outages

sumo=owns in my new invertible alphabet. yeah.

i got a lot of stuff done today. yay me. this new RAID contraption seems to have increased the startup time for my computer to nearly an hour. guess i won’t be frivolously rebooting any more. hah. because nothing sooths my compunctions more than wanton reboots. and today yahoo mail has been out of service, so that was an added bonus. then i read about amazon’s cloud evaporation and thought i’d check in my data that is backed up there, since there appeared to have been a lot of permanently deleted things. everything seemed to be present, but for whatever reason i had to enter my password over a dozen times before it let me in. some days i think the internet itself shall burst.

i am at a pub, listening to leonard cohen and idle chit-chat. other dramas are raging but the details are beyond my ken. business-related dramas, letter grades, inspections, yaddayadda. not my problem, but it for some reason feels like it is my problem. oh and screaming babies, wide open windows and doors with all the bus and truck exhaust fumes which accompany that most odd NYC fetish: outdoor dining. or rather, sidewalk dining. i will never understand the fascination with sitting on a sidewalk, sometimes practically in the street, sipping cognac whilst inhaling bus fumes and sitting in the asshole of toxins.

i am still thinking about the weird walk to west maspeth earlier this week. i have made that walk at times but for some reason this one puzzles me. it was hot. my throat was closing. there is nothing there, really, even for a price, as far as liquid matter to hurl down your dying face. the area under the Kosciuszko Bridge is rugged and enormous. the streets are wide, the vehicular traffic is desultory, and human beings walking along those paths seem like toothpicks among giants. the sound of that bridge is thunderously rickety. i recorded the sound with a microphone and field recorder designed for nature recordings, and the sound is tremendous. i am glad i do not live under the Kosciuszko Bridge, for i would get no sleep.

there is a hill in West Maspeth that reminds me of the children’s movie “Across the Great Divide,” which i saw long long ago. in that film the gambler guy swears that the destination is just over the mountain, but he really has no idea what is over the mountain. his only way of coaxing his youngster companion to go with him is to insist to him that the destination is just over the hill. the child agrees, believing what the gambler dude told him, and (choir of angels) when they reach the top of the mountain they find that the destination really is there. i think the destination was a city or a town, or some place with food and beverage to fortify the tired bodies that had been bushwacking and hiking for far too long.

that hill in west maspeth reminds me of that scene from that film because, the first time i ever encountered it, i had no real idea where i was going, how high and long the hills was,and what awaited me at the other side. i made it all the way to Maspeth that day, a walk which is really not that far (by my standards, hah) but which seemed eternal for how i had no idea how much farther i had to go to reach something approximating civilization.

i got to know Rust Street and envied the passengers on the q39 bus that roared past with alarming frequency (Queens buses are mostly ghostly) but i envied them not enough to wait for a q39 bus myself. i once rode that line from queens plaza to ridgewood, all the while thinking i could just as easily walk this route, having walked almost every part of it many times over.

i also recently discovered Van Dam Street on weekdays. a long line of people waiting to visit prisoners at the jail caught my eye, reminding me o fthe bus to Rikers Island which I once almost boarded by mistake. i never got on to the q101 Rikers Special, but evidently if you try to board it and the bus driver thinks you do not look Rikers-bound, then s/he tells you outright, “You’re on the wrong bus.”

i have never been in a prison. my life, like all lives, is a prison, but there are no bars and shared shitters or arbitrary solitary confinements for me. the bars are different kinds of prisons in my life, and the solitude is of a different stripe, but the shared shitter is one thing by which i can not abide, not since the Parc Lincoln days.

a documentary film maker followed me around for a while, mining for content, and he described a film he had mostly finished. long story short, the documentary sent him to The Barge, that ghastly boat docked off the south Bronx, The Barge is a floating jail. he, too, had never been in a prison before, and the entry screenings were elaborate. the subject of his documentary was incarcerated at The Barge, and weeks later that person hanged himself with a noose made of his underpants. that ruined the documentary, which was framing this person as a good kid who would escape the wretched life into which he was inaugurated.