Most of this entry comes from me speaking into my cell phone and letting speech recognition software attempt to transcribe what I said. That stuff does remarkably well, assuming you enunciate clearly, do not speak too fast, and experience limited background noise. I edited out most of the transcription errors but left a few in (with corrections after the fact) just for gits and shiggles.
Everything seems uncommonly loud today. I am walking to Calvary. I did not shower yet, have not shaved for a few days, but that is just incidental to things.
I was happily surprised to wake up and remember how much I had cleared out of the closet and straightened things out in there. The door still does not close because the bottom shelf overflows with useless electrical cables, but I will figure that out later.
It looks like I’m sinking back into the sleeping past noon thing, having never really fallen too far out of that routine in the first place.
On Honeywell Street Bridge now, there is a brightly painted red door that I’ve never noticed before. It has no door knob, so I guess it is an escape hatch.
Not only is everything uncommonly loud to me today but my bag is uncommonly awkward, bouncing around abnormally, disrupting the serenity of my gait.
I found all kinds of good stuff in the closet last night, not least of which was the rubber stamp kit I thought had vanished. I had not seen it in something like a year, and could not even remember what it looked like or what type of container it was in. Now I get to resume the pesky, exacting task of plucking letters from the thing, I can’t think of a better word for it, except for thing. I want to make a nice decorative rubber stamp that dead bodies the elegance and dignity for which I have become known. Haha.
I intend to make corrections to this dictation but I am going to leave dead bodies where they lay in the previous paragraph. What I actually said was embodies. As I happen to be heading to a cemetery I think the dead bodies should be allowed to lie in peace.
Hey wow there is a nice new sidewalk at 35th street and 48th Avenue. I had to look at street signs to remember what intersection this is. I’ve been walking this route for years and I still don’t know what street I’m on most of the time. I saw workers building the new sidewalk a few days ago or whenever the last time I was over here just last week. Nice shiny sidewalk I shall christen and it with my illustrious steps.
I did not forgo a shower for any hipsterish æsthetic of indulging in slovenly decorum as some kind of oafish fashion statement. I intended to take a shower but when I pushed open the shower curtain I saw a fat, immobile cockroach sleeping there, without a worry in the world. I don’t like doing this because I think it is cruel but I sprayed the cockroach with RAID and, out of respect for the writhing agony that the creature experienced as the chemicals ravaged its nervous system and drove it down an unexpectedly insane path toward inevitable death I let it die in relative peace.
I could shower later, I thought. Plus, even without a shower, I don’t look too much like a wino if I just comb my hair.
I am on the cemetery grounds, Section 9, where I happen to be passing a favorite marker of mine: the Cornelius Fitzpatrick marker is a favorite because it was built by the Draddy brothers, whose work I researched some years ago. They were such an interesting clan, the Draddys.
Somewhere else here Section 9 is a mausoleum housing the remains of a businessman whose office was burned down in the same fire that destroyed Tesla’s laboratory in Manhattan. This person’s office was either upstairs or downstairs from Tesla’s lab. Unlike Tesla, however, this person had insurance, though the paperwork lost was irreplaceable.
To my left is a mausoleum which hosts the remains of a beer brewer who was once quite famous but whose name and legacy have been almost completely extinguished from public legacy.
Also nearby are a couple of mausolea of people who ran cigar businesses based out of Tampa, Ybor City to be exact. Tampa (for those of you just tuning in) is where I grew up. I tend to think of it as that (“where I grew up”) as opposed to my home town.
I am heading to the chapel to remember what praying is, and to be alone with thoughts of rotted faith. I make this trip uncertain that the doors will be open on this Columbus Day holiday.
To my right as I reach the 4-way intersection of Sections 9, 49, 53 and 52, is the Wonton Food Company. If you have ever had a fortune cookie such as is commonly given at Chinese restaurants then that cookie almost certainly came from that factory. Wonton has a virtual monopoly on the fortune cookie market.
I am walking through section 7 now. This is one of the older sections where very tall and imposing monuments tower over us living mortals. The further east you go in Section 7 the more marble monuments you see. Many of the marble monuments were built by the F word mentioned ready brothers. Hah, going to leave that bit of voice recognition gone wrong just for comedic value. What I really said was the marble monuments were built by the aforementioned Draddy Brothers, who were the funerary artists of choice for wealthy posterity-seekers around the turn up the century. No one had the foresight back then to realize how vulnerable marble was to the elements. Most of these people’s grasps at eternal posterity are essentially erased from the cemetery because the elements wiped away their names.
So, too, the Draddy brothers whose names likely appeared at the base of dozens of these monuments but which have been smeared away by winds and rain.
There are a few visitors out here today. Typically I have this entire place to myself, minus the groundskeepers. I thought more visitors than usual might be around today on account of the holiday.
I am approaching the chapel now. At the intersection of section 46 section 7 and the statue of Mary standing in the middle of this intersection. Off in the distance the cashews go bridge rumbles with traffic as the new bridge rises behind it. Haha, going to let the cashews rumble. What I really said was “Kosciuszko Bridge rumbles”.
So much for getting back to God. I am disappointed but not surprised that the chapel is locked today. It reminds me of when I first moved to New York and wanted to go to church only to find that the cathedrals were either overwhelming in some way (too crowded, too enormous) or they were locked. The doors never seemed to be open.
Any time I enter a church now I feel like dirt. Not “dirt” in the sense of a horrible human being or a bad catholic but that dust from which we are born and to which which we return.
Hundreds of other churches exist in this town but the Calvary Chapel has become special to me, and I hope to make it mine. I wrote earlier that I think the place is a dump, and I stand by that assessment. Its lack of glamour, however, does nothing to turn me away. It draws me in, inviting me to empathize with and identify with its blemishes as they embrace me. At this chapel I could expect the silence and quiet that does not exist at St. Patrick’s or other marquee cathedrals in town.
I have entered Calvary Chapel a number of times, but am not aware if it has a regular schedule and/or if such schedule of openings and closures is adhered to by cemetery staff.
Like other things in life I could just call the office and ask, but I like to dodder along on the serendipity of things.
A sign outside the chapel says there is a mass every Saturday at 10 a.m. and that the chapel closes at 2 p.m. I don’t know if “closes at 2 p.m.” means that it closes at that time every day or only on Saturdays.
It was well after 2pm the last time I entered the chapel.
Okay, then, heading back. I guess the exercise of getting here and back (about a 5 mile walk) was worth the trek, regardless of the chapel’s inaccessibility.
I saw some people just now picking up berries off the road. I guess they are berries or some kind of things that grow on the trees and fall to the pavement. They were putting them in a plastic container with (I think) the intent of laying them on someone’s grave so that flowers will grow there.
Here are two more people walking the other direction from me, looking like they are here just to look around.
Walking now past the Gilmore memorial, which headlines Section 8. Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was among the most famous musicians in the world during his lifetime. He conducted orchestras and choruses of over a thousand participants. The site of today’s Madison Square Garden was originally called Gilmore’s garden.
Exiting the cemetery, going to take the somewhat longer but I think safer route back via Van Dam Street. It should be pretty quiet today.
Oh look it’s an abandoned car. A Nissan Sentra with New Jersey plates. The driver side window is gone and it just looks like nobody has paid attention to it for a very long time. Maybe I will report it to 311 and get some municipal satisfaction for doing so, even though experience has shown that reporting derelict and abandoned vehicles opens a world of sketchy low-level criminals and unresponsiveness from the city agencies that haul off abandoned cars.
All this car’s windows are gone. I’m not going near it. It looks like a booby trap of sorts, where if the cops see me poking around in it they’ll arrest me, then leave the car there so others will do the same and they can get arrested too.
Alright I am on Van Dam Street across from a paintball place and across from the Goodwill Outlet store. I am approaching the prison, which is across the street from LaGuardia Community College, where I have seen a handful of concerts. I got my idNYC card there a few weeks ago, and have thus far gotten free museum memberships at a couple of places.
The day I got that ID card I had a burger at the Van Dam diner across the street. I thought of that place last night when I was cleaning out the closet. I found an old foldable keyboard that I used to use a lot. One time I used it at the Van Dam Diner, typing away into my cell phone. The waiter or owner or whatever saw me using it, visibly becoming unbelievably curious about it. He asked the brand name and how it works and whether I liked it or not. He wrote all that information down, including (for some reason) my first name. He looked like he had found something that would change his life or at least take his business productivity to the next level. Keyboards like that are relatively common now. But I’ll always remember that intensely ambitious and opportunistic look on his face, as if he had just made an amazing discovery.
I am on the bridge that connects Skillman Avenue to Jackson Avenue, traversing Sunnyside yards. Every time I cross here I remember several years ago when I made the acquaintance of a woman who was in a big, fat, fucking hurry to get married and she was courting me like it was your full time job.
At the time I was posting pictures on my website and she would comment almost daily on each and every one of them just to keep her name in my mental circulation.
One time in particular she wrote several paragraphs about a picture I took from this bridge looking toward the Citi building but not including the Citi building. I think it was just train tracks at sunset. The picture was from months previous, before I even knew her, and I remember thinking she must have combed through dozens of pictures trying to find something to comment on. That she did with this particular image, which was honestly among the most banal of any from that time.
After it became clear I was not interested she opened up to me, being honest for the first time now that marriage was off the table. She was in a hurry to get married because her father had put a deadline on a $25,000 stipend that she was supposed to use for a wedding. We lost track of each other but I saw her name pass by on a message board a few years later. She mentioned that she was getting married soon and that the event would be 5-figure extravaganza. I guess her father extended the deadline or did something paternally gracious like that.
This is bullshit, I said that the Van Dam was a safer way to go, and I said so partly because there is a subway entrance at the northeast corner of Queens Boulevard and Jackson through which you can pass underground and avoid the clusterfuck pedestrian quagmire that is Queens Plaza above ground. But Hudson Meridian construction somehow has the authority to close this subway station entrance until at least March, 2018, which probably means it will be closed until 2020 and beyond. You can pass underground by crossing Queens Boulevard but that can be a scary proposition during the week, when traffic is severe and drivers are uniformly angry for being alive at that place and time.
Hudson Meridian posted apologizing for the inconvenience, but says that “IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY” to call some number. In the context of a subway station entry being closed I can’t think of what emergency would arise that might force them to momentarily strip away the scaffolding, opening the subway station to the public.
