i wrote a strange and maybe too-revealing thing today, to one of my many domain-name web sites that no one knows exists. i have several such sites, and one could find them out if one had the desire and the network know-how to trace dns changes i’ve made in recent months. i stuff them with bad poetry and rants, extracted at times from things i typed into a hundreds-pages-long document that just gets longer and longer. it’s a document called “The Road To Elvis” which starts with an account of the “Elvis In Concert” event i saw in February at Radio City Music Hall. there is nothing Elvisian in the ocument beyond that, i don’t think. oh there probably is. at any rate, the blather posted today concerned stream-of-consciousness connections among certain words and certain memories of my mother. i’ve had a long-running direct association between spaghetti and my mother’s first stroke. i called her one night with some news or other from my eventful and fascinating life, but she was in a state of misery, her unquenchable misery which none could requite. she had just eaten spaghetti for dinner, and the spaghetti landed in her stomach like a rock. in futility i tried to say something upbeat or encouraging but with my mother there was never any use in this, and my bare attempts at spreading happiness felt like naked, ignorant stupidity. spaghetti, you see, was always a happy food to me. children laugh and cackle whilst sucking long strings of spaghetti into their tightly puckered mouths, trying not to open their mouths in laughter as the joy of the moment rises to a climax. the noodle writhes and flails like a snake being strangled, streadily but irregularly disappearing down the child’s head, splattering a coily trail of spaghetti sauce on the child’s chin or cheek. yes, spaghetti is a happy food, one i associate with children and cookouts, but my mother ate spaghetti in retirement and the spaghetti she ate that night i called made her everything but happy, and i later felt that that spaghetti helped introduce the coming ye
ars of hospitals, unquenchable misery, and her embrace of helplessness.

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and with a wakeup call like that, well, how could my day have been anything but miserable? i felt like a turd all day, waking up at 8am and forcing myself back to sleep until 12:30. i got a haircut, trusting my least-favorite barber at the shop i always go to, and coming away reasonably certain that my hair is a decent cut. i had to finish the job myself, since he inexplicably left the right sideburn thingy untouched. i went to the thrift shop to look at old shorts and LP records. oh, and furniture. armoires and desks, all of which were rubbish at this particular shop. my head feels like cotton candy, my innards are weirdly asunder, and all i want at this moment is to not be alive. but that is my body talking, not my mind.

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i have been thinking about the word POST. it has assumed meanings in the past 15 years that are new. message board POSTS, the term derived from posting notices and advertisements on cork board bulletin boards in simpler days of yore. is a contribution ot a discusison dialogue really a POST, or is it something else? a POST is, to me, the beginning of a dialogue, or the intended beginning of a dialogue (i almost said “commencement”, another puzlzing term, since it is often used in reference to the end, the end of college is a commencement). but when did a story become a post, when did a news article become a post? oh, and i also remembered working with a woman who used post as a verb, referring to the mailing of USPS postal mail. she said “i’m going to post this”, referring to a stack of envelopes. my mind thence rambled into some of the weird definitions i’ve seen in the WordNet dictionary-type content given away by a linguist at Princeton. it’s free, it’s open source it’s public domain, it’s available in XML, it’s lorded up with buzzwords, so its unassailability has a tough row to hoe, but i think a legitimate analysis of the editorialized content of WordNet might be in order. some of that shit is just bad, but since it’s FOSS it gets gobbled up and regurgitated as gospel.

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