sweat
sweat as pouring down my back and ass when i reached the highest spots at mt. zion cemetery today. 94 degrees and hot as hell but well worth the trip, worth the walk, the long walk there to those spots of baffingly spacious beauty, spacious but cluttered and jammed, for there is little open space at mt. zion. headstones are required for burial there, unlike calvary and the bigger catholic cemeteries, which look sparsely populated because two-thirds of the burials are unmarked but in fact those yards are filled to capacity with mostly unmarked burials. mt. zion is a little harder to get to by foot, harder than the calvaries which have entrances on main thoroughfares. mt. zion‘s entrance used to be on a dirt road that looked like some random alleyway. today i saw that that road has been paved, and recently, since i could smell the fresh tar. burials at mt. zion are in wood coffins, glued shut, not nailed, so that all will be able to rise from the dead when their messiah comes. i saw something i‘ve never seen. a metal box at the base of a grave site. it looked… interesting, and had a note in Hebrew on it. i‘ll try and find out what it says, that message. i might have stayed longer, just to take in more of that amazing sight from the high point of mt. zion, but the heat was getting to me, my throat was closing, but i could barely bring myself to leave. there is one gravestone portrait there which i saw the first time i went to mt. zion. it‘s a picture of a woman, but it looks like someone shot it. like, with a gun. i‘ve noticed at calvary that the portraits of obese people seem to be attacked by vandals more than others, but the vandalism at zion seems to be of a different order of focus and energy. i am glad i got out today. yesterday i was inside all day, working away at web stuff, avoiding the heat but craving it at the same time. craving sunburn and this feeling of gorging on sunlight. those p.o.s.mbt sandals are getting me down, though. $260 and i‘ve almost worn them out after just a few months th
e bandages seem to stay affixed better than before. the bandages required by the MBT‘s relentless attacks on my heels and ankles. i can not seem to break these shoes in. i noticed today how heavy they are. heavier by far than normal sandals. wtf, who cares…
it is interesting sometimes to think about the confluence of activities on this earth. as one thing happens here another thing happens elsewhere, and vice-versa, in existential circuitousness. when i left my mansion the yankees were in the first inning of a game against the rays, and when i got home the game had just ended, 3 hours and 40-something minutes later. i have lost my interest in baseball, largely on account of the ludicrous amounts of money these people make. the value of their contribution to society, especially with the asterisks and question marks regarding the phoniness of their accomplishments, seems to be in direct contradiction to the inflated monies blasted at them. will the house of cards come down? i don‘t know, but i imagine a chart tracking the relative per-minute financial value of what these baseball players make per minute versus what virtually any other more valuable member of society makes at the same time. i was walking my way along, contributing nothing to society, and deserving nothing on account of it, while someone uptown standing around in the outfield made enough money in 3 minutes to sponsor an artist collective for 3 months. not that i imagine a society in which individual‘s wealth is forcibly distributed to “worthy“ causes. i do not. i don‘t care about other people‘s money. but the currency of america is money. it is not anything else. once again, wtf, am, i, talking, about,
i am rubbing ice cubes on the back of my neck, where just an hour ago sweat barrelled forth. i made an interesting walk through some parts of queens i‘ve seen before but never so directionlessly. i had direction, but but it was vague, as it mostly is in my life. i am thinking about expanding my immediate circles of influence, which partly accounts for the ruminations on the financial value of baseball players versus the contributions to society of themselves and others in other disciplines. i read something yesterday, in one of my 100+ year old magazines, which claimed that music, of all the arts, endures more stably than the others. the comments made during WWI, seemed odd in a way, but it implied that museums and physical objects of art are prone to destruction more so than music. which is interesting, i guess, from an early 20th century war-time perspective. i remember how the americans allegedly destroyed iraq‘s heritage by bombing museums and cultural institutions, raising immediate questions as to why the fuck those entities did not secure their holdings ahead of time, knowing full well the bombs were coming. it turned out virtually no significant damage was done to iraq‘s treasures, but it got selective attention at the time. i guess it is true, though, that a work of music, once published and disseminated, is more immune to perils of war than the products of other arts. an original manuscript score, often useful and interesting on a musicological level, would not necessarily imperil a symphony‘s ability to be performed again should it be destroyed. with publishing as the intermediary i guess music is a reproducable art, like photography. i remember hearing that original photo negatives from a noted photographer‘s estate were destroyed with the twin towers on september 11, stored as they were in safe deposit at one of those buildings. i remembered, then, how close i came to renting a safe-deposit box at the world trade center, in 1990, but instead i chose the post office box at rockefeller center
as a permanent mailing address, opting not to store my precious valuables at the mighty twin towers (because i had no precious valuables) and because a PO box seemed more versatile and useful anyway. i sometimes have trouble falling asleep over worries about what might happen should lightning strike, figuratively or literally. i have ludicrously sprawling backup plans for my data but i still imagine that a disruption of any link in the chain would take weeks to restore. i guess i need funding, so i can delegate and assign these concerns to skilled parties and remunerate them appropriately for their time. hah. who‘d give a piece of stick like this a fucking dime? actually i got funding for one of my web projects last week. it was pretty cool. random successful businessman contacts me out of nowhere with a sponsorship offer for a site that he likes, and within days the money arrives and all is good. i might use the $ to purchase a residency at an artist commune/colony near here, disdainful as i am of the zero-prestige which comes from purchasing a residency versus having it offered to you. purchased residencies are the the bailiwick of trust fund babies and talentless hacks, and should i gain admission to this i would never advertise it. but it could provide some value to me. and it‘s all about me, isn‘t it? isn‘t it?
