i might be drinking decaf coffee right now. what, as letterman would have said, would be the point of that? i am not certain it’s decaf or not, nor did the cashier know.  i’m in sort of a ghetto bodega. not the most conducive to concentration or intellectual greatness but then what is? oh, right… the rose main reading room.  rambling through the domanico scarlatti sonatas and just experiencing endless amazement at the craft and confidence that this composer had. there are well over 500 sonatas from his pen, and i am traveling through them in what i think is generally believed to be chronoligcal order. not sure about that, either. what do the sequence of scarlatti’s sonatas and the coffee i am drinking have in common? i am not sure about either of them.  I wrote and posted a story about a set of abandoned Verizon payphones on Water Street. i forget myself just how long it takes to write and assemble a simple story like that. it probably ate 7 or 8 hours writing the story, putting the photo gallery together, editing the pictures, etc. if it gets easier and quicker  with repeated doing i think that’s just because i cut corners and simply don’t write as much as i could. while writing another story about the obnoxisities of Nuance Software’s Dragon voice recognition i wanted to add that the most fun i’ve had with Dragon is in using it to transcribe recordings of radio broadcasts and sseeing what crazy shit the software thinks the announcers are saying. but i can’t really say that without sharing a particularly choice sample of such a transcription and i did not feel like digging one up. i also use Dragon to transcribe the Donut NYC call in line. man if you’ve never heard that craggy sound world you could consider yourself lucky, but i find it bottomlessly interesting. it’s hard to describe. a bunch of homies call in to a free telephone conference call where there are several rooms you can choose from. whenever i’ve called everyone sounds black. someone might start rapping or singing something, setting a rhythm of sorts over which others speak and rant. i can’t think of a single time i called in without hearing mysoginitic spew coming from some dude, and  that spew gets really vile. the women cide the men, calling them “little baby” and “little boy” as they seem to gleefully accept the verbal abuse.   what fascinates me about the place is not so much the content of the conversations but the way it seems to be orchestrated as a kind of musique concrete. the dude rapping providdes the baseline, the mysoginistic spew is the lead, while the supporting cast of sirens sing their songs of complacency. then someone uninvolved with it all comes along and starts laughing at it all.  still not sure if this is decaf. ===== oh boy i thought i sent the previous blather yesterday. taking my afternoon break from getting pathologically frustrated with this thing of internets. thinking of a typical day for me now. i wake up and look through any recent sets of tombonte pictures from Calvary. i’ve been finishing for souls, typing as of yet over 500 name and dates of birth/death inot a spreadsheet which automatically builds links to ancestry.com, the search engines, nyt.com, and other sources. i’ve uncovered a few interesting tales, headlines, and otherwise mercurially forgotten detritus. it’s amazing but not surprising how many sites out there try to leverage the dead for advertising revenue. i guess we all do things like in some way or other, not so much with leveraging the dead but deriving a livelihood from unseemly sources. i mean what livelihood is both profitable and bulletproof ethically? everyone’s income stream, if put under a magnifying glass, would probably reveal criminal or illicit connections. just ask all those people whose jobs relied on Bernie Madoff, who had no idea of his criminality or even that his largesse was at the root of their employment.  i need to find something new. called the accountant yesterday to ask about the wisest way to withdraw against a retirement account. can’t take out too much or i’ll enter another tax bracket and lose a lot of it.