The Panic Pill did its thing, taking its sweet time as it sometimes does when my anxiety and BP reach impossible levels. This is starting to feel uncomfortably like a routine.
At the ghetto coffee shop, after an afternoon spent mostly doing nothing useful. Stared at some old weather site code but solved no problems.
Someone I know has listened to my Calvary Chapel Redux piece over on Soundcloud. Knowing her I think I know what impact it might have had. That’s a piece I probably would not play for my sister, at least not without fair warning of its lurid content. Another friend heard it and said it was good and all, then followed that by asking if I was sure I wanted to put stuff like that out there. I’m like, I’ve been putting “stuff like that” out there for over 20 years and no one has been harmed by my accounts of certain things.
Feeling like I will actually make it out there this week. No more booze means no more sleeping late. I do not really regard my periods of sobriety as being any more or less productive than their opposite. Just a little more melancholy and sleepless.
…
It is the next day.Tuesday. Here is good reason not to come to the Windmill around noon time. The schoolyard next door, separated from this space only by a fence, is presently teeming with kids. It’s mid-day recess and it sounds like a stampede, albeit a joyful stampede.
I wonder how the chickens are doing amid all that cacophony. I care so much about the chickens.
I would sit in my usual spot, near the fence, but the kids might murder and mutilate me, burning my corpse with kerosene and flamethrowers, leaving me to agonize in my final moments as a flaming, smoky blob. Kids these days, they are mean. Savages. I see them now biting the heads off those poor chickens, spitting them out and using the sharp beaks as tools to gouge the eyes of the teachers who were, until such moment, watching over the kids. No hopscotch or dodgeball for these kids. It’s primal war, homicidal bloodshed and a bitter, angry fight to the death.
A friend from the neighborhood said (with a slight roll of his eyes) that this is an exclusive school, or maybe he said charter school.
Most of the kids just all of a sudden went inside. I just moved closer to the fence, and think this might be a decent place to pick up some ambient sounds of kids playing. The sound would gradually morph into the scene of murder and bloodshed described above. That will be my Pulitzer for the day.
That actually reminds me of a time in high school, when I bought my boombox to school. I had cassette tapes of I don’t remember what music, probably Billy Joel or whatever I could skim off the radio. One day I accidentally hit the record button on the boombox, taping 7 or 8 seconds of the schoolyard sounds. I heard it later and almost cried, wishing I had recorded more. That tape might still exist in my coffers but fuckall If i should expect to find a few seconds of random sound lurking somewhere in an unknown 90-minute cassette.
Despite appearances of attending an expensive Jesuit High School we really never had any money. My collection of LPs, 8-tracks, and cassettes came almost exclusively from the remaindered bin at the mall record stores, or from the vaunted Publishers Central Bureau catalog, a monthly volume over which I pored more energy than I ever put into the Bible or the classics of literature.
Publishers Central had a gimmick that totally drew me in. Somewhere in the fine print was a blurb that explained how, occasionally, they would get excess stock of something that they needed to get rid of at the lowest possible expense. In such cases, said the blurb, you will find these items listed at a price of $0.00. I combed and combed the Publishers Central Catalogue for these freebies but never found one. My mother often commented on how they got me, they pulled me into devouring every word of every page of their catalogue.
But I did plunder Publishers Central for dozens of $0.99 LP records and cassettes, including a lion’s share of my Michael Ponti LP collection which I procured over a few years at a total cost of probably $20. The fancy expensive records I borrowed from the library. I remember gong to the house of a friend’s girlfriend. Her family was quite well off, and it showed by the fact that they had Vladimir Horowitz LP records. Those were just way outta my league, just like Fantasia, which I only saw within the last few years because when we were kids the “Deluxe Editions” they kept coming out with were just too damn expensive for us. .
Until I got to college I think the most Horowitz I heard was on the radio, probably from the much-maligned Carl Hass Show, which I sometimes appreciated but other times would concur with those who thought the program was kind of a joke. His introduction to Haydn’s “The Creation” was, at the time I heard it, one of the most inspiring revelations I’d ever had about a piece of music. I can still hear the ending soloists sing “Amen,” or rather “A-a-a-a-a-a-men.” .
Horowitz would, when I had better access to his recordings, become an almost colossal influence over me. I still have the personal, autographed letter he sent in response to my fan mail. Good authority tells me that such a personal response from Horowitz was quite rare.
This could be my new table anyway, this table farther away from the fence, now that I have spotted a pen drawing of a naked woman, headless and armless, this keyboard sitting across where her head would be. There is a woman who moved in across the street several months ago. She saunters about the place topless quite often. I was sort of intrigued by it at first but really, it gets old. The view from a local bar I go to looks up at a 6-story apartment building where it is routine to see the watery profiles of residents there showering. The windows by those showers are full size, suggesting that the apartments were converted and bathrooms placed where they were not originally intended to be.
I’m considering making the trip down to Tampa by plane, and the trip back by train. The train would be for old time’s sake, since that was how I used to most commonly travel between here and Tampa — until it just out of control expensive. A sleeper car is $388 one way, which actually isn’t as bad as I seem to remember, except that in the past I guess I was looking to go round trip that way.
As it is I get the full cavity-search any time I pass through an airport security check. I have no idea why. Maybe a certain Marq Thomaz is on the watchlist. So getting the full violation of my belongings and anal cavity as it is I imagine that flying one way would signal that I should be detained and sent to Guantanamo. One way flights suddenly became suspicious after 9/11, when all the hijackers had booked one-way tickets. So stupid we pay for that to this day.
…
I had to retreat from the Windmill. I moved over to the fence, thinking the kids had all gone inside. A bunch of them did go inside but several more remained, playing games involving a baseball bat, a basketball, and a machete. The basketball was the decoy, a toy intended to fool me into thinking these were just children and not savage, sociopathic killers. I know the attack was coming. As one of them juggled 5 machetes the others had their muskets and flamethrowers ready to go, ready to blast me into a charry, spontaneously cremated oblivion. I heard the attack dogs, growling and slobbering in anticipation of gobbling up the debris of my dismembered and incinerated body. All it took was for the teacher to turn around for just one second, just the briefest moment, and the kids would have attacked. I know it.
So I am safely seated at the library, breathless and thirsty from the Windmill escape. I have not done a random page 181 in a while so here goes, I’ll grab something from a shelf.
…
Aw man, this one looks stupid. Natural Born Heroes. “How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance”, by Christopher McDougal.
Well, at least 181 is short. it’s the final page of Chapter 23, and its text only covers less than half the page.
“(cer)tainly a tasty little addition to Paddy’s witchcraft campaign. Paddy had just arranged for them to be ferried off to Cairo on the same boat that brought Billy, leaving the Germans with four more mysterious disappearances to worry about.”
That is only the first partial paragraph from the page, which starts to the 181-focused reader with “tainly”, this a decapitated remain of the word “certainly”, of which “cer” dropped off with a hyphen at the bottom of page 180.
There were two teachers at the school yard. Maybe one of them was among the Germans mentioned in the above paragraph, while the other one was Paddy. It was Paddy who had brainwashed the kids with promises of eternal salvation heaven eternally raining onto their hearts should they successfully fool the Germans into thinking that disappearances of visitors to the Windmill next to the schoolyard were mysterious. This when in fact everyone but the Germans knew it was a meticulously planned and astoundingly secretive campaign to keep the Windmill safe from middle aged men by simply annihilating everyone that enters the place.
That’s what this book is about. Natural Born Heroes, indeed.
…
Had some good luck this AM making tangible progress toward once again having a site-specific search engine on my own web sites. The Google Custom Search has gotten so bad I just can’t use it in good conscience, even if it had always been the most aggressively monetized of the AdSense products. That was where, once in awhile I would get a $65 dollar click. But that doesn’t happen anymore, and more importantly the search engine just sucks. For years I used Swish-e but it seems to have evaporated. Other site search suites are out there but many have not been updated in over a decade and others are just too over the top brainiac for me to commit to. I mean if that’s all I was working on I’d be OK with something like Solr but it is just too steep a curve and potentially too huge a security risk if I’m the one who thinks he knows what he’s doing in managing it.
So I’m down with Xapier/Omega, at least for now. It indexed quickly, but is weirdly lacking in certain obviousnesses. I should be able to exclude a directory from being indexed. Nope. At least I can skip .txt files or any arbitrary mime type. But using Xapier to index my entire sorabji.com web would doubtless turn up all kinds of skeletons unintentionally lurking in completely random directories. I mean invoices I thought I’d uploaded to the /home directory but that somehow ended up mixed in with files under some public folder. I don’t think an invoice like that would actually surface on public web searches, that’s not the concern. Something like that would be far more likely to surface in a search result from something like Xapier, or my erstwhile beloved Swish-e.
Years ago I used to host a semi-private game site. It was possibly and quite likely copyright infringement of a commercial game, the name of which doesn’t matter for this discussion. I downloaded the script from someone in South Africa who had hosted an identical, albeit completely public game site himself until getting shut down.
The URLs for this game included the players’ logins and passwords. This was not uncommon in the mid 1990s. Passing a username and password via a straight unencrypted URL was actually considered something of a standard.
So the URLs for my game site looked something like
I and the others played this game for years, I don’t know about the others but I became, just from seeing it so much, very familiar with the URL structure, and the fact that the username and password were passed openly. Anybody with the URL could take over your game, and I thus warned any and all players to keep their URL to themselves.
And most of them did.
Except for L.
This was one of the more haunting things I’d ever noticed from the days I spent tailing my access_logs in ssh windows that were always opened. The access_log, as you may know, is where all hits to your web site are recorded. Every single time a web site visitor accesses an html file, a gif, a stylesheet or javascript file that access is, by default, written to your access_log.
So one day I noticed something I had not seen in years. A search bot from Yahoo was attempting to index one of those old game URLs. I saw the familiar “pass=aaaaaaaa” show up. Concerned that the private game site was actually being indexed by commercial search engines I looked into the matter. It turns out Yahoo was going after a version of the game that had been removed long ago. But what I discovered next was that the player’s URL they were going after was that of Leslie Harpold. She had died a couple of years earlier.
How did I figure this out? I entered her game URL into Yahoo. The only thing that came up was a text file sitting on hoopla.com, Leslie’s personal website. the text file, I discovered, contained not only her game URL but countless passwords, user id,s pin numbers, bank account information, on and on. She no doubt thought this text file would go unindexed but somehow it go out there, gobbled up by the searchies.
As soon as I realized what I was looking at I just shut the browser down. It’s like I had just walked in on someone showering, or going to the bathroom.
Phew… as much as I feel that story is worth telling it felt like doing so was about to bury me. Felt like heavy, heavy lifting. Maybe that’s a good thing. I should tell more heavy-lifted stories.
