foul play. Natural deaths receive lowest priority over murders and drug-related circumstances. Sometimes the family stares at the corpse until blood and pus burst from their father's eyes. Police assistants clean the blood from the body's face so the daughter or son can give their father or mother a good-bye kiss.

The old man's body could be lying there now, exploding, 10 hours on, and Annie could be forced to sit there with him.

She is with family somewhere else.

I looked out the window expecting to see the body hauled to the ambulance.

I saw youngsters walking past, gossiping, as the empty ambulances disappeared.

Fun with artificial intelligence

Werder is a fun Perl module that produces gibberish. These words look close enough to being real words that they could fool people.

Sometimes Werder actually produces words that are either real, or which could conceivably be legitimately coined. In today's example the words "multiple" and "unties" appear, but so do possible real or invented words "debative" and "clingies," neither of which I will attempt to define or research. Instead I will savor the joy of saying nonsense words like "spoollaughser," "scallished," "swallsmanitie," and "pronsformo." I shall further endeavor to use these words in casual conversation as my day progresses.

Here is today's Werderblast of poetry to cleanse the mental pallette, punctuation and linebreaks added for readability.

Multiple anellying latinguiltssi 
fanciationsi sssmicani onistratess 
attedily toy lebeecheapoff 
     publicititutor.

Bestuffisti unties everging 
audingly stemaing emouser 
deternally chinger eassionopt 
     spoollaughser.

Trusiresmotives sonanceseni coarsencels 
ssmaspansi basmorations jayceeding 
nonunciaticians debative clingies 
     asheratutious.

Scallished admity aliticedacy 
barterlea surauggleam kestounds 
poisenatopola gingly swallsmanitie 
     pronsformo.

Chew your food

The quest for pinball filled my day. And my yesterday. Wandering into pool halls and bowling allies looking for pinball machines is a stupid way to waste a day, but of late I have had no capacity to concentrate. I consider it time well wandered.

Last week I bit the inside of my mouth. It did not seem to hurt so much when it happened but the cut seemed to grow. I have bit into the inside of my cheek before. It is hard to tell exactly what is happening in there, as it starts to hurt so bad you'd think the whole tooth was knocked off, but in fact it's just a little cut.

That has improved greatly, but for a few days I did not chew all my food quite so thoroughly. As obvious as it seems to me now I did not know that this would aggravate my esophagitis problem. That was less and less of a problem of late, but I guess sending half-chewed food into the esophagal sphincter (love that term) is not so smart when the lining there is scratched and not primed for double duty.

So I've been feeling like a bucket of fuck again. Boo-hoo.

Today's pinball search sent me to Queens Boulevard, where I stepped in to a few billiards halls. No pinball there, but I found a table at a place on 48th Street in Sunnyside. Joy.

I had a strange thought today. I was in a bathroom at a diner on Queens Boulevard when it occured to me that nobody could see me. Nobody. It is hard to think of very many places where *nobody* can see you at all.

I imagine motel rooms as anonymous passageways, not for the present occupant but for the disconnected mysteries of the paths that cross through at room out of sequence.

It sounds like Arthur Miller: "The Motel Room." Each night a new occupant, each night a new drama from the world of transience.

One night a businessman, the next night an up-and-coming starlet, the next night a wife who just left her husband. In sequence they make their desperate and not-so-desperate phone calls from the motel room bed.

I thought of these sort of things when I drove from Florida to New York in 2005. In Norfolk, Virginia, the pouring rain and dark of night forced me to get a room at the first motel in sight. This happened to be a Motel 6, a chain I have always avoided in any of my travels.

The stay was miserable and uncomfortable in that uniquely Motel 6 way, but what overcame me as I swiped the key through the motel room door was how, as a child, I believed that some doors were magic. I believed that opening a door at my grade school would send me not to the school cafeteria but to another country. I further believed that some keys were magic, and that using a magic key on the lock of any door in the world would turn that door into a magic door, granting passage to another planet or at least another world.

I wanted that motel room door to be a magic door. I was driving my father's car 2 months after his death, and as I got closer to New York the meaning of that trip piled up in my mind. Through Georgia and the Carolinas I simply drove the car and tried to think about anything but my father, whose hands so proudly clutched the very steering wheel I now controlled.

I can still feel that motel room door opening. Like many things in my life, I remember the sound. It made a thrush of a sound, the insulation around the door frame creating what sounded like a large refrigerator or freezer door opening.

The walls of the room were barren where my mind was not. My thoughts splattered onto the walls like a disaster. I wished that I had just walked through a magic door, and maybe I had. As I pushed the door open I recalled that child hood memory and clearly said to myself "I believe that some doors are magic." But the blank, dismal interior of that motel room was a sour alert that magic was dead.

Why do I not feel like finishing this story. I am tired, sad and depressed and might need to shutup soon.

Chew your food, You and your esophagal sphincter will be glad you did.

Caffè

ESB