Sounds

THis is turning out to be a stupid day. I was up at 8am, as I sometimes am. But instead of just going back to sleep I went out to Calvary for no damn reason and accomplished nothing. Nothing new there, really.

Actually I did unintentionally discover that a notable sculptor is responsible for a few of the mausolea near the chapel, in the area of Texas Guinan’s place. I don’t remember his name now but a book was written about him in the not so distant past.

I also learned that there are 14 stages of the cross. I thought it was 12. These two mausolea that this sculptor built depicted the 14 stations of the cross on the structures’ bronze doors. The chapel also contains a rather dumpy series of pieces representing the stages of the cross.

It’s been cool watching the new Kosciuszko Bridge go up… I meant to look (and listen) if they are still using the old span. The old Kosciuszko made or maybe still makes a horrible almost frightening racket.

I thought of going over to New Calvary to see if the calling card and coins I left in the DETEX Watchclock Station are still there. I bet they are. There are not many places like that, where you can expect to just hide something in public. That’s what geocaching is about but I think I prefer leaving stuff as I do. There used to be some coins on the giant wall that holds all the dead people in at Old Calvary. The wall runs almost the length of Review Avenue. I put coins on a specific stone and found them there about a year later. But the next few times I tried this they disappeared. I had also stashed something behind on of the “LIVE WIRE” signs on the Honeywell Street Bridge… Somewhere I made a note of which sign it was but that’s lost on me now, as is any memory of exactly what I hid there.

I sat in the chapel for a while. For some reason I just felt that I wanted to be there. I am not especially fond of the structure but it is pretty much always empty save for me. I was looking through a book about Lent and the customs of fasting and giving up certain indulgences during the Lenten season. That stuff should be familiar to me but it felt like I was reading about it for the first time. I’ve forgotten almost anything I ever knew about Lent and even general church rituals. It’s like I never went to Catholic school for those 10 years.

I was going to church once in awhile for a time last year. I had to give up because I could not understand anything the priests were saying. There was one guy whose English was fine. I actually liked him. But most times I went it was someone with an accent so thick I could not understand anything. And the acoustics in that church were no help, drowning the words as they were spoken.

I also found the ritual attempts at pomp and circumstance to be tedious and vacant. I always did find the music at church services to be bothersome.

At a Caffe Bene, feeling restless yet somehow serene. When I am tired from lack of my usual 11 hours of sleep I get lonely and feel even a little desperation. It’s weird how that works. I unplugged from Facebook again, forgetting once again that doing so cuts me off from a number of other things that use FB logins. So, I’ll probably be back quicker than I would want. Just not needing the brain drain, not that I have anything else to do.

I just looked up and saw that word “desperation.” It reminds me of this phone thing I discovered in college. I think it was called The Bridge. It was basically just a party line where anyone could call and talk, though if it was referred to as “The Bridge” that meant is was set up illegally. One particular line I found happened to be occupied by elderly people. Listening in on that was some of the most depressing shit I’ve ever heard… although I wish I could hear it again to see if it still lives up to that verdict.

One woman was droning about how all her kids were grown and had moved on, and this made her “stranded” and she felt a whiff of “desperation” about her life. The others on this call politely chimed in with affirmations or sympathies while this woman just never stopped talking. My mother walked into the room as I was listening. She heard but a few moments of this phone chat and said “That’s horrible!” She recognized it immediately for what it was. I have to admit I did not. It just sounded like people talking until my mother’s perspective made me realize these were some sad and lonely old people with no one else to talk to. The one woman in particular spoke in an almost cadential style, like there was some sort of poetry or a rhythm to her litany.

“I just feel stranded. I feel desperation.” And she had memories of her children from when they were young, but nothing to say about them in the present.

As depressing as that sounds I really wish I had recorded it.

Another sound I remember was from the high school yard. I brought a boombox to school. I seem to remember the device being considered fancy because it not only played cassettes but also let you record them. I had some music on a cassette but I accidentally hit the record button, erasing several seconds of music with sounds of a couple of kids talking to the Latin teacher, Mr. Peloquin. It was a spirited conversation about what I do not remember. If I knew how enchanting it would sound to me years later I would most certainly have recorded longer, even if it meant nuking the music on that cassette. That live sound from the schoolyard really was unique and real, totally unpretentious in its spirit.

Not to get grandiose but I believe that sound is the blood or the heartbeat of society, its most ephemeral and irreproducible element. It flows through everything. Even if specific sounds can be recreated (bells, horns, thunder) I don’t know how well or even if the experience of hearing it as a spatial phenomenon can be played back. I guess there is something to be said for virtual reality and binaural sound, though I think that will always suffer from being too artificial.

Hmm, not sure why I am thinking about all this. This tiredness leading to a sense of panic has me feeling like I should be in a hurry to get things done. But I have nothing to do.

…

Going outside to dick around with the Links. I am starting to think Citybridge forgot they put these things up in Astoria. None of them are displaying the much-needed advertisements, one of them has been showing a desktop screen for days now, and a lot of the tablets just do not work. But the absence of advertising is most strange, since belching out ads is pretty much the only reason these things exist — or rather, it’s the only productive or money-making reason they exist. Whatever they say about the free services is good for propaganda but it is not creating any kind of revenue stream.

I really do not like seeing people lounge around these things, sprawling on the sidewalk for as long as it takes to charge their phone. It’s been worse in other areas, it seems, where there are more homeless people. But it is really just an unsightly and unnecessary little blight. And there are just so damn many of them. The fundamental logic behind the quantity of these things is presented as unassailable: “We’re replacing the payphones.” Guess what? We didn’t need so many of those, either.

Man it is only 2:20. Normally it’s so much later by this time of the day. Wait, what?