Therapist today got something out of me that none other has: Tears. I was letting them flow like hot lava. Felt like snakes coming through my eye sockets. Some pain even I hadn’t contemplated was down there. As I left she asked if I wanted more Kleenex. I pointed at my stash of Starbucks napkins and dais “Nah, that’s why I steal these. I never know when a crying fit might hit.” She laughed. We went waaaay over time today. All’s I can say as I sit at this millennial bar and think about it all is that a certain woman from my distant past was a cunt, and her legacy of bitterness and arbitrarily dispensed  emotional acid lives on decades since she left us.

A therapist I saw 2 decades ago put me ill at ease for a number of reasons. Not least of those reasons was her complaint that I didn’t cry enough during our sessions. I did not cry at all, and if I had any inclination to do so then her demand in the form of a complaint put that urge to rest. It was like being with a woman who pointed at my cock and said “Get hard!” (In substance that is exactly what happened to me once.)…

I made the somewhat amusing discovery (or discernment, rather) that someone out there thinks I am an asshole. Someone influential within a not-so-limited sphere. It is refreshing in its way. Years ago someone who would know informed me that I had serious enemies within Verizon, this on account of (what else?) the payphone web site. He wasn’t allowed to tell me specifically why certain individuals at Verizon loathed me (on account of confidentiality) but he reassured me with words the wisdom of which I have come to appreciate: It is not the friends you make in life who make you what you are. It is your enemies who define you. Bring ’em on! hah.

…

HuffPo coming to my living room on Saturday. I think I am ready for it with my narrative. I am ready to go public with certain stories I’ve never put on the record. I’ve stayed away from one story in particular because other people were involved and they have reputations to maintain. I will keep any mention of them out of this. It hasn’t mattered for over 20 years but I think that a cadre of kids I knew in school still keep it on the cupboard of their lives that it will come back to haunt them some day. Leaving those kids out of this actually makes the loneliness of the story more singular. I am maintaining the thickness of thieves.

…

Two stories about Hart Island crossed the radar this week. One was the NYTimes’ exhaustively researched survey of people who you would not expect to end up at Potters Field. The other was the story of Rosalee Grable, probably the first person ever to request burial on Hart Island. My connection to Rosalee is this:

Back in September or October I was approached by a documentary film crew that had an assignment. They were to report on and document an artist whose work and/or life connected with the theme of poverty in New York City. They contacted me with a specifically refreshing angle. they wanted to work with me on things I do that focused on anything but payphones. They knew my forensic genealogist work and my piano music and my photography… I appreciated that they dug deeper than the coin return slot of a payphone to see who was behind all this shit that I have done.

Still, I didn’t think I had anything for them. I liked the people a lot. They were smart, creative thinking but focused, and a mix of cantankerous ambition tempered by nice.

I wrote to the lead director on the project last week, asking how the project was going, what direction they chose, etc. Turns out they followed Rosalee around for a few months until she got sick and died last week.

I cannot wait to see the film these guys put together.

Reading about Rosalee and Hart Island today I came across some of the familiar activist rhetoric. In January Melinda Hunt (founder of the Hart Island Project) dispensed an unusual anecdote into the Hart Island debate. She claimed that in the wake of Superstorm Sandy Hart Island’s burial ground was trimmed at its edges such that bodies were disinterred and that bones washed up on City Island and at Orchard Beach. I have found nothing to corroborate this claim, which if you think about it does not even make any sense. Bones float, I guess, but even if bones were discovered on City Island and Orchard Beach then what authority analyzed them and pronounced them to have originated from Hart Island? And how did this tabloid-ready discovery fail to catch the attention of any news source?

If she is proven to be lying about this it would underline my instincts that her well-intentioned work has gotten nowhere on merits and so she has had to resort to lying.

That would be unfortunate.

I hope that she was simply misquoted.

Another pique of mine as regards Hart Island is the disdain heaped upon the fact that it is run by the Department of Corrections, and that the island is treated as a prison. Burials are handled by prisoners. This is true. On account of this the place essentially is an extension of New York’s prison operations.

Americans regard prisoners as animals. Reform and re-entry into society are not how prison works, and no one is going to go to bat for prisoners. Prisoners are among society’s last lepers. No politician anywhere is going to gain traction or constituencies by defending the rights or integrity of prisoners.

In the case of Hart Island, though, there is evidence that the program works. Quotes from prisoners who dug the graves and deposited the pine caskets into the mass graves described how their souls were cleansed by the experience, how it forced them to contemplate the reality of their limited time on earth.

I can hear society’s chorus: Fuck the prisoners. And you know what? Fuck the dead, too. Turn Hart Island into a park so we can play baseball and fly kites on those graves.

…

Aw crap, it is trivia night at the millennial bar. And no one is here to play, but I am leaving anyway.