\t\t\t\ti made it back out to section 23 today. i had plenty of time because for some reason i woke up at 8:30am. my usual time to rise is 12noon. i qould normally just go back to sleep but for whatever motivation i summoned i decided to make better use of the 3-1\/2 hour period of time. i was out of doors before noon for the first time in probably a year. i mailed a letter! and i deposited another $100 in coins at the bank. then i headed over to New Calvary to continue what i started a couple of months ago in capturing images of the sepulchral portraits in that section. after about an hour or so i was amazed to find that it was only 2:15pm. the extra allotment of time was bboth an inspiration and a depressant. more time to do things, more time to fail. i may have wasted this gift of a day, but i’ll check again on the pictures later. they all looked way too bright, but with cropping that should not be an issue. i don’t mind getting the pictures all over again, but i probably won’t need to. i scoped out another section to do this same project, and Section 55 looks like my next frontier.<\/p>\n
all that said, i started to question the ethics of this project. i mean, i am scooping up the images and likenesses of human beings and blasting them up onto a global computer network that they could probably never have imagined (most of the pictures are early 20th century). and for whose benefit? pretty much mine and mine alone. i have endeavored to dig up background information on some of the people, but i am no research genealogist nor do i intend to be. i am, or was, at most a Forensic Genealogist, which is just a hi-falutin term for cemetery photographer. but that’s a different species of genealogist from someone who researches family trees and traces lineages. still, i have done that here and there, and when i find anything interesting i note it, but i have not included it in the portraits project as of yet. it seems like a fair trade in its way: i seize your image for use in a photo project and as a sign of respect i summon as much detail of your legacy as i can. but would someone who died 90 years ago be inspired or horrified to see their name rise from the relative obscurity of a single burial site in a massive New York cemetery into the global repository of easy-access content? and is not death one’s most humbling moment? one’s event most unwilling to be shared? i think about that in context of the human body — that fallible, disposable, inferior vessel filled for a time with the spirit abd energy of a mysterious, superior provenence.<\/p>\n
i don’t know, but today’s effort would make such research harder than usual since so many of the tombstone inscription were etched in Russian.<\/p>\n
i shan’t lose any sleep over the ethical implications of the thing, but it is just an example of the sort of thing one thinks about whilst diligently patroling cemetery aisles.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
i met a nice-seeming couple out there today. they found a burial site of one of their ancestors, but could not seem to find the other. they diidn’t have the location coordinates, but they seemed to know with certainty that the other site was near the first one. the name was long, 15-letter Russian name that started with a K and ended with a K. i told them i would keep my eyes open for that name, and i did so, but i never spotted it, either.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
my new inspiration in pursuing the portraits project came from a post card i got last week, from a friend who wrote to say happy birthday, adding that she noticed the portraits. all i need is the slightest bit of motivation and i am up at 8:30am and out in the field, doing my thing.<\/p>\n
i thought of this when i paid my quarterly taxes last month. for no good reason i waited until the last day to do it. that means i woke up in the morning with a deadline. i rarely have those any more, but it was both motivating and a little unnerving to have to hurry. but after i got the taxes mailed off and taken care of i was all motivated to do other things. it was nice to have a deadline, in a way. it was also making me tremble and squeal obscenities into the thick, lonely air of my apartment. i wouldn’t say i was happy at that time, but i was going somewhere. and then, of course, i got lazy.
\n(HAZY. I SAW THAT NAME ON A TOMBSTONE TODAY. SOMEONE’S LAST NAME WAS HAZY. I THOUGHT THAT WAS AWESOME. ANOTHER STRANGE NAME: SEMENSKY. ONCE I SAW THAT NAME I COULDN’T STOP HEARING THE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SONG “EMPTY SKY” WHICH INCLUDES THE LYRICS “I WOKE UP TO THE EMPTY SKY” BUT WOULDN’T THAT BE SOMETHING IF THE SONG WAS CALLED “SEMEN SKY” AND IF BRUCE WOKE UP TO THE SEMEN SKY?)
\nso motivation was interesting today, and on that previous day when i paid taxes. motivation is not so hard to come by, even for one in the unstructured\/directionless life that i choose, but i preserve my energies for things i care about. i am not passionate about most corporate agendas, so i don’t feel any joy in pursuing those situations again. why am i suddenly talking as if i am being interviewed by a dotcom?<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
i just saw the name of a college on the TV. it is a Division III college where the basketball coach today used to be the basketball and soccer coach at my grade school. even as a 7th and 8th grader i remember thinking he was a pretty good guy, and when i learned years later that he had moved on from grade school soccer and basketball to college basketball (even Division III) i was happy for the guy.<\/p>\n
but there’s this one thing he said that i always remember. it’s really the only thing he ever said that i remember.<\/p>\n
during a halftime of a soccer match against another school he took us into the locker room and, in a soft and measured voice, he said “You boys are playing like a bunch of pussies.”<\/p>\n
I ha donly recently seen “pussy” for the first time. It was on the school bus, where one of the older kids had a copy of “Hustler” magazine. Icraned my neck like a giraffe, trying to get a glimpse of what everyone was looking at and talking about. The word “pussy” filled the air, and for the 2 or 3 seconds that I had to see the magazine it was opened to a 2-page picture of a woman lying nkaed on the beach, her PUSSY exposed for all to see. i had never seen PUSSY before and, to be honest, while i found it tantalizing and a little weird looking, i didn’t see what the big deal was (O, how i have changed!).<\/p>\n
so when this soccer\/basketball coach quietly lectured us on how we were playing like a bunch of pussies i imagined a bunch of hairy vaginas running around on the soccer field, unable to kick the ball or run too fast because i guess this coach was saying that vaginas couldn’t do that.<\/p>\n
the other thing i remember about the PUSSY lecture was the fallout. the PUSSY fallout. i remember it clearly as a calm, understated, even nurturing delivery from the coach to us kids. he was trying to make a strong point without scaring or intimidating us.<\/p>\n
but that’s not how it was recounted by the other kids. the other kids recounted this speech as if the coach was wailing and screaming at us. one kid, R., was like “that was awesome, man, did you hear him go off on us, he like screamin’ ‘YOU GUYS ARE PLAYIN’ LIKE A BUNCH OF PUSSIES!'” that is how the tale was told but i was there, too, and i know as sure as i was there that the coach never even raised his voice. but the story got handed down differently, and i imagine that if my version of the story surfaces in my mind once in a while then it must be that the other version is being told in other quarters, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
i made it back out to section 23 today. i had plenty of time because for some reason i woke up at 8:30am. my usual time to rise is 12noon. i qould normally just go back to sleep but for whatever motivation i summoned i decided to make better use of the 3-1\/2 hour period […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-yu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}