Trying out the noise canceling headphones for the first time in a public space. Not especially noisy here at the LIBARRY but it seems to be sealing out the din and drudge of what noises I see but now cannot hear.

Last night’s sleep was far from noiseless. One of my last anxiety pills down and I made it through, probably getting 7 hours sleep in over 10 hours time. Jolted awake several times and felt weirdness in my innards. Might yesterday’s feelings of butt have been indigestion? Borges would mention “good digestion” as a key to happiness, and it seemed funny or quaint to me. But I see its wisdom now. The funniness and quaintness with which I greeted his comments came from my ignorance of how unhealthy a lot of people in the world are.

Reminding me, yet again, of that dude at the other library, yelling into the phone about his health problems and how much he has to worry about. That other library sits between two of the biggest housing projects in the U.S. Queensbridge is the biggest, I don’t know where Ravenswood stands in the “rankings” but it must be pretty high.

When I switched insurances a few years ago my PCP was randomly chosen from a medical office that sits between Queensbridge and Ravenswood. Wait times for routine appointments at that office were something like 3 months, with no apparent room to suggest that there was an emergency. I switched to another PCP about a half mile up the road, where same day appointments are the norm and office wait time is usually 10-15 minutes tops. Of course this doctor also gives me shit about getting refills on benzos prescriptions. If he does that this time I might switch to another PCP or find a shrink that can prescribe meds. The therapist I saw for 6 months was not licensed to do that, but she had no problem with my intake of those pills.

Wearing, for the first time in public, a set of Sony noise canceling headphones. So far all I have heard from the outer world is one man coughing loudly. Evidently there are settings for muffling even noises like that, but I’ll try them out later. Mostly these headphones seem great, but a real test will be to measure the profundity of silence at the cemetery.

Speaking of cemeteries page 61 of today’s random page from a random book is from Faulkner’s The Town. We are introduced to Mrs (sic) Rouncewell, a woman who runs a flower shop not out of a love for flowers or the money but because she loved funerals. She had done every funeral in the town’s history since cashing out an insurance settlement to fund the store.

Not going to do more pages from Faulkner this moment. Feeling congested and flu-like in here. Going to leave and find another spot.

…

No go on the cemetery today. Chance of rain and I feel insane with anxiety. Listening to Dolly Parton at the 21st Street library. A friend of mine made a sarcastic comment about this library. He says he likes this library because there is no competition for the books. He said it was a cynical grin.

The silence is good. Not as profound as I imagined. Maybe that is what drives me to anxiety. Definitely enough to silence enough of the world around me to be dangerous. I saw a couple of snowballs land on the sidewalk in front of me. It had been thrown by some kids across the street, not at me but at another kid walking the opposite direction. It took a moment of clarity to be sure it was not directed at me, the snowball mini-blizzard.

Ooh, now it’s “Islands in the Stream,” maybe my favorite Dolly Parton song. Hah, who knew I had favorites of hers. She was a master songwriter for all the other singers before going out on her own. Parton wrote circles around everyone else in the 1950s and 60s but as a songwriter she tended to get no credit. That has been a bane of songwriters since forever. Cheryl Crow was the same, writing songs for everybody but no one knew who she was.

Was just thinking of that Cheryl Crow song “If it makes you happy.” It looks and feels like a tender love ballad of resigned seduction. But I hear a woman basically saying “I am a total pain in the ass, drama queen, going to make you hate life… are you man enough for that?

Um, I am not. Sorry.

Another song that always puzzled me for being so widely embraced was Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks.” It’s about a teenage couple where the guy knocks up a girl who gives birth to a ten pound baby boy. The chorus of the song glorifies this irresponsible, life-altering behaviour with “Young hearts be free tonight. Time is on your side.” How is that even a conscionable declaration? He’s saying “Go out, kids. Fuck like dogs. Make babies. You got plenty of time to, I don’t know, adopt?”

A song my mother particularly detested (and I can understand why) was Willie Nelson’s “Always on my mind,” which I must have screeded about here so I will not talk about it now. I’ve since learned that the song is not an original Willie Nelson tune. That kind of changes things, though not by much. Mother died thinking that was a Willie Nelson song. I am sure it haunted her to the grave. Haha, not.

Speaking of which, I need to visit that spot.

Oh man I slept badly. This is not going anywhere good. Can’t believe I am ready to depend on the doctor to renew a benzos refill, and even an Omeprazole reload, which he has expressed doubts about in the past. Out of habit I’ve been taking Omeprazole every day. But this can allegedly harden the arteries. I believe that but from everything I read it seems that artery-hardening from PPIs is rare and I’ve shown no signs of that happening. So today I tried going without the Omeprazole for the first time in a long time. So far so good but in the past it has always crept up on me, the feeling of flame rising up inside. It’s the same as the anxiety, which slowly develops and I do not take it seriously until I am freaking the fuck out.

Wow, there was a few seconds of silence between Dolly Parton songs and I looked around, saw people moving and mouths talking, but I heard absolutely nothing. Nice.

Prattle prattle prattle…

…

From Think Like a Freak, by the “Freakonomics” guys:

It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don’t know. That’s a shame, for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

Yes, much of the opening chapters of Think Like a Freak ring true for me, or at least ring consistent with my outlooks on things. They make the case that people don’t get married to become happy, nor do they become happy on account of being married. People who already are happy are more likely to get married. Who, after all, would want to marry a grouch?

…and other bits of passing, related wisdom that I appreciate for its non-philosophical verbiage overload.

This book takes on the phenomenon of fake news, but was written before that phrase became the stuff of presidential rebukes to CNN. To me fake news comprises not just content purporting to be factual news reporting but the oceans of phony content generated by data crunchers and artificial intelligence dabblers looking to see how much they can fool the automated searchies or human editors of such bogus content receptacles as the Wikipedia.

My story about the esoteric union of funerary laborers will focus not on the majority of my rambling dream which inspired it but shift straight to my discovery of this unknown group of workers shuttling tombstones from a warehouse under the Long Island Expressway… or maybe from a secret room under the Calvary Chapel. There is said to be a vault under the floor in front of the pulpit in which a 19th century archbishop is interred. I don’t know how true that is but I have not read up on it for a very long time. There seemed to be some skepticism, or lack of evidence to prove that the vault under there had ever been used as an interment vault.

But the funerary labor union is dedicated solely to manufacturing tombstones for people who never existed. Names are plucked at random from 1970s-era Manhattan residential white pages and thrown together like dice on a casino table using algorithmically generated spreadsheets. Like 20-sided D&D die where each side is an LED screen on which the names constantly change until the die come to rest. These names are associated with random dates of birth and death, some stones leaving the date of death unrecorded to maintain an authoritative air of incompletion that haunts the tombstone space. Any given cemetery will contain a percentage of tombstones with inaccurate information, misspellings, and complete omissions of family members who are buried there. The occasional errors placed by the funerary workers union included obvious misspellings, missing dates of death and combinations of religious and secular symbols that made no sense.

Cemeteries are increasingly filled with the work of this union, which maintains its secrecy in ways almost unimaginable in 2017.

I think I have that whole story ready to go, just not sure where to take it from establishing that they do this and any real world consequences their actions inspire. Will someone wandering about Calvary see a marker for one “Thaddeus Silverstein” and question how a Jewish named person ended up in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery? Well, I do not know that Jewish-looking names are unknown in Catholic yards. But that seems like the sort of thing the Funerary Union would consider when choosing their fake names.

So would someone see a marker for “Thaddeus Daly” from County Cork Ireland and think “I am Thaddeus Daly, with ancestors from County Cork, and I know my genealogy better than most people know theirs. How have I never heard of this Thaddeus Daly?” Is that how the Funerary Union unravels? Or is that how its work enters into the bloodstream of knowledge about family histories and ancestries? The latter, I think. It would be more tempting for researchers, no matter their general intelligence and seeming of things, would be tempted into the beliefs inspired by phony tomb stones.

Maybe this Thaddeus gets on to that Internet thing and finds a line of products being hawked for one Thaddeus Daly, an 18th century explorer who discovered the island of Jools before emigrating to New York.

Keep in mind, these are not cheapo DIY styrofoam tombstones, such as appear (tastelessly, I think) around Halloween. These are handsomely crafted and aged to look like authentic markers exposed to the elements for generations. A corner of a marker might be chipped, or there might be graffiti. These markers are made to look old and authentic, and it is this quality of their work which the Funerary Laborors Union takes most of its pride.

Inventing fake lives, however, is the real mission.

Time to let this percolate ever more. I mean with enough stones you could form countless family genealogies, and from there infiltrate other mediums with fake books written by these people who never existed, reviewed on web sites by anonymous reviewers who never read the book because it was never actually written. Build the mythos of these largely unremarkable fake lives with innocuous information and forgettable books ghost-written by the fake people. The books have to be poor or forgettable (according to critics) for any of this to matter. They also had to be self-published.

But we might look for obscurities in real printed matter, such as indices to magazines or newspapers, indices which contain errors. Take those real-world errors and incorporate them into this haze of fake people living fake lives.

Talk of them is the stuff of presumed loonies. Cemetery denizens who claim they saw teams of men hauling tombstones from the chapel up to Section 1, where the marker was solidly erected on an unmarked plot next to, say, Nita Naldi. I hate bringing so-called “notable” burials into this but they evoke a certain type of identifiable authenticity.

But the credibility of the people who report seeing these incidents is lost when no marker is found where they said it would be. Somehow the workers fooled the spectators with optical illusions, or else their techniques allowed them to plant stones relatively weakly but with the appearance of strength. So they could easily slide them from one plot to another. It’s like there is a conveyor belt under the soil, or a small train track on which the stones slide by remote control. But that would tear up the grass and be obvious. Unless the conveyor belt itself is covered with sod, turf, or some kind of self-replacing dirt. This allows the Union to move the tombstones from spot to spot with a limited amount of ease.

What of drones? Too obvious…

Or maybe the stones don’t sink, like most tombstones eventually do, becoming dirt. Maybe these stones rise up, and they are planted by the workers in such a way that a good rainshower or blizzard will force them from the ground, when no body would be looking for it. This way, anyone who reports seeing workers handling tombstones in the dark of night will direct skeptics to the spot where the stone was buried, revealing nothing. Then the stone appears from the ground weeks or months later, at the whim of the workers. The markers would have been underground long enough to have gained some additional appearances of age and wear.

No, the stones are buried alright, but they are covered in bags containing flower seeds. A drone, in the dark of night, flies in and is able to lift the stone from the ground. Hmm, have to find if drones are capable of lifting 500 pounds of granite, or however much these tombstones will weigh. The drone technique of raising the stones will necessitate that the markers are relatively lightweight. Perhaps they will be zincers, the poor man’s mausoleum, which could probably survive a few weeks underground just fine.

No no wait, the tombs will all be rather small, or in-ground. Nothing too ambitious, as the groundskeepers would be sure to notice anything too handsome. Maybe they even violate the interiors of the above ground mausoleums, or simply commandeer tombstones with no etchings on them with etchings of fresh names of people that never existed. Most groundskeepers would probably not notice that in a yard the size of Calvary. That might be the simplest way to get this done but it erases the need for the Funerary Laborers Union. It also has the somewhat uninspiring way of moving the story from satire/metaphor to something closer to a comparatively dismally real possibility.

OK, mental taphophiliac masturbation over. For now.

Getting back to what the Freakonomics guys say about marriage, and how happy people get married more readily than grouches… It reminds me of a comment someone made once. She said she had a theory that “everyone marries their mother.” She was referring to men, women, gay, straight, whatever. I don’t think I buy that theory, but it reminded me of one of my pet theories on life: People tend to become that which they complain about the most. Going to let that linger in my mind while I do some wandering.