Forgot the tablet, dagnabbit. So typing into the smaller Galaxy Note 5, and feeling AT PEACE with this critical decision. It involved the excruciating choice between typing this or not typing this. May the world be a better place on account of the words that follow.
An afternoon spent mining old telephone magazines for mention of phone booths turned up a few interesting anecdotes. Among them was an evidently lesser-known tale about William Howard Taft, the portly president probably best known today for being unbelievably huge. 340 pounds, I think, on a 5’11” frame. The famous myth, which has pretty soundly been dismissed, is that he got stuck in a White House bathtub, and his big fat body had to be pried out with the help of butter. Really, that makes no sense to me. It’s not as if any common bathtub has the structure to trap somebody, whatever their size. On the other hand it is true that Taft had an oversize tub built just for him. There is a photo of 4 normal sized men sitting in it, demonstrating how large was the tub.
The story I found has Taft in Hot Springs, Virginia, staying at a hotel which I assume to be today’s Omni, the only hotel in that tiny town.The source for the story was a man named, strangely enough, George Bush, an electrician at a regional phone company who shared the name of future presidents Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Bush claimed that Taft got stuck in a phone booth, and become so lodged in that a carpenter was summoned to pry the man out by cutting up the booth with a saw. Allegedly the phone company replaced the old booth with a much more commodious one, significantly bigger than any other, in honor of Mr. Taft.
The story appeared in numerous newspapers soon after the incident was said to have occurred but I find scant mention of it anywhere else. I wrote to the head of the Taft National Historic Site, and to the management of the Omni in Hot Springs, to see if they had any corroborative evidence to back this story up.
I have two connections to Mr. Taft. One is that my grandmother turned some evidence of a possible genealogical connection, though I don’t think it was ever proven. The other is that Taft’s is one of the few president’s burial sites I’ve ever seen. Him and JFK, I guess, also at Arlington, unless there was one at that smaller Congressional Cemetery in Washington.
True or not the Taft/phone booth tale makes an amusing anecdote. The sources seem sketchy. The story is said to have come from Mr. Bush in the form of a letter. He was in Hot Springs visiting his father, an aside which suggests that it was that individual from whom the story originated. That gives it even one less layer of credibility.
Still, it’s easier to believe a man of Taft’s size would get stuck in a phone booth as opposed to a bathtub. And in its spirit it is consistent with other stories I found from that era which report on normal-sized people suffocating or getting trapped in phone booths when their doors would not open. In Taft’s case we can assume he was unable to even get the door shut. Hah.
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Fuckall but I can’t turn off FB messenger on this phone. It’s obnoxious. I had disabled it before but there doesn’t appear to be any way to do that now.
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I forgot how beautifully filmed Rocky was. You can appreciate it without the sound, too. In fact I think the absence of Stallone’s kinda dippy voice actually enhances the æsthetic beauty of the film.
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It is a beautiful day. I intend, once I proof my gear, to hit the chapel tomorrow for recording of what I guess you’d call a podcast. It’s been a long time coming but really, the chapel is not the type of place I can just book an hour at and show up. Time is limited and what time I get is not guaranteed to be usable. To complicate things a little more it feels like my voice has been changing. I don’t cough but I hock up small amounts of phlegm and have to loudly clear my throat, sometimes repeatedly. I’ve noticed it during my use of the voice recognition software.
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Another Beautiful Day
My trip to the chapel was reconsidered. I would not have a lot of time, even if it was open at all. And I need to rehearse. So here I am at the Windmill Community Garden, wrestling with this recalcitrant field recorder. This gadget presents enough problems that I should either replace it or pony up the $300 for Sony to repair it and make it, as they promise, good as new. But I have no money these days, and it is feeding into the sourness of my spirit, a sour loneliness that increases daily.
I was going back over the “CUNT” story, which is sounding a lot shorter than I imagined it. Here’s the idea:
The first time I saw it was in the 6th grade, on a school bus. One of the older kids had a copy of Hustler magazine. I did not know the difference between that and Playboy or Penthouse. They were all the same to me, those dirty magazines that only certain dads were allowed to have. They were like beer and cigarettes, but unlike those we were not even allowed to see the magazines.
I heard people whispering the word, over and over. I did not know yet that it was a dirty word. The way the kids whispered it made the word sound reverential, even sacred. It sounded like the finest, most respectful word one could use in reference to a woman.
I thought it was interesting how the girls sitting next to the kid with the magazine had an air of authority about them. It was like they were supervising, or chaperoning our access to this.
I finally pushed my way through the 3-deep crowd of gawkers, and I saw it. I thought it was disgusting. It was completely covered with hair that spread all the way up to her stomach. The somewhat overweight woman was lying on sand by a beach. One of her hands gestured toward it, pointing at it. On her face she had a glib expression that seemed to ask “You want this, don’t you? You do want this, right?”
I only saw it for 5 or 6 seconds. I went back to my seat, and looked out the window. I did not know what I had just seen. But even then, at that age, as repugnant as it might have seemed to me than I knew I wanted it.
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Yeah, that’s a much shorter story than I imagined. The other one, about the esoteric union of funerary laborers who traffic exclusively in tombstones for people who never existed, is mostly written somewhere else on this site. The point of that story can’t be too obviously connected to my disillusionment with the abundance of phony content on the Internet. Or can it? I refer specifically to the databases of fake identities, which crunch together databases of legitimate names, addresses, social security numbers, etc., and turn them into mashups of people who never existed. The stated intention of these sites is to thwart identity thieves, but really what kind of dumbass identity thief would take the approach of combing a site that is explicitly labeled as a “fake identities” database? The ancillary intent is to wield SEO skillz in such a way that the fake identities rise to the top of the searchies, while the real ones fade. I don’t buy that rationale, either. But if one is going to populate the Internet with garbage records of phony lives then why not take it to another level and fill cemeteries with monuments to those very people who never existed? Or rather those very non-people. Folks like me who make efforts to research the names and stories of those who are buried at places like Calvary would be led into a world of emptiness. The fulfillment of peoples’ legacies as done by the workers at burial grounds and funeral parlors would be cast into a sort of oblivion when cemeteries were overtaken by monuments to people who never even lived.
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And then there is my thing about cremation salons. I don’t think I ever posted that stuff here, and it might work best as a written story and not spoken. I had this idea where cremation salons suddenly became a fad. A new technique for cremation had been developed whereby bodies were not merely reduced to ashes but instead incinerated and evaporated into the air, leaving no trace whatsoever of the organic matter. But by accident, while performing a trade show demonstration on a rat, it was discovered that by only beginning the process and then strategically stopping it before it achieved its task of completely disintegrating the body one could achieve transfigurations of the body. These metamorphoses were unpredictable to the point of being completely random, but to a certain segment of the population that engaged in bodily mutilation this quickly became something everyone wanted to do. The most commonly affected body part in this process was the head, which could increase in size by as much as 3 times without adversely impacting brain activity. The mushroom-like expansion of the forehead was the most desirable result of the procedure, but no guarantees were made by its performers.
I guess I don’t need to rewrite this whole story now. It is at home, in a text file. But it suggests that those who are presently into body piercings and full-body tattoos would be the first segment of society drawn to this process of bodily mutilation in the name of art, or rebellion.
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Oh jeez, in the school yard that is next door to this space is a pairing of creatures I don’t think I would have expected. A chicken and a cowboy. Well, the dude is wearing a cowboy hat, and not the boots with spurs or the whole cowboy garb. But he is talking to the chicken, telling it to go back into its cage. I had no idea there was a chicken farm on the school grounds, but then why would I know this…
Yep, just got up and looked across the fence. There is indeed a cage with at least 2 chickens inside. Hey, why not? We never had livestock on any of my school grounds but it would have been fine with me if we did. This Windmill place is becoming a sparkly fascination for me.
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2:00 is coming and I intend to record the churchbells. That should be beautiful.
OK, got it, I think. I got here right at 1:00 and missed the bells at that time, this whilst wrangling with the annoying field recorder.
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Now all I can hear is those fucking chickens. The cowboy came back through the school yard, talking to the chickens, saying something “You’re much happier now, right?” Now they are back in the cage.
Bunch of years ago I found a dead chicken at Rainey Park. A couple of park rangers were nearby, sitting in a pickup truck. I told them what I’d found, pointing them to the 4th tree over from the entrance. They responded, going over to the site and putting on rubber gloves in preparation for disposing of the thing. One of the rangers thought it was hilarious, saying he’d only been at the park a couple of weeks but that this was maybe the third or fourth chicken they had found. It was the product of some cult ritual, and the chickens were probably obtained from any of the many Pollo Vivo places around town. Those are places where you buy live or freshly killed game, like chickens and goats. It’s the sort of thing most Americans don’t really do but for people from certain other countries it’s just considered common sense to see what kind of condition an animal is in before you eat it.
In a related incident I spotted a dead chicken in a bag right plop in the middle of Northern Boulevard. As strange as it seemed to me at first I later concluded it had to have come from one of those Pollo Vivo places, and just fell off of someone’s truck or bike.
Those Pollo Vivo places smell really nasty.
Now I wonder if these chickens on the school grounds are being raised for cult ritual sacrifice, or if certain of the kids have those ideas in mind. Hah.
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The sun feels good on the back of my neck, but little can be done to sweeten the sourness of my disposition. I have too much to do in too little time, but laziness thwarts all. I still can’t believe I have this Windmill place all to myself for over an hour now. One woman walked in and looked around but left after a few seconds.
I might have to take a panic pill later. Drank last night but should not have. Over at sorabji.com/yo I posted an audio bit that I sent to a friend in Portland. He thought it was hilarious. When I pointed him to the source of the audio he was like “Where do you find this stuff?” The DONUT chat line has been one of my dirty little secrets over the years. I’ve never said a word into it, unless I was too drunk to remember, but I’ve listened in on it for probably 6 or 7 years. The line caused some controversy when a 20-something year old talked an 11 year old into meeting with him and having sex. Yuck, I can’t even think about shit like that without grimacing. But the line itself was absolved of any responsibility, I guess on account of its disclaimers that all calls are unscreened.
The calls are completely free for callers but they have an interesting business model that probably makes them a shit ton of money. They direct all the calls to numbers owned by tiny local phone companies in sparsely used area codes in remote parts of Iowa and Minnesota. I still don’t fully comprehend why this is allowed to happen but the big phone companies are forced to pay a 2 or 3 cent per minute termination fee to those phone companies for long distance calls made to their networks, and the purveyor of the calls (in this case a free chat line) gets a cut of that fee. That also explains the business model behind those free conference call web sites. The more people who call in the more money they make, all because of some ancient FCC loophole. In the past the termination fee was passed on to the callers who made the long distance calls. But with cell phones and Skype and all this unlimited calling plan environment there is no one to pass those fees on to anymore. So the big phone companies just have to suck it up and make all payouts, which were intended to subsidize rural phone networks in the interest of fairness. At first it sounded like a business I should get into but it seems smarmy to me now, and even if it didn’t I think it is one whose ship has sailed. Too many players in that realm.
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OK, I finally have company, just after I sent the previous images of having the place all to myself. A woman with a cup of coffee just sat in one of the shaded benches by the front. We made eye contact. I am certain we will become blissfully wedded and spend the balance of our erstwhile empty lives together, as one, passionate lovers, advocates for each other’s successes and accepting of the failures.
Or she’ll drink her coffee and move on.
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Wow, 45 minutes have passed since the churchbells rang. I should wait for the next round, which promises three, count ‘em three hits of the bell in honor of this third hour of the afternoon. I love the sound but would probably not enjoy living anywhere near these bells.
Time keeps ticking away.
