i‘ve wanted to make a wander of mt lebanon cemetery for a long time. so i was kinda bummed to get there and find that it looks like a parking lot. i mean, no disrespect to richard tucker (great opera singer) and the shapiro mobster brothers buried there but the lay of the land is just kinda blahblahblah. it is similar to mt. zion in its way. the old section is elbow-to-elbow crowded, barely a sliver of land on which to walk, though mt. zion maximizes its use of land even more vigorously, i think. but the land at zion is so beautiful. nothing at lebanon even came close, in my brief run-through. and the biggest difference? the most notable thing about lebenon? the silence! zion, calvary, st. mike‘s, these yards have a swirl of noise about them, the hum of traffic from the bqe and/or the lie is a constant white noise companion at those cemeteries, but at lebanon there was nothing. no residual urban noise, no horns honking, no mr. fucking softee truck jingle trickling among the tombstones. what noises there are jangle like a weird thunder. even the sound of my camera clicking felt conspicuous, made me feel conspicuous, though no living humans appeared to be anywhere nearby, and the dead appeared undisturbed by the ruckus of noise from my camera. maybe they are simply slow to rise, and maybe they are convening at this moment, a couple of hours since my noisy presence, and maybe they are having a town council meeting to address the noise issue. the noise, or rather the silence, and the trickles of sound which filled that silence more monomaniacally than all the carhorns and traffic of the LIE and BQE combined, came to a head as i wandered up one of the paved roads. the paved roads are reliable paths to avoid the annoying dead ends (no pun intended) of the routes that seem to offer passage through the thickets of tombs but which do not, really, do that. you find yourself at the end of a sidewalk with no clear path out, save for turning around and going the way you came in. i ended up at these endtrails so many time
s today it became comical. ha! ha! hahahahaha! but my point about the vacuum of sound and the seemingly tiny noises which rise up to subsume it was that i was walking on one of the paved roads when i heard the sound of a soup can being kicked and tumbling across the pavement. it was clearly a soup can. some things in this life you just recognize, whether you have ever heard a soup can rattle across pavement, you just know when you hear it, and i knew when i heard it today, a man walking about 50 feet behind me wearing a nifty hat and sleeveless shirt and carrying what appeared to be a bag on each shoulder, was walking on the same path as i, and kicking a can, demonstrably, filling his journey with this tumbling ruckus, and each time he kicked the can it came closer to me, i could hear him nearing me as his kicked can preceded him, or maybe he himself strayed farther from me, strayed from the center of gravity around which all things whirl, this orb of mark thomas, and as he strayed from this galilean moon he thrust a soup can into his orbit, lurching into mine, and the noise disrupted my senses. it was loud. he looked like a rebel. a hobo. a guttersnipe. a hoodlum. i liked him. i wanted to be him. i am more selective now about who i want to be. as a 20-nothing i wanted to be like everyone i saw. now i let the passing influences of the moment guide me on the path of directionlessness. today i wanted to be the sombrero-wearing dude kicking a soup can, loudly, over the avenues of mt. lebanon. i soon discovered that all the groundskeepers at lebanon wear those hats. the dude was not a biker rebel tattooed anal-pierced renegade terrorist of silence. he was a groundskeeper. which is neither here nor there, as the tumult in my mind came not from his role in life but from the conspiracy of that tumbling soup can edging closer and closer to me, to me, to me.