fire
contemplating the melancholy of the firefighter, or of a single firefighter who happens to be sitting nearby. we‘ve had some conversations. a nice guy whose every working day is clouded by the possibilityof death, and by whiffs of mortality. i don‘t know any other firefighters. are they all drawn to the profession by an interest in confronting mortality on a regular basis? i address my own mortality in the form of announcing my age, announcing it only inside my head, at times when one‘s position in life might need assurances or, perhaps, encouragement and motivations. fire-lighting.
i bought steaks and a giant vessel of A1 steak sauce at Costco today. steaks, A1, and busywork for my web sites are the plan for Friday night. i set the old magazines project aside for a couple of weeks in favor of photo things and the receipts site, but this morning i dove in to the content of a September, 1899, magazine and found some laughs therein. one respected writer on music raved about the Moscheles concerto, saying it puts Beethoven‘s rigid piano concerti in their place. wow. who would say such nonsense? emil liebling, that‘s who. tonight i shall scan some more editions and continue editing the stories from 1899.
i was having a friendly conversation with a woman friend yesterday when a blowhole interrupted, intercepting and summarily ending our chat with the classiest line i‘ve ever heard. he said “you wanna go get a couple of 40s at the corner store?“ and she was like hey, sure, that‘d be great. the guilelessness of it reminded me of a line from a porn movie i saw in high school. a friend and i went to a music festival in tennessee, and had to drive a few days to get there. my mother did most of the driving but at the motels my friend and i shared a room while my mother and sister did the same. for some reason i feel i should clarify this matter. anyway, being a couple of high school kids in a motel we gave in to the inevitable act of renting a porn on the pay per view. guy meets girl, girl spreads her legs, lots of butts and groins, boom-thwacka-boom music, a few moments if dialogue and plot, then rinse/lather/repeat 3 or 4 times to fill out a 90-minute feature. at the end of the film the 2 main characters talk about their hopes and dreams, and about how much sex they just had. then the man blurts out “LET‘S GET MARRIED. WADDAYA SAY?“ the woman accepts the dashing man‘s offer and the credits roll. man, my friend and i laughed at that line for months, it was our summertime punchline and to this day one of us might blurt out that line when i pay a visit to Tampa.
another great porn line, also courtesy of the same above-referenced friend, came from a pulp fiction type of novel he was reading. i don‘t recall the book but it was not outright porn, but some sort of romance fiction. actually i think it was a fantasy/romance, if such a genre is allowed, and the book was one of a series that was popular at the time. anyway, after much anticipation there was finally a sex scene in the book, and while my friend was much interested in the progress of this he threw the book away when the man said to the woman “TURN OVER. GIVE ME YOUR ASS.“ Man, we laughed for years at that line, such crass confidence as the woman said no no no and my friend just gave up on that book on account of such a stupid line. i think part of why i found that line hilarious was because i, in the 9th grade, may have not known what anal sex was, or if i knew anything of it it was clotted in that cloud of anxiety known as adolescent sexuality. and i found the scenario of my friend reading that book, getting tweaked by the arrival of a sex scene, only to reject the book and throw it away, laughing, the tension severed by a comical piece of dialogue.
i bought a piece of pro audio gear yesterday. a sony field recorder gadget with a fuzzy wind filter. i should have done something with it today but distractions were nigh. i went to staples and took an alternate route on a street near the projects. i saw some kids fucking around by a van, which appeared to be abandoned, and while i didnot see them doing anything particularly evil their gathered presence there was conspicuous enough to draw my generally ambivalent attention. it‘s a ghetto enough area, for lack of a better term, on 39th avenue near 21st street in long island city, if you‘re mapping this at home. i noticed the kids by the van but paid it no mind, but after i walked another block a police car screamed up, blasting its siren and, i thought, turning the corner which i was crossing. i sotpped in my tracks, reflex-action, as i maneuvered into position where i could get out of hte way of hte police car should its driver need to go in the direction in which i stood. i quickly realized that the cops thought i was afraid of them, or that i was thinking of running, or something. they were, i quickly discovered, responding to someone‘s call regarding the above-mentioned looting of the abandoned van, a trespass which was evidently more brazen that i had detected in my concerted aloofness toward the situation. the police noticed my reaction but i think they quickly realized i was not a 13 or 14 year old black boy, as were the 4 or 5 kids pillaging the abandoned van. the cop car moved toward that van and i turned to see what was happening. the kids were all gone but a man remained, talking to the police but i could not figure out what was going on nor did i care enough to stare. if he was not the van owner then he must have been a local business owner or resident, for why else would he have called the police? i felt that if i looked a certain way i would have been detained or harrassed by those cops in the car.
i recognized some vestiges of the situation. a couple of years ag, for a period of 5 or 6 months, an abandoned SUV sat on a streetcorner near my apartment, accumulating parking tickets and suffering vandalism until the thing looked like a junkyard relic. all the windows were gone, the seats ravaged and every crevice ransacked of its objects. i had called 311 3 or 4 times to get this blight removed but nothing ever happened. i imagined the city anticipated a payday for all the parking tickets stuck on this vehicle. then, one night as i passed by i saw some dumbass kids ransacking the vehicle for its umpteenth desecration. i called 311 again but this time, since i was reporting a crime-in-progress, i was shuttled over to 911,which freaked me out because the problem here did not seem to be the kids vandalising the suv but that the city did nothing to remove the suv, which is itself the source of the problem. the van was a welcome target for this kind of behaviour but instead of removing it i found that police time had to be wasted in pursuit of the flies that circle around these piles of shit.
i think that is what happened on 39th avenue today. the van looked like it had been there a long time. the rear windows were busted and the doors opened, and the damage looked like far more than a group of teenage kids could have incurred in a short period of time. repeated calls to 311 to remove the abandoned vehicle were probably ignored, and the matter escalates and escalates and all manner of civilian and police time and energies are wasted.
