no travels today. only busy work. i ran out of big pictures and i feel ghastly awful. i‘ll get over it. i had a baflfing altercation with some software today. babbl-baffling. a fling of baff. up early, though.
sometimes i feel the stillness in people‘s lives. i feel the blank line. the test pattern, the kiss of light that flashed when old televisions were shut off. in college i knew a guy who had no such lines. no stillness. only jagged hills and continuous confusion comprised the terrain of his spirit and his mind.
between peckings here i look at pages from the oxford book of death, a series of poems and short quotes regarding death,funerals, boneyards, and all that. i found a pretty darn good poem today, by Patric Pepper, about death. i found it last week, actually, but shared it today, and sharing something makes it feel new. that poem belongs in this Oxford anthology, i think.
i have always liked the anthology, or the Omnibus. it is not a genre but a format.
…..
Dark house
I stand inside.
Mystery specks of noise are
of no concern.
Not now.
Doors opened, their
shadows unbroken like
cobwebs and
stains which the
family tourist
decrees must be
preserved.
…..
A woman who walks past my apartment at least a dozen times a day just walked past here. I first noticed here a couple of years ago for nothing more than the prodigious number of times she walked past my window each day. It is not a busy thoroughfare on which I live. On other streets she might pass unnoticed were she to walk past a thousand times a day. For years all ㅏㅜㄷㅈ ㅐㄹ ㅗㄷㄱ ㅈㅁㄴ ㅅ소솜ㅅ ㄴ노녿 ㅈㅁ미ㅏㄷㅇ ㅔㅁㄴㅅ, ㅈㅁ미ㅏㄷㅇ
hokay, that was amusing. through some magical stroking of these keys i somehow switched this keyboard from the english language to Korean. i wonder what i said in that language?
so as i was saying, for years all i knew of this woman was how she walked and walked and walked, yabbing into her cell phone sometimes but mostly just a walkin‘. she was a silent figure until last week when she passed within a few feet of me and, yabbing into her cell phone, shared with me the story of her abusive ex-boyfriend who just got out of Rikers and who asked her for a place to stay and she said fuck you and then his mother called and she told his mother to fuck off and then she called someone who called someone else who called another person whocalled her back and next thing you know she‘s letting this dude stay at her place “but if he so much as breaks a fork i‘m calling his parole officer!“ and since hearing her say that i have been hung up on the standard of breaking a fork. how common is fork-breaking and in what world of ours is that a standard for misbehaviour?
…..
a discussion of the old trick question “who is buried in grant‘s tomb?“ (nobody, for it is an above-ground mausoleum) reminds me of a college friend who thought i was a dumbass for thinking that the song “Lola“ y the Kinks was a song about a young man‘s encounter with a transsexual. “it‘s a beautiful love song!“ he said, to which I replied that it may well be a tender love ballad but if it is then it happens to be a tender love ballad about a young man‘s fling with a transsexual. “no!“ “yes!“ “no fucking way!“ “yes fucking way!“ i quoted some lines from the song but he was not to be persuaded from thinking that Lola was a hot babe, purely feminine, oh yeah. i do not begrudge anyone for hearing lyrics to rock songs incorrectly,or for misinterpreting their message. for most of my youth i thought bands like the B-52s and Cheap Trick were bad, bad influences, their music a scourge and a blight on decent folk. today i hear the B-52s and their songs are such a joyful tonic, and Cheapㅆㄱ갸걏갸차’ㄴ ” ㅈㅁ무뭇 ㅛㅐㅕ ㅅ새 ㅉㅁ무뭇 ㄷ” ㅑㄴ ㅁ ㅅㄷ두둥ㄷㄱ ㅣㅐㅍㄷ ㄴ내ㅜㅎ ㅈ조졷ㄱㄷ ㅅ소쇄ㅕㅎ호홋 ㅅ소솓 ㅠㅁ무뭉 ㅈㅁㄴ ㅎ해ㅑㅜㅎ ㄹ래랙 ㄴㄷㅌ ㅁ무뭉 ㅇㄷ듀듐듀며몇며초촏ㄱ교.
Trick‘s “I Want You To Want Me“ is a tender love song where I assumed that rock & roll bands such as theirs sang only of sex addiction and debaucherous living.
What is with this Freedom Pro Keyboard lurching into Korean? That‘s never happened until now. Maybe some teen hack0r phreak is playing games with me, video taping my face from across the street and mining it for material as i react to her zapping my keyboard into Korean.
