A base human instinct just rose up to assure me that this was a safe place. A safe spot. Not by the street, where a car could swerve and strike me. Under an awning, safe from the snow and falling ice. Why is spellcheck saying that “could” is spelled wrong? Do I not know my fundamental words?

At the ghetto coffee shop on the day of a pretty big snowstorm. Not the epic blast of the April Fool’s Day storm of yore, after which I wandered into a field of shit at the big cemetery. Also not as big as the freaky storm last February.

I just bumped into a friend who read my Facebook post from last night. He said he laughed out loud at it. He suggested maybe there had been a sewage problem out there, but I don’t think he really believes that to be plausible. Plumbing in a cemetery? There are actually a couple of bathrooms there but I don’t think there was ever any need to provide those facilities to the acres of the dead. Just making up alternate possibilities to my belief that it the origin of the feces was a gathering of geese. I was thinking of them last night, their instincts forcing them to assemble, maybe in that same area near the Civil War Memorial in Section 4. It is a notably open stretch of land, though there are other such swaths out there, some even wider.

Last night I got to explaining some of what I know about Calvary to a friend. I think it was opened in 1848 or 1849 but several markers actually pre-date the year of its official opening. That’s because a bunch of burials were relocated from Manhattan yards after new cemeteries on the island were outlawed. I think the earliest marker I’ve seen was from 1819 but I might be wrong. This excludes the little Alsop Family Cemetery, said to be the only Protestant cemetery contained within a Catholic yard. Those markers are of the 1700s Colonial style familiar to any Bostonian, and which is also found in some of the old Manhattan cemeteries.

I fell asleep in the Alsop Cemetery once, probably only for a couple of minutes, but it was a startling place to wake up. I listened to some kind of Eastern drone music on my Treo… was it the 300 or the 650? Probably the latter but whatever it was I remember it because listening to the radio on a phone was a new thing to be able to do at the time. I texted Patrick, who for a short time was a bartender at Sunswick. He was an OK guy who took the job as a moonlighting thing to supplement whatever money he was making at American Express. He worked at the Hippodrome, and for some reason seemed proud to be able to say so. Why do I remember so much about this guy? He lived on 28th Street, in the same building as at least two people I’ve known. I helped him move out of that building, though I don’t know where he moved to. Somewhere else in AsLIC. My text message to him that day was something in the spirit of “I am dancing with the dead.” I really was dancing out there. It was a strange jaunt. If I am pouring on the memories of Patrick it might be because I have gone over the story of waking up in the Alsop Cemetery many times over but possibly never mentioned his connection. His response was polite, as I recall, and even semi-enthusiastic for the randomness that prompted it.

…

OK, then, it is the next day. It is tomorrow. It is not yesterday. It is no longer Tuesday, but in its place we have, as a species, been presented with Wednesday. It is a fine, fine Wednesday, if I am allowed to pass judgment on something so arbitrary and diurnal.

At the LIBARRY. I was up earlier today than yesterday, which had me feeling like death warmed over. I slept through most of the big bad storm, which was not so big and not so bad.

A woman at the table with the computers is looking for and printing out pictures of Shannon Doherty, who I remember only as an irascible brat from Beverly Hills, 90210. Why would anybody even be looking for images of that person, much less printing them out?

Oh, cool, now she is looking for (and printing) pictures of Phoebe Cates. I’m on board with that.

Now she is typing a letter to someone named Bradley.

This is such an entertaining place.

…

I am listening to sounds of wind chimes. Through these noise canceling headphones the voices of people nearby come through like the clucking of pigeons, but that is only when they come through at all. Most of what surrounds me is a chatterbox of silence. I just cranked up the wind chimes, which were recorded using binaural gear. Sweet sound. The neighbors used to have wind chimes that I could hear when I took a shower. I wonder why they got rid of them… So many lingering questions from the past century.

I would really like to be looking at some porn right now, but I resist out of courtesy and respect to my fellow citizens of this facility. I might go visit the mausoleum again, and look at some porn there.

I was telling a friend about my father’s Bible. You need a microscope to read it, since the print is so tiny. It was passed on to him from his mother and on to her from possibly her mother, meaning it likely dates to the 19th century. I found The Book some years ago. I started reading it. I noticed it was littered with pen- and pencil-written comments and notations, with some words circled for emphasis and others thrice-underlined. As I cruised through the scripture I was thinking that my father had written all these comments. I was enchanted and even impressed, since I only know him to have ever read one book, which was an account of Jim Thompson’s life and unsolved disappearance in Thailand.

A smile grew across my face as I leafed through the pages of The Bible, drawn in by the hand-written annotations, until I realized something: These comments and annotations were written by me. In the 8th grade or maybe early high school I read every page of the Testaments Old and New. Today I have absolutely no memory of the words or my own comments about them. Even 4 years of a Jesuit high school did not present an occasion where I was required to read the entire Bible.

The smile on my face washed away. From the surprising possibility that my father had energetically traversed The Bible to realizing that I had done so and essentially wasted my time at it was a familiar window into the world of industry into which I pour so much of my energies.…

The woman who was printing photos of Shannon Doherty and Phoebe Cates is now typing a document in which she appears to be discussing her “persecutory complex”, that is if I can properly make out the 12-point type face from here. In paragraph 3 she mentions the death of her boyfriend, Richard Greene. She is Asian, probably late 30s, kinda stout, a sour countenance, and timelessly beautiful breasts. I think she is saying that her life has been a series of ratings, from one to ten, and she has always been a “lower number.”

She is on to a new document now, saying that meditation caused her to excel in “church organ talent”. I don’t think I have ever met a bona fide church organist.
…

Page 181 comes from a book the title of which would have been appropriate to my condition yesterday: Half Past Dead, by Meryl Sawyer.

The radio inside was tuned to a Spanish language station. The delicious aroma of carne asada made Kat’s stomach rumble. It was after eight, and she hadn’t had a thing since eating a yogurt at noon.

The word “yogurt” is hyphenated at the yo- on account of a line break. The book seems to be printed in oversized type. This observation is confirmed by the notice on the back cover “LARGE PRINT ROMANTIC SUSPENSE.”

This book looks horrible. Here, read it.

…

OK, then, time to get organized for the long anticipated trip to the chapel. I could deliver that story of my father’s Bible, maybe quoting both scripture and my hand-written comments. Or I could just concoct the comments, making them up as I leaf through the pages of a Bible at the chapel. Do they even have one there? I don’t think they do. A bunch of hymnals but no Bible that I could access.

Walking over here I was thinking of how Joe Frank filled so much air time with a brand of lunacy that is essentially endless. I think the show was “Eye in the Sky” where he spoke as a radio announcer giving traffic conditions on the highways. It started out sounding normal enough, with delays of 10-15 minutes on the Interstate, and traffic moving smoothly on the bridges. It gradually gives way to lunacy, with a machete-wielding gorilla causing headaches on Santa Monica Boulevard and a stampede of incontinent elephants causing a mess on the Newhall Pass. I made up both those scenarios but that was the spirit of the show, just one ludicrous scenario after another. It actually got kind of tedious, as Joe Frank tends to do, but it reminded me of Steve Martin’s zipper routine, where all he does is go on stage as “The Great Flydini” and pull things out of his crotch. He did that sketch on one of the final Johnny Carson shows, afterward commenting that the beauty of that routine was that it could just go on forever. You could pull anything out of your pants and it would be funny. In the same sense Joe Frank, in that particular show, could have strung together any combination of animals and weapons, belligerence and ignominy, swiftness and lethargy…

I should do the geese story at the chapel, the story of when I found myself in a sea of shit at Calvary. I wanted to add a dramatic flourish:

Horizontal snowfall poured for 24 hours straight. Billions died.

Yikes, I think I am about to have a panic attack. Need/want to get out of here and get me a bagel and some porn. Or to be fully crass about it: Porno.