Hallelujah

We mustn’t think of these things. For that precise reason we must think of them.

I did not make it to my destination. I often fail in this way but today’s failure felt especially colorized. I wanted to go to the Mausoleum, and sit. Just sit, and listen to the music. The music seems mostly to be the stuff of Gregorian chant and church hymns. If I am to be immortalized in one of these niches I would request certain pieces of music be added to the rotation. Godowsky’s Elegy (is that the title?), I think it is in B Minor. I played that once and my first thought was that it made for classy and distinctive funeral music. Now I can’t remember what the Goddamn piece is called.

I imagined the mausoleum with all the windows and doors opened, the sounds of car horns and traffic from the Grand Central Parkway joyfully polluting the manufactured serenity as the indifferent breezes passed through. These breezes that ushered birds from far away places to these cemetery grounds would blow through the niches of the dead, and then  move on. They might envelope further-away individuals with this perfunctory cloak of earthly comfort, or they might move on to the ocean shores and destroy thousands of houses. One never knows what the winds will do.

…

I could never be a reporter, or even a journalist. There is too much that I would have to understand. You have to get into the life and mind of your subjects and your sources. I could never do this because life makes no sense to me. There is too much chaos masked by manufactured serenity and happiness. Lives make no more sense to me than the randomness of the winds.

I check the New York Times and see the same reporters covering vastly different subjects from one day to the next. How do they do it? How do they understand so much? Maybe they don’t. Maybe it is all a charade of facts masquerading as hogwash, and vice-versa.

…

I slept until 2pm again, which is stupid. I drank again. I felt entirely uncomfortable being at home alone, so I went out for conversation with a favorite bartender. Fortunately there was time for that. There often is not.

A couple of annoyed and annoying millennials sat near me. After some bothered and bothersome chatter about the cost of the beers an older woman appeared. Probably in her late 40s her arrival seemed to make the young men nervous, while she seemed comfortable with herself. It seemed to be a Craigslist sort of assembly where it was agreed upon that there would be drinks and then sex. Maybe this is why the men complained about the cost of the beers (“A dollar per ounce!”), because it cut in to their hooker budget.

Whatever the situation their time at the bar ended on an awkward yet consistently irritated note. Bartender handed one of them the check. The man asked “Where’s the pen?” Bartender replied “That’s not actually the bill. I need your credit card first.” The man was somewhat apologetic, but only to himself. He produced a credit card. A minute later the bartender returns with the prematurely requested writing implement and assorted other props required for this oft-performed play.

The bartender was present enough to ask what I thought of the New York Philharmonic concert I went to last week. That was an encouraging sign that this dude would probably be OK with being friends beyond the bar, a social situation I could be down with assuming he has a circle of other interesting friends.

I described the concert as a half and halfer. The first piece was extraordinary, a revelation even, from a new-to-me Russian composer Lera Auerbach. My date and I were fully engaged in that Violin Concerto from the first note to the last. But we were mutually skeptical at first. This was on account of a godawful poem Ms. Auerbach wrote to accompany the music, as well as tedious and needless introductory comments from the composer. All those misgivings were erased the moment the music started.

The second half featured one work, Mahler’s 4th Symphony. It was not a horrible performance. It just was not very good. I think it is a piece so often played by these musicians that they did not see fit to pay much attention to each other.

Going out for as much sunlight as is left of this day.

…

Prepositions. Pictures of prepositions. You say you are walking to a place, walking under a bridge, going to or from a specific location. What does it matter where you are going, or from whence you come?

The above is a paraphrased set of questions from Joe Frank’s “Black Hole”, one of his shows I had the most trouble getting through — not because it is tedious, as sometimes happens (especially with the fucking phone calls) but because it is just disturbing to hear.

An amusing moment has a poobah of “Electricism” (speech-to-text wants me to say “a poop out of Elektra scism”) claiming that love is a manufactured term invented by the French in the 13th century. Once in awhile Joe Frank gets you going thinking that a pearl of wisdom is coming, only to make you realize that it’s all lunacy. It is frequently social commentary in the form of setting up expectations and failing to meet them. That’s what makes his real gems so golden. If not Platinum.

An enormous rat crossed my path as I spoke that last paragraph.

“Black Hole” is a troubling and unnerving episode. I listened to this years ago and it haunted me. The conversations between the man and the woman, in which it seems that the man had done something to warrant black helicopters hovering over their house but he cannot stop lying about it, was so icily delivered by the actors that it sounded real to me the first time I heard it.

A brief aside regarding suicide and the many ludicrous ways people might choose to perform that act starts off sounding authoritatively sour but moves ahead into lunacy. One method was hurling yourself onto a buzzing chainsaw, another was nailing yourself to a hotel room door (huh?).

But that little monologue ends with what was, to me, a poignant observation about the undramatic way we all ultimately commit suicide. It is by inches. Inches toward the niches. (I added that last flourish.)

I think it was Jimmy Breslin (among others, of course) who said it was an article of faith among the Catholics that birth commences the process of dying. By extension you could argue that choosing to stay alive is itself a form of suicide, since the inevitable could be intercepted. He wrote that in an article about how we mourn the fallen from 9/11, and he started his survey at St. Michael’s Cemetery.

Then follows (back to “Black Hole”) a description of some kind of acid bath into which people hurl themselves to die. It is a popular destination because death is essentially painless, since the acid is strong enough to destroy your body on contact.

But it is not just the comical discussion of suicide that makes “Black Hole” hard to get through for me. It is the alternating story lines of that and paranoia, and how firm yet non-muscular is Joe Frank’s grip on the latter.

…

It is the next day. I am walking to St. Michael’s to sit at the mausoleum. I am going to make it there today.

…

Here now, thinking about getting around to making my final plans. Not that I’m in any hurry. But you never know and neither I nor my adoring fans want me to end up on Potter’s Field. It is something that we mustn’t think about, and for that precise reason we must think about it.

For years I assumed I would end up at Calvary, but their columbarium and future columbaria appear to be of the outdoor variety, most likely meaning that decorative niches would not be allowed. Looking at the niches again I think that this little platform of stuffing a little cabinet with everything I can fit into it would be best for me. I can work with it.

I would definitely want The Wild Thing in my niche. In my kitchen cabinet I have a little day-of-the-week calendar desktop device. It was my dad’s. He changed the date every day but did not do so for the few days before he killed himself. I would want that item in my niche, with my date of passing on it. And something handwritten by me. Something alive, like an ant farm or some sort of organic item would be cool, but that is probably not realistic. Nothing religious, unless I happen to find Jesus in the next 20 years. I would also want a small stack of receipts, although I would have to think about which ones in particular. Maybe the earliest one I can find from The Parc Lincoln. Also include my “sorabji.com” coffee mug filled with pens and pencils.

I just had a funny thought, maybe I should include a printout of all my passwords.

Now that I re-read that sentence I ask myself, what made me think that was funny?

I would want some smiley face tchotchkes the type of which are found in charm machines at supermarkets or laundromats.

And there is a wood box that I have. That would be the centerpiece of my niche. I made it with my own hands when I was in the 3rd or 4th grade. It is filled with things that I have never shown to anybody. Actually that’s not necessarily true. What I mean is that nobody has seen the inside of the box and its contents since I put the items in there. That box would be in the niche, for no one to see its contents.

…

I don’t think I have sat still for that long in ages. My feet were twitching. But I sat and listened to the music and recorded a few tracks. I will attempt to post the audio later. It sounded like one after another track of music containing the word Hallelujah.

I do not know how appropriate “Hallelujah” is given the location. Hallelujah, you are dead.