So the walk to and from Section 43 of 2nd Calvary is about 5 and a half miles. Didn’t seem so far but it’s a routine trip I’ve made so many times… I found some other Calvary videos on YouTube. I thought I had looked for such things fairly recently and found nothing but these videos are dated from years ago. One shows groundskeepers lounging around on someone’s burial site, talking smack not about the person buried there, just general bullshit. I could see being offended if that was my relative’s site but those guys don’t have anywhere else to sit and take a well-deserved break — to give them as much benefit of the doubt as possible.
Another utterly imbecilic video shows someone had created a tombstone jacket, something which makes no sense even as comedy. A lot of work appears to have gone into this production, too.
Discovered that the scheduling feature of WordPress decided to stop working. Little things like that have the capacity to put me over the brink. It even makes me want to cry.
Tomorrow I’ll resume the public space tour. Goal is to take the writings from those places and use them as first drafts for use one the real site, which does get indexed by the searchies.
The walk to and from Fresh Pond is still resonating. Genuinely had no intention to make such an epic trek but such perfect weather made it pointless to stop. Looked at a map and see that my instincts were right and that I was headed into a pretty sketchy part of Brooklyn before I turned back toward Queens. I can handle bad areas but entering into them with $2000 worth of camera and electronics gear is not necessary.
The video looks and sounds craggy, as I expected. Don’t really care if it’s production worthy, just like being the first to report on something, even when that something is a year old already. It appears that one of the first inurnments was that of an infant, whose dates were 2014-2014. Exact dates are not given on the niches, only years. So no way to tell who was first. Why does that even matter, anyway? Most summaries of Old Calvary give a shoutout to Ms. Ennis Something, who was reputed by Calvary management in 1848 to have died of a broken heart. Is that kind of mythologizing of one who was most likely unremarkable in every way really necessary? If there is some genuine prestige associated with being a cemetery’s first victim then so be it but in the case of Calvary it’s just a matter of Manhattan overflow and who happened to be first when the order to cease new burial plots on that island was issued.
Ah hell, was hoping for 3 straight days on public space patrol but the pope is in town. There is something to avoid. Or maybe not. It’s cool he’s going to be here but I just don’t care much for megaevents and being one speck of humanity among countless thousands. Probably the biggest single event I went to was Pavarotti at Central Park, which was cool in its way. Somehow the estimated half million people who turned out did not make me feel claustrophobic or like I was drowning. But events like Paul McCartney at Giants Stadium, Bob Dylan at Woodstock (BethelArts Center), even a Yankees game at the old Yankee Stadium made me feel utterly insignificant, like a fraction of one in an infinite herd.
I might try for the Trump Tower, though, on Thursday. If Trump gets any further than I guess that place could be command central for the campaign. It was funny last week when I saw him at the Trump Bar. My first thought was “What the hell’s he doing here?” A question quickly answered by “Oh, right. He lives here.” I tend to think of the Trump name as a brand more than a person, as I think he would like it. So the fact that he actually in the Trump Tower is secondary in my mind to the name of the building as a manifestation of the brand, not the person.
If I spend money on anything this month it will be a couple of beers at the Trump Bar. Might have to check the wardrobe requirements… It actually looks like a nice, albeit very small place.
Going home to take a dump.
