Today might have been utterly delightful had I spent it with a heterosexual female and not a gay man, but hey, friends are important, right?
I gave a friend the big tour of the big cemetery, which is something I’ve basically never done until now. A couple of years ago I tagged along with some documentary film makers who wanted to use Calvary in their film. It was fun but I am not sure what value I brought to the endeavor.
Today was nearly spontaneous. I had not driven my car in over a month so I figured I should do that. A friend had told me months earlier to call him any time I wanted to go “cruising” in the Lincoln. Hah.
So that’s what happened. Driving around Queens, mostly at the big boneyards, looking at the amazing quantity (and quality) of stained glass in the mausoleums and me pointing out the places I knew anything about.
I had fun. He did too. I don’t really know too many people who would want to do that so it was fun.
And a beautiful day. Hah, those words “Beautiful day” headlined my first-ever secret web diary thing. I stashed it under some crazy URI like sorabji.com/8bnn_k^Y8psof67fw2@)% — crazy like that so no one could ever find it, and so no one’s web browser auto-complete would mysteriously fill it in even though the address had never been accessed.
I think I reached a point at which I felt I could not say something like “It’s a beautiful day” without prompting cynical cackles. So I took that stuff secret, and truth be told I am not sure where that stuff is now.
I write every single day, but for the last couple of years few of those words make it to the Internet. There is something unnatural to me about taking hand-written words and transcribing them for digital use. Furthermore the logistics of competing with a computer operating system and its demanding softwares has become quite enough to make me pick up the pen and press it to the paper as a safe and sane way of documenting my fascinating existence.
It truly does feel unnatural to take that hand-written stuff and turn it into type. It feels like taking something that is here, something material and real, and vaporizing it, dropping it into nothing. The words seem to lose part of their meaning when they are not joined to something, and they seem conspicuously naked to me if I see them on a screen.
You know what it reminds me of? When I was a kid in Tampa there was a big empty lot on which it looked liked someone was going to build a new house. The neighborhood was not the most distinctive or characterful, but it had a certain consistency to it. When it looked like a new house was going to be built I guess I assumed the new house would fit in with the character of the area.
They did not exactly build a house there, They hauled in a ready-made house. A pre-fab. I saw them haul it on a trailer, the house’s plumbing dangling from the bottom like a loose muffler dragging from the bottom of a car. I thought it was cool to see the plumbing, and imagined the spiderweb-like puzzle of pluggin all those pipes in to the underground plumbing that lay there gaping.
I lived near it for about 15 years before moving away, but I always knew that that house did not belong there. Its roots were phony, it was not organically built, it was an outsider structure that forever stuck in my mind as the gangly looking thing someone hauled in on a flatbed trailer.
That is how it feels to me to copy hand-written words to a digital screen. I’ll always know they don’t belong in this sterile, substanceless environment.
So here I am doing that which I can’t stand from other people: writing about writing. Writing about this act, self-scrutiny. I can’t stand this from any discipline.
Whatever. I’ve been trying to do more writing for my web sites but I find that the format of the web page and the computer screen just does not suit me any more. I am not at all certain what “format” would suit me but in the meantime I am taking notes on paper and not looking back.
Not looking back is part of the problem. At some time, probably as a consequence of the piano-playing part of my life, I came to believe that words written should not be bothered. Ever. To read your own scribblings is a bit of weakness as well as vanity, and to tinker with them is to intrude.
Stupid. Stupid!
There are nuances to this attitude –nuances which have merit but not enough to subsidize the notion that written symbols are somehow sacred.
….
It is an hour later. No it’s not, it is 10 seconds later, I just lied by typing in those 5 dots and saying whatever I want about the passage of time. I was just trying to change the subject.
Crap, now I have to leave anyway. Aha.
