It’s strange to skip a day of Pantoprazole, the acid-reflux inhibitor that i’ve taken for about a year. Before that it was omeprazole for 5 years. I feel some acid burning down there but it’s strange how something actually feels good, feels better and more natural than when i take the pills. Those pills prevent natural things that should come up from down there, calcium in particular my doctor told me, and I get a sense of that any time I skip a day of the stuff.
Thinking of the word ACID, too, as it applied to the silence that I felt at the North Burial Ground last week. Acid sting of silence, the sound of death, of lives forgotten and memorials ignored. I think I felt that once at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Queens, but that ight have simply been a reflection of how much quieter it is at that yard versus Calvary. Calvary’s constant din of noise swirling about from the Kosciuszko and surrounding highways brings in a soup of vehicular noises, the Mister Softee truck’s music box abomination, the sounds of voices barking over loudspeaker at a mysterious, enormous facility where cranes swing tremendous metal slabs and where giant trucks whizz and zoom about.
This was a different strain of silence, though, at the North Burial Ground. This was the silence of forgetting, the silence of the forgotten.
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I rummaged and ransacked today, removing almost everything from under my bed and either discarding it or sorting it for storage. If I stay at this apartment (and even if I don’t) I plan to get a king size monstrosity of a bed, to better accomodate my sprawl sleeping acrobatics, and i’d get a bed frame with storage space underneath. I decided today that my space is not so much cluttered as badly organized and haphazardly shelved. I don’t have *that* many books, and considering the piano music scores are not to be had in any other format besides printed matter. I imagine there are 2-tablet music readers or other portable screens that could function as solo piano music scores but I’m not interested in exploring, since printed books have never been a bane of my pianistic pursuits.
I’ve been Browsing Katchor’s latest. All of it is so good, and so true to the artist’s voice, consistenly maintained and honed across the decades. The latest volume is back to his original shorter forms, with mostly single-page stories of ludicrous surrealism tinged with commentary on reality. Some of them made me weepy, not for any sadness but for their perfection.
Christ, I wish I could draw. Among other objects uplifted from underneath the rubble of a desk that looked like a tornado had blown through it was the fabled Wacom tablet I bought last year, intending to learn to draw once and for all. I’ve gone almost nowhere with that desire but I want to get down to it once and for all. All it takes is time. I can do anything and improve my abilities in virtually any discipline I choose, I just need time.
I also found a pile of papers on which I wrote daily ramblings for 2 years. I remember the ritual: wake up, stay naked, sit at the kitchen table and write, write about whatever the night’s rest brought about. The paper was cheap and the pen gushingly inky. The pages today look like they were soaked in mist, and the words look like they were written by a stranger.a stranger to me.
It is intriguing to find words I’ve written of which I have no memory. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Accumulation must end at some point. I think I’ve been saying that for 10 years now. Preaching the gospel of decumulation since the Clinton administration, but not bothering to live up to my espoused ideals.
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