Trying to write a story for publication. Don’t want to put too much time or effort into it, as the reward would only be $25. Obviously it is not about the money. I just want to try this again. It’s funny how, once I start writing for publication, my attentions tic back to the word count almost obsessively. I remember that feeling. It’s unhealthy.
The theme of the story is supposed to be about how someone was “too busy to die.” They say you should write what you know, and after drowning in a few hopeless ideas I think I could use the theme to re-create what I imagine was my father’s decision making process leading to his final decision. If anyone considered themselves too busy to die it probably would have been him. Then again that’s pretty personal subject matter for so little compensation. This contest gives entrants an opening line they must use. That little bit of lost control already makes me feel like a horse being driven.
I find myself falling into the same rut I often landed in when I wrote more. I try to say things without saying them. A first attempt at this story had me thinking that the person was drowning, but I was not going to use the word drowning. Wouldn’t it be easier, in telling a story, to simply say what the hell is happening? Somehow that is just not how my mind works.
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I saw somebody on the street yesterday. He ignored me. I know he saw me. He is a nice guy from the Sunswick era, so his feigning blindness kind of surprised me. It made me sad just a little bit, but more and more I can understand how the people you knew 10 or 12 years ago are best kept as that: the people you knew 10 or 12 years ago.
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I saw the absolute nastiest dead cat ever today. Everything was hanging out, sparkling in the sun. Freakin’ disgusting, and on an Astoria side street that seemed pretty devoid of people, explaining how this cat had probably been sitting there for days as the maggots and whatever else feasted. I reported it to 311, though the report will probably languish in obscurity. There was no category for dead animals on the 311 app so I filed it under rodents. I could have called it in on the phone but that takes so long and it had already taken more than 10 minutes to install the app and navigate around it. That was a couple of hours ago. I have half a mind to go back and see if it is still there.
I saw a memorable dead cat near St. Michael’s Cemetery some years ago, and another eerily similar cat on a deserted Woodside sidewalk. And there was a bloody white deceased cat near Astoria Park. I’ve also called in a dead chicken.
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This little project of exploring the meaning behind Astoria apartment building names has come to the somewhat uninspiring conclusion that a majority of the names refer to the old named streets, before almost everything was changed over to numbers. GRAHAM COURT on 34th Ave. was named for Graham Ave., which is what 34th Ave was named before. Buchanon Court on 29th Street is the same story. That piece of 29th Street used to be Buchanon Place. And today I made it up to 29th and Ditmars, where a SINGER APARTMENT building exists. That part of 29th was formerly known as Singer Street.
So that makes the unexplained building names all the more intriguing. I cannot find anything credible as to why a building would be called PALC. It doesn’t seem to be an acronym for anything that makes sense, though the letter A in there was a promising clue that maybe it stood for Astoria, and that PALC was something like the Prussian Astoria Liberation Committee, or the Polish Astoria Letterman’s Club.
Palc is the name of a place in Albania. That seems obscure but there is a known Albanian population in Astoria. I think the social club a couple of blocks from where I live is Albanian.
And there is a Sorbian word “palc” which means “big toe.” I don’t think anyone would knowingly choose to imbue prestige upon a building by naming it “TOE”. “Yo, man, I just moved in to ‘The Toe’. It’s jammin’!”
There appeared to be a handful of people on Ancestry with last names of Palc but those are OCR errors and their names were actually Pale.
So I managed to figure out who owns the building and I am going to write him a letter to see if he know. The building was erected in 1922, and I assume the present owner and any family forebears are not the original owners. If he ignores me I might even hang around outside the building and ask people coming and going if they have any idea what their building name means. It’s not like I am a journalist or anything but I could imagine selling this story to one of the hyperlocal newspapers for $5.
There is a lot of hokey architeture in Astoria. That is not a new observation by any means but I’ve been down some streets I don’t think I ever walked on before and seeing all these sorry excuses for building design.
An amusing building name was one “Emmanuel Towers”, I think on 37th Street. The building is 2 stories high. No offense to anyone who lives there but a 2-story structure does not a “Towers” make!
I also noticed how no one seems to have named their house. Only apartment buildings. Seems like privately owned houses would be as deserving if not moreso than apartments for distinctive names….
I went to church yesterday. It was the priest whose words I can actually understand. I gave up on that church because I could not understand a fucking thing the priests were saying. It’s my fault for being so bad with accents, but it’s also a problem of the church’s acoustics. I had some trouble understanding this priest, who is quite articulate.
The purple-colored paint from the ceiling littered the pew on which I sat. The building looks like it will come crumbling down at any moment.
The priest had a good quote which fits in with this “too busy to die” story. From Luke, Jesus excoriates a disciple who wants to bury his father before going to … was it Jerusalem? Doesn’t matter where they were going. Jesus’ reply was “let the dead bury their dead.” That was his way of saying “We’ve got shit to do, man, seize this moment or it will pass you by.”
The dead can’t bury the dead. I guess Jesus was just frustrated with the disciples whose attentions drifted away from their mission, and on that account he resorted to impossible hyperbole. But I’m going to try and fit it in to that story about being too busy to die, since it fits the sentiment. “Let the dead bury me. I’ve got shit to do. Places to go. People to see. I still have hearts to break! Let your heart be one of them if mine has been murdered!” Hah, that’s not any kind of a fit for my father’s decision making process but maybe that doesn’t matter.
