it was a little eerie today. rummaging and sorting, discarding and filing, i was on my way to eliimination of numerous mountains of mystery documents, piles of papers the content of which i lost track long ago. much of it estate related, that everlasting sequence of accounts and dividends which keep dad’s financial flame eternal. call it a match, maybe, and not a candle, aaahahahaha…

the eerie thing was this: among those rummagous piles of now-mostly-useless detritus from 2005 and 2006 rose a handwritten page of notes from me, dated August 5, 2005. these were notes i took the last time i talked to my father. he called me and, with little explanation or introduction, recited a list of things regarding his estate which he wanted to make sure i knew about. details. among these details were the combination and instruction for opening his safe. there was name and number of who to call should i ever need to sell the property at which he lived. there was the 5-digit code to open the door of his car, followed by rejoinder of other digits which were pressed for to open the trunk and opened the other doors of the vehicle.

the notes were detailed. i felt a sourness during the conversation. though i had no idea there wasa gun in his safe, or that he would use that ugn on himself at 12 noon on September 3, there was a clear feeling of heavy doom over the conversation.

that night i joked with friends that my dad’s planning about his estate and death seemed to indicate that he was positively enthusiastic about dying. it was like he was looking forward to it, and looking forward to the manifestation and execution of his elaborate series of plans.

that night never ended. i fucked a pig of a woman i met at a bar, and whilst leaving her magnificent shithole of an abode i swilled some bad wine that we left out overnight on the kitchen counter. the sun appeared. it was august, the temperature already at 90 degrees as that unblinking orange eyeball rose over Northern Boulevard. i made my way to Calvary Cemetery, racing around the grounds at the earliest hours i had ever been there. the sun daggers crashing across the yard from the east was new to me, as was the heat. i ran. i ran. i rolled through Section 8, then into Section 1-West, then Section 6, down to Section 1-South and on to Section 4, my favorite part of Calvary in those days for it comprised the Soldiers Monument and the Alsop Family Cemetery among its half a million burials. The little Alsop yard is where the now-massive Calvary Cemetery began after that family sold its farm to the Diocese of St. Patrick. the Alsop yard remains intact over 300 years later, per the terms of the initial sale by the Alsops to the Diocese. the Alsop yard is the only known Protestant cemetery contained within a Catholic Cemetery.

I ended up in the Alsop cemetery. the old Colonial-era tombstones are of a style typical to the old Boston yards, and to a handful of surviving Manhattan cemeteries from the 1600s. the stones are characterized by skulls and eyeballs and winged skeletons and funerary art typical of colonial American bone orchards.

i landed there, at the Alsop yard, on the ground,, catching my breath, my breath jammed with bad wine and the taste of a woman’s cunt under my tongue. i fell asleep there. my head lay on the ground by the tombstone of an infant, an Alsop infant. somehow a copy of William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” made its way from my back pocket to the infant’s tombstone. i had probably been asleep mo more than a few minutes when i woke up, but it seemed like i had been gone for hours. i did not know where i was, and the taller-than-me tombstones scared me. the cover of Styron’s suicidal memoir flapped in the dull wind, winking at me. traffic on Kosciuszko Bridge roared in the distance. i found WFUV on my Treo and listened to… something, i can’t remember what, but i think it was a sitar, the music rising up from the infant’s grave, atop which lay that Treo, streaming audio in that then-new-fangled smartphone kinda way.

i got home eventually, around 11am, i think.

it was a fucked up night. i remembered it this day, after finding those notes i took during the last conversation with my father.