Lesson learned from first foray into cloud document storage… No such thing as straight text. It’s all gotta be stylized and prettified if one wants to pass it through to Yahoo Mail, as I’ve been doing. Only way to strip out all the bullshit styles was to stuff it into Apline e-mail. There you go, in case you care.
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Possibility: Buffalo? I don’t know. In Detroit the only person I seem to know is a college friend who is no longer my friend. In Buffalo I don’t know of anyone I know directly but I know someone who has plenty of contacts there with whom he could set me up. He has offered to do this in the past when I made similar plaintive suggestions of skedaddling this burg.
Staying within New York State would have its advantages. Buffalo is probably still pretty cheap, certainly compared to NYC. Did not look it up yet, but $500 for 3 bedrooms is probably a ship that has already sailed in that town, unlike Detroit. On the other hand Syracuse had ludicrously cheap houses when I explored that town’s real estate on a friend’s behalf. As for Buffalo I could deal with the snow. I’ve always understood it to be not anywhere near the bigass deal it is made to seem like in the news reports. Their sanitation people know how to deal with it.
Remembering Giuliani being defensive about claims that Alaska’s airports are plowed of snow seemingly within minutes, and that snow-related delays are rare (unlike here, where he was Mayor). His point, valid I think, was that the type of snow they get in Alaska is typically like a powdery substance that you could practically sweep away with a broom. This differs significantly from the unpredictably sloshy slushy shit we get here, and that plows have to make multiple passovers to fully clear away.
OK, quick search, absent any analysis, shows that 4 bedroom houses in Buffalo can be had for about $1000. I of course do not want 4 bedrooms, only one or 2, so that’s a positive prospect already. Not even the vaguest concept of neighborhoods or such but that sounds about what I would have expected from reading about a supposed Buffalo migration of hipsters a couple of years ago. Would I maybe want all 4 rooms to myself, though? I do not know. It’s fun to mentally masturbate over things like this now and again. My crutch would be to keep a storage room here, maybe just the same one I already have, as a comforting lure to bring me back should I have genuine doubts about it all. I did exactly this when I exiled to Atlanta. M., the girl I was at the time, laughed at my renting of the storage room, deriding it as “such a fucking crutch.” She was more of a free spirit than me, with virtually no earthly possessions. When she moved she just up and moved. But her comment was not made with disdain or the like. Just knowing humor.
It turned out my stashing of the piano and other things into storage here was about the smartest thing I might have done on that massively ill-advised caper. But even I would not have expected it to be such a godsend as far as making the move back to New York as simple as it was.
Man, I could not get out of Atlanta fast enough. Don’t even like thinking about that interlude.
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Walked over again to the St. Joseph Mausoleum, which was more active with live humans this time compared to last, which I think was a Sunday. I liked it more this time around, just going niche to niche and reading the poems and such. One woman’s home address was shown. She had lived almost across the street from the cemetery, I think it was 30-something 49th Street. I found a few people at Calvary who lived within walking distance of the place. Convenient!
Funny how there appears to be no security in the mausoleum. They must have surveillance cameras, though I did not look for them. But for how aggressively the security goons patrol the outdoor ground (for “loss prevention”, remember) you would think they had more interest in securing and preventing loss from the more accessible and, indeed, opulent plunders of these artistic cremation urns.
I thought of this when I saw what appeared to be two people opening one of the niches. I thought, maybe I just had not noticed, but there might be locks on each niche, allowing family and such to mess with the decorations as needed. Family members typically have access to the innards of above ground mausoleums, for placement of decorations on the mantlepiece, or altar, or whatever the design of the structure calls for.
These folks had no such access, it seemed. They were futzing with one of the flower vase thingies that I think look like dildoes.
There is one especially foreboding corner of the mausoleum occupied by… I believe it was the Rosario family. It is behind lock and key, and looks like a church. Never seen something quite like that in a mausoleum, though I am not so worldly on their vagaries.
One of the odder encounters I had at Calvary was the time I went out with a couple of composer/musicians and an NPR Producer. I spent most of the time with the producer, it having not been impressed upon me that the composer/musician duo was kind of a big deal, or at least they seemed to think they were. I’ve mentioned the name of one of those 2 musicians to others who are always incredulous, asking “You didn’t know who that was?” I had looked him up before the meeting but didn’t hear any music of his that did squat for me.
The NPR producer and I stepped near the COMO mausoleum and heard a rustling noise. Someone was in there. I had never encountered that, nor had the producer. We inched away, as quietly as we could, imagining a scene within of emotional outpouring and deathly sadness. Who knows what was going on there. Not we.
It seemed a strange, that first encounter with a mausoleum visitor, but it should be no real surprise that these sometimes extravagant structures are visited and tended to by the people who paid for them and their perpetual upkeep. It just seemed surprising because Calvary is generally so quiet and not the scene of much funereal activity. Save for the perpetual din of traffic noise swirling about from the surrounding highways, as well as the occasional Mr. Softee truck and its detestable music box jingle, the scene at Old Calvary is just about as quiet as the forgotten memory of those buried there. O, lost!
Why is that particular species of aural disgustingness (Mr. Softee) so commonly heard in that fairly obscure area, anyway?
They are going to DEMOLISH the old Kosciuszko, its shadow which hulks and echoes like a sad, constipated ferret over the mighty Calvary. Hell yeah, I want to see that, or at least part of what is so far expected to be a multi-day destructive event. I have never seen a demolition in person but always wanted to. No schedule of these things is typically published, I guess because the nuisance of gawkers could cause safety issues, especially in congested Manhattan. They announced the time of the destruction of the old Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, with festival seating for the event available from a safe distance. But I did not hear about it before it happened. I’m not even sure I was still living there when it happened.
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Getting back to Destination: Buffalo. I think my attitude about such a jaunt is different now than it might have been in years past. I am fed up with the angry landlord, but not ready to make a move to another New York City place. I want to store some stuff in the crutch of storage and just have a little adventure, save some money, and come back when the crutch starts to weaken. Getting a place back here couldn’t be that hard, could it? Hah, famous last words. Part of the reason I washed up in Astoria after Atlanta was because finding anything in my old nabe of Upper East Side was said to be nigh impossible. Or maybe I just chose to believe that out of laziness and the stress of moving back, new job, etc.
Going to look up Amtrak routes to Buffalo. What a perfect time of the year to visit.
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Listening to Bob Dylan at this Bakeway where, once again, someone came in here and felt it perfectly appropriate to absolutely scream their conversation with the cashier as loudly as it seems they could possibly wail. These noise canceling headphones I wear drown out a lot but not those folks… Although I was hearing some of his barking earlier when hearing the relatively thin sounds of an Enescu piano sonata. There must be some acoustical phenomenon about this place that subconsciously forces people to scream without knowing they are doing it.
Well, I should go home. If that’s what I can safely call the roof that has hovered over my head for 18 or 19 years. Don’t remember exactly how long, don’t really care.
Might go for a bridge walk later if the lack of booze starts to drive me crazy again, like it kinda did last night. My destination last night was the RFK/Triborough but it seemed too cold.
My midnight ritual at bedtime (sans booze) is to play AlphaBetty on the old tablet until I cannot stand it any more, whilst listening to the BBC Radio 4 Extra until they switch to something tedious. It’s a nice ritual.
