well well well
back in the wilds, after almost a full day indoors. in of doors. out of doors. i spent fifty bucks on a t-shirt, one which will take a month to arrive. i guess i should have known a custom-made t-shirt would take longer than an assembly-line article, but i guess i did not realize that it was literally custom made on a per-order basis. it‘s all good. it‘s a snoopy t-shirt. or rather, it will be a snoopy t-shirt. i am wearing a shirt now which shows peppermint patty, charlie brown, snoopy, linus, and pig pen driving in a car. i guess pig pen is driving. the hood of the car looks like a giant tongue. everyone is happy and, for my sensibilities, not obnoxiously so, and not cloyingly so. just a good old wholesome carload of happy kids, hopefully driving off of a highway. oh, woodstock is there, too, flitting around outside the vehicle. i never fully analyzed this t-shirt before but a bird flying around in a moving vehicle (it‘s a convertible) does not seem like a smart way of maintaining control of that precious animal. i guess the car is not actually moving? why, then, is the gang of 5 in the car? this is an old, old shirt. the white ink is cracked, making linus look like a wrinkled, wizened little man. this shirt is long overdue for replacement.
when it was announced that the complete charles schulz charlie brown comic strips would be released in book form i was intrigued, interested, and i loyally began collecting these volumes as they were released. but the release schedule bothered me on mortality levels. i wnated to buy this series for my mother, and i bought her the first few releases for christmas and birthdays, but the release cycle was supposed to take 16 years, virtually guaranteeing that neither my mother nor a lot of other people walking among us would live to see the last editions. sure enough, mother is gone, and i think the series is not even half way through its generation-long publication schedule. i lost track of the series for my personal collection, and it would cost hundreds of dollars to catch up at this point, but i will do it some day. catch up. i think i have 6 single volumes (three 2-volume box sets).
i like sitting in this seat because i can look up and see the reflection of the subway roaring past. the reflection is in the glass of the doorway to this place. the subway is a block away, and sometimes loud as hell even from here. the glimmering, flashing subway cars are a neat thing to see shuttling through the tiny window of the front door to this establishment.
i used to live in upper manhattan, at 216th street (not 90th street, which i have often heard described as “upper manhattan“ by geographical dumbasses and tv news reporters), and the el was overwhelmingly loud at times. the 1/9 train rumbled to and from the bronx outside my window, and it was not until i moved from there to the subway-free upper east side (york avenue) that i realized just how fucking loud it was in upper manhattan. that part of hte upper east side was, i think, particularly quiet, and after a year or so of above-ground subway thunder i felt like i‘d moved into a tomb.
about a year ago i got an e-mail from someone saying that she had just looked up her street address online, and the first thing that came up was a set of pictures on my web site, pictures from that building in which i lived in the early 1990s. “i think i live in your old apartment!“ was the substance of the message. it was close, so close, but she actually lives in the apartment next to my old studio on upper broadway. we indulged in a spirited correspondance and today we communicate on occasion. she had said that she might be going away for a month, and that she might need someone to sublet/cat-sit for her during that time. i told her i‘m all over it, though we have never met in person and i imagine she would rather offer the accommodation to someone she actually knows. still, it would be fun to stay at one of my old haunts, even in the apartment next door to my old one and not on the actual surface on which i lived.
i used to drive between florida and new york a couple of times a year, and in ‘03 or ‘02 (can‘t remember) i landed in alexandria, virginia, at the front door of the first house i remember living in. my earliest living memories are from a plane over the sahara, but my first memories of living in a house are from summers drive in alexandria. i was very young in those days but i was surprised how clearly i remembered the contours of the house and the anthropomorphic character of its façade. i remembered running around the sides of the yard and into the back yard, which i could not see from the street. i regret not making the attempt to ask anyone in the vicinity i the owners of the house would allow me in. it would have been a long shot, no doubt, but i think it might have been possible. i say that based simply on the friendliness of the people i happened to see walking past. the chattiness. the ease of neighborhood. had anyone asked why i was standing there, a stranger in town conspicuously occupying a sliver of suburban street for no obvious reason, then maybe the ice would have bene broken and i could have entered the realm of my childhood nightmares. the Mish-Mosh, that awful witch who emerged from the attic, grimly announcing “Hello… I am the Mish-Mosh“, pointing her shriveled finger at me and brandishing one enormous tooth from her mouth, the signature single tooth of the Mish-Mosh, that tooth which would eventually kill her as she looked down too quickly and stabbed herself in the chest. this, too, was the house where my sister and i spoke in our own language, inventing words and insults, the only one of which i remember now is “no curia, bullsnitch“, a babyspeak insult roughly equivalent to “no shit, sherlock.“
the nightmares we had rose up in our memories for the rest of our lives. my sister had one which our mother recounted frequently for how she had to turn on “every light in the house“ to convince my sister that the demons were gone.
