130/60

Yesterday’s doctor visit was a bit sanguine, yet conflicted. My BP was shockingly low, at least on the bottom number. I’ve never seen it lower than 70, I don’t think. It was 130/60.

The conflict comes, as it seems often to do with this doctor, in the medical advice. Last time he said, as clearly as he could, that I should try to ween myself off Omeprazole, as it can harden the arteries and cause nondescript other problems. This time his advice was completely the opposite. He vaguely referred to the weakening of the esophageal sphincter (without naming it) and how skipping a day on the Omeprazole can cause that weakness to, er, increase. He didn’t say it like that (weakness doth not increase) but that was the meaning. He was also not as lecturous about the Lorazepam refill as he was last time. In fact he was almost congratulatory about my having not refilled it for a respectable length of time (7 or 8 months, I think). He is concerned, as should I be, about becoming addicted to that stuff. But I am not addicted to Lorazapam. I am addicted to alcohol, and the Lorazepam helps me dry out for a spell without having a heart attack and fucking dying. But I don’t feel addicted to that shit. I could be lying to myself, of course, but I’ve seen online accounts of people who got addicted to that stuff and I don’t see any such tendencies in myself.

To cap it off the doctor and I both forgot to give me a fucking flu shot. It’s a little late in the season for that but I’ve been noticing a lot of sickly folks at these libraries I’ve been attending. The office was as packed as I’ve ever seen it. Every seat taken, and about a 45 minute wait. One of the receptionists said the word “march” and I thought she had called my name. We laughed.

Blahblahblah

…

Morals of disdain.

Listened to Bob Dylan’s bootlegs last night. An early (almost said “elderly”) version of my favorite Dylan song (“Every Grain of Sand”) had some different lyrics, and generally sounded more strained than the final studio version. It was funny, even if it may have been scripted, to hear a dog barking in the background. I believe he made those recordings at a house near Woodstock, with members of what would later be known as “The Band.”

Interesting to hear that he did so much preliminary stuff before finalizing. I mean what artist doesn’t? But still, you take a song here or there and leave it at that, forgetting how much effluvia and hard work precedes it.

The grim discovery of Springsteen’s teenage demo tapes opens the opposite window into that type of output, revealing the genuine crap that great songwriters get out of their system before they get to the good stuff, before they find their voice.

Listening now to more current Dylan. “Stay With Me” is the song of an old man with nothing to speak of but the comfort of God. The melody (it feels like more of a chant) is not quite beautiful but hardly banal.

Though I grope and I blunder
And I’m weak and I’m wrong
Though the road buckles under where I
Walk, walk alone.
‘Til I find to my wonder every
Path leads to Thee,
All that I can do is pray:
“Stay with me.”

Did I say this was not quite beautiful? I changed my mind. Dylan’s religiosity sometimes has a pinch of sourness. Not in that song, which communicates a  solemnity — there is a word to precede “solemnity” here but I can’t find it. I almost said resignation, but this is too confident for that.

The song before this — “The Night We Called It A Day” — is what Dylan sang on the last broadcast of the Letterman show. I found it curiously appropriate, which surprised me. Dylan is not known for dressing for the occasion, and by my estimate when he tries to do so he fails miserably. I cannot f*ing believe he used his audience with the Pope to sing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. That song is not even about heaven! He might as well have sung “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”

The phrase “morals of disdain” appeared in my mind while listening to Dylan last night. I think he used the phrase “morals of decay” but it came across differently to me, or rather it morphed into something in keeping with my effluvious streams of consciousness of late.

Could there be a set of morals for the feeling of disdain? That sounds conflicted. Disdain is, I would argue, immoral or at least lacking in fundamental courtesy and respect for the disdained one.

Oh, look at that, it was lost on me at first that Dylan’s latest album is a set of covers, not original songs. Nothing wrong with that.

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World’s Tallest Trash Can

TIL (or rather YIL): 432 Park was modeled after a trash can. Look it up.

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Performance Art

Looking last night at groupware and collaborative suites. I may have had another eureka moment, not that I actually believe those moments exist. In fact it’s just another version of something I already did, albeit in a more public form. A certain groupware suite defaults to showing an email inbox. In the demo the inbox was filled with spam. I don’t know if that was intentional — the messages were all dated from a few years ago — but it had me thinking that I could set up a groupware app like this and make it readable by the public, but not writeable. I could send emails in to the inbox making it look like real dialogue was occurring when it would all be written by me. It has the makings of a performance art project. But it is not in keeping with the Flaneur.NYC æsthetic, not that I have fully articulated that, either. I am all about Flaneur.NYC for the moment.

But to flesh out the groupware thing: It would be a copy of sorts of what I did on my own, non-publicly, a few years ago. Just let my penchant for talking to myself blossom, with full-scale discussions and arguments between myself and fictional antagonists over matters of the day, matters of all times, matters of the matters.

I think I could do that. I mean I know I could do that. What attracts me to it is the groupware suite as a vessel, or rather a vessel of vessels. If I concede to the stricture of the vessel then my effluvia has a better chance of becoming something beautiful, or at least something more pleasingly coherent.

Jeez, some things just go without saying.

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Say It Anyway

No one seems to know I am here (21st Street library). That is nice. I am present but invisible. If I can allow my fantasy to nonexistence to at least fully form I can prosper.

Yet I think, therefore I am, as concerned Descartes.

A funny spin on that line came from the radio, years ago: “I think. Therefore: AM.” Referring to the AM radio band and its talk format.

The Wind

Stream of consciousness from earlier Dylan thoughts has me playing Warren Zevon’s The Wind, his last album. It contains a cover of the above referenced “Heaven’s Door” song, but for now I am on the “dirty life and times” opening track.

Zevon’s last television appearance was on Letterman. It was a strange episode, at first, and then you realized what was happening and why the audience had been instructed not to laugh or be joyful, as they usually demand of the studio herd.

Zevon, it was slowly revealed, did not have much time left. He was dying. The Wind was his swansong album, and perhaps its invocation of Dylan’s Heaven song makes more sense than Dylan himself, as a relatively young man, performing it for the Pope.

There may have been no stranger a mood on the Letterman show save for the Pete Best interview of decades earlier. Or maybe the first Cronkite interview. I remember that as being arch, uncomfortable, and downright bad. The second Cronkite interview was on YouTube last time I looked into this vital matter, but I never found the first one. Dave had referred to the first Cronkite interview as if it was not just his worst interview ever but a personal embarrassment. He was slackjawed at the presence of Walter Cronkite, and as best I can recall it really, really showed. In those earlier days he was wont to show his awe at big name guests. I remember him being what I though was inappropriately thunderstruck at the appearance of Alan Alda. Years later, in an appearance for which I guess I can give him some room for obsequiousness, he introduced Vice President Al Gore with a somewhat self-serving reference to “growing up in Indiana” and never imagining he would say these words: “Ladies and gentleman, the Vice President of the United States…” That was a fine moment. The interview was so-so. He totally kissed up to Gore, and AM radio voices were all up his ass for it. But, lest we forget, he was a COMEDIAN. I don’t think it was until later that Letterman took on the role of asking harder questions, but he never seemed to be in character trying to be Ted Koppel.

I got into an online pissing match with someone around the time of that interview, or maybe within a few years of it. I think her name was Nora. She claimed to have once been an employee of Walter Cronkite’s. I don’t doubt that but I do question her claims that the revered nightly news anchor regarded Letterman as some kind of lickspittle. Maybe he did at some point but that disdain did not seem to have lasted, as his later and numerous appearances on the show seemed to show a level of respect appropriate and even higher than one would expect for a COMEDIAN.

It was Mike Wallace who, among newsmen from the era when the opinions of newsmen were more potent, seemed to regard Letterman as a vacuous clown and he was not shy about saying so, even on Dave’s show. But Mike Wallace had opinions that seemed disengaged from reality. Maybe the matter is a little too near and dear to me but Wallace regarded his spot with Vladimir Horowitz on 60 Minutes as his best interview ever. Horowitz and his wife thought that was the worst interview he ever did. This was partly on account of Wallace asking Horowitz to play that fucking Stars and Stripes Forever, which is  a dazzling technical showpiece but not much on substance. Horowitz (rightly so, I think) would have preferred to play something that better revealed the depth of his art.

I find myself preemptively explaining to anyone who might ask why I am crying: “It’s the wind.” Like almost anybody my eyes water in response to a stiff, cold wind, as has been seasonal of late.

It’s the wind. It’s not you. You are not making me weep. It’s the wind.

Defilement

At present listening to Spotify’s popular tracks by A Tribe Called Quest. This is follow-up to an e-mail from last week, from a friend who referenced this band. We were talking about a piano piece by Max Reger, the palindromically named composer of earnest forgettableness. My point, in this email exchange, was to poke fun at her for her habit of highlighting text and writing notes in the margins of books as she reads them. I jokingly call this DEFILEMENT. I thought of her habit of doing this when I found a copy of Reger’s Op. 132, variations on a Mozart theme, at IMSLP.org. I had been mining Reger’s piano music, which is quite comfortably written for the instrument but baldly lacking in warmth or beauty. I spotted that he had used the opening theme from Mozart’s A Major Sonata and thought cool, let’s see what Reger brings to a beautiful melody such as he seems to have been incapable of squeezing out.

I may never know because the score at IMSLP is littered with “helpful” annotations which attempt to clarify where the melody is as it is sometimes confusingly passed between the left and right hands and further swallowed by effluvious polychordal embellishment. The writing looks good but I CAN’T FUCKING READ IT because some pinhead pianist from who knows when or where has basically obliterated the noteheads and made the already tightly-wrought and hard to read printed copy look like a kindergartner doodled and drooled all over it.

The e-mail exchange included a comment the humor of which I did not get until now. Indeed, switching from A Tribe Called Quest to Max Reger would make for quite the “interlude.”

OK, gotta get some food in this hungering vessel of water and bones.