I was in a text message conversation with somebody just now. On account of that I walked around the block a few times instead of entering the library. That’s because I speak my text messages. I have to speak clearly and somewhat loudly to do that with a minimum of voice recognition errors. While many people at this and other libraries seem to think talking in full voice is acceptable I do not.

So that’s how I spotted a new Radisson hotel going up at 37th Ave. and 12th St. What an asshole location for a hotel. I mean 21st Street is bad enough but at least it’s a main thoroughfare. Unlike others I don’t have a problem with the hotels popping up around here. They’ve been sprouting for a number of years now, but not exactly in plague-like quantities. The Verve Hotel has been converted into a homeless shelter, but I think that is the only instance of that in this immediate vicinity.

I wonder if it is the mark of the Flaneur to feel like you do not want to be anywhere. I do not want to be anywhere right now. Not here, not at home, not on a bus. I want to shit until my innards are vacated.

I did some work toward making the new web site completely invisible to the commercial searchies. I am surprised that the discussion of what constitutes a search engine never seems to include archive.org, which gobbles up web content for eternal archiving. I blocked Archive’s user agents along with the usual suspects, using a few lines of .htaccess code. But making myself completely unknown and non-existent to the searchies can’t be as simple as just that. Sorabji.MOBI is not indexed, or at least it wasn’t the last time I checked. But it is a known entity. If you search for the domain name it shows up as having a robot.txt exclusion, making a preview of the content not done. I don’t even want that to be possible. I probably have a better chance of doing this right from the gate, since it is a new domain name…

Random book pulled from a shelf at the library: Ted Bell’s “WARRIORS”, an Alex Hawke novel. Hawke I guess is a James Bond type of dude. Chapter 35 references a drone attack on a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. There’s a ghastly idea. That place was probably the busiest, most bustling cemetery I’ve visited. So much history. I was there not for a full day, with no delusions that I had enough time to even begin to absorb its totality. I got pictures and it seemed like half the names on the stones had New York Times obituaries written about their careers in the military or public service.

I was sorry to learn later that one of my grade school teachers, Ruth Allyn, was buried there. I wasn’t sorry or surprised that she had passed. She would have been quite elderly by now. I was just sorry that I didn’t know she was there when I visited, as seeing her stone would have made for an unexpected personal connection to that cemetery.

Amongst all the tourists and gawkers there were continuous burial services taking place. It felt a bit constipated and conflicted at first, this meeting of touristic gawkery with solemn ritual. For me the real buzz was simply seeing so much activity. Most times I see people at Calvary they act like they don’t want to be seen, or like they don’t feel like they should be there. But that’s on the rare occasion I see anyone at all.

Maybe I will go there right now. It is cold out, but always warm in the chapel.