By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where and Eidolon named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wierd clime that lieth, sublime,
   Out of Space—out of Time.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
for the dews that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters—lone and dead,—
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

from Dream-Land
Edgar Allan Poe
1844
(complete work)

Haunted Poe was tremendous. It struck the right balance between farcical and grim without feeling too much like a haunted house. The costumes and decorations were good and ghastly. The details all felt right, like the slowly creeping vines, the bubbling mist, and the insectoid catacombs, but some of the bigger designs could've been more impressive. Prospero's masquerade, for instance, seemed a bit spartan. The actors were excellent, in particular the ghostly Poe (though his reading of The Raven threw me a bit—I'm used to a more Basil Rathbone-esque interpretation), and the murderer tormented by the heartbeat beneath the floorboards, who looked like he could explode at any second. Hands down, the best scene was a deliciously eerie epiphany of Poe's preoccupation with the death of his beloved. Even though the whole show lasted about 45 minutes, there was so much material left unscratched I could've probably gone another hour in there.

So began the pouring.

Light was weakening.

It was final.

A brief list of things I've been thinking about buying but haven't:

A bigger TV

More silverware

A car

The print editions of Order of the Stick

A new vacuum cleaner

One of those things you put underneath a rug to prevent it from sliding around on the floor

A new computer

Another CD-sleeve binder

Summer shoes

A smart-phone

A replacement alarm clock (to fix the fact that the display is invisible in the dark—not because I'm sick of the Celsius thermometer)

An updated copy of Quicken/QuickBooks

Bedclothes

A pennywhistle in the key of C.

For the one boy –
A story.
For the other boy –
A different story.

The Boyhood of Raleigh
Adrian Rice
after Millais

The episode “Playford Ball Countdown and Piano Rental” will resume following a short thought.

A lot of times I feel like I don’t practice playing the pennywhistle “enough.” I’d say that on a good day I spend about thirty minutes to an hour practicing old things I know and learning something new. On an okay day I just practice old tunes. On a bad day I don’t play it at all. I have more okay days than bad days and more bad days than good days.

I know a few musicians read this. What’s your routine? How do you work it? Does this even make sense to ask people who are, you know, good?

Oh, and you know what else? Been thinkin’ about getting a C whistle.

I know I just put up this whole thing about how the melodeon is the
coolest and how the world will be a better place once I get one or
whatever. But here is the awful truth: I am on fire for the
pennywhistle. It is hard for me to put it down. Just now I had to
promise it I’d be back soon when I came over here to type this.

Almost certainly the best $10 I’ve spent in a good long time. Even if
it had been one of those tunable, hand-crafted, solid African
blackwood whistles with a custom thumbhole that costs $300 and has a
two-year waiting period, it would still have been a deal with the
amount of use I’ve gotten out of this thing in the past two years.

SWM ISO musical instrument for possible LTR. IPT traditional music, WT consider other genres. Must be able to play many keys in many locations. WAA.

Favorite Moments on the First of May

Running around the gazebo instead of doing a hey. Number of children collided with in the process: almost one.

The look the security guard at Barnes & Noble gave me.

Swinging sticks at eighth graders while ever-so-slightly under the influence.

Leaping with no hands (safety -- who needs it?)

Watching the kids loving the fool.

Doing contra and morris dances in the cafe while dodging the waiter. As though we didn’t bring enough havoc to that place by our numbers alone.

Morris-Garland-Morris back-to-back-to-back.

Dancing Nutting Girl in Rittenhouse Square at the haggard end of exhaustion, when everyone was dead tired, and mustering the final reserves of energy to absolutely nail it better than any of us would have at dawn.

Intentionally mispronouncing words.

Somehow managing to be involved in every team that was dancing post-Belmont.

Honorable Mention

A couple of Bryn Mawr students' reaction to Longsword.

A Mixed Bag

The Three Musketeers set (ouch).

Waiting for breakfast ("You guys look like you're at a funeral.")

I have made some discoveries in the past couple of days. The ever-kind stowaway_geek lent me his 120-key piano accordion. It is crisp and clean and it has that slightly marbled look on its keys and I’m told it has some wolfish notes but, to be perfectly honest I think it sounds smooth and accordion-like. I can only really play it slowly. A properly played slow accordion’s sound should resemble that of a ghost sighing through a hollow tree, an alien flower exhaling, or a cathedral organ winding down after nightfall.

Of course I cannot play it anywhere near properly. See, I’m used to playing an instrument with six holes. The massive accordion, whose bulk is a subject I shall perhaps discuss later, has about a 30 keys and 120 buttons. When I played a wrong note on the whistle, I usually thought “oops, I did that wrong, let me try the correct one instead.” On the accordion it took me an hour to even play a wrong note because I was trying to figure out which keys are which.

Though at least with that side of the bellows I could figure it out. I am sure my attempts to decipher the 120 button chord side amused my neighbors at 11:30 PM last night.

The beast was stalking. Its spindly legs carried it over burnt metal and charred slag. It latched thin claws onto a pipe whose surface dimly pulsed with latent energy. Arm over arm it ascended as lightning returning to its clouds. It flashed by a tangle of copper mesh, a relic from wars fought generations ago. Many a brave one had been thwarted by the immovable, inedible metallic snare. This beast knew better.

In a moment it felt the cool smoothness of the surface at night. It had no fear in darkness. In the black obscurity nothing could see it, or follow it through the trackless labyrinths to which it could escape at a moment’s breath. At night it was free to plunder, pillage, and befoul all in its sight with ghastly deposits. A glimmer of malignancy flitted through its bestial synapses. Its intellect lacked, but it could revel like a dumb brute in the chaos and pollution its exploits would wreak upon civilization.

The true nature of the civilized and the rational were alien to the beast. It understood little more than to walk and to eat and to shit and to breed. But amidst the detritus of its troglodytic brain, deep in the unhewn bowels of its neural chassis, was the thought that sought to tear down the structures and works of civilization. With every chomp of the incisor, whether upon cornered insects or stolen crumbs, the beast believed it was one bite closer to gnawing away the keystone of the arch of humanity, whose bricks are knowledge and whose mortar is reason, and toppling the world itself into numb anarchy.

But none of this was on what passed for its mind. It through the hunting grounds, an ever-changing landscape of metal, glass and stranger substances yet more alien. Not once had the beast stalked these grounds for prey and encountered the same trees, the same towering reflectors, the same pools of swamp-water. Always was it different, and so it was today. The hunting grounds proved barren and defiled, made rank with compressed nodules of guano and coprolite. The beast’s skittering gait halted momentarily and the corners of its mouth pulled back revealing the fiendish incisors. Its pitch-dark eyes took in the ruin it had caused. Amidst dome of glass and tree of metal lay the fruits of its mightily labor. Across the barrens were strewn noxious and vile remnants. And upon the open plains lay—something new. The beast cocked its matted neck towards the odorous monolith, scribing its scent and shape upon primitive memory before the odors of fresh prey assaulted its chasmous nostrils. Hunger and thirst propelled it onward.

The beast did not know how it first reached the summit of the peaks. The twisting trail rose higher than the warm caverns were deep, and the trek was more arduous. But at the summit lay treasures beyond any beast’s ineffable dreams. Time passed rapidly and the beast could feel the wind-currents of the world shifting as it crested the peaks. And it was there on the plateau above the hunting grounds that it found its prize: a storehouse of leftover grain. The beast’s claws tore open the feeble door and it squeezed its mammoth bulk into the trash-chute of the incinerator where the crumbs and morsels remained when the larger pieces had been removed. There it worked itself into a squealing frenzy of chewing and squirming and sucking stone after stone of hardened flecks into its dripping gullet. The maw of the beast was as a whirlwind of saliva and vomit as the insatiable gut of the wretched beast cracked its whip upon its undeveloped brain. The appetite was all; existence was to feed.

The beast exited the refuse heap in a stuporous haze and descended from the peaks. Its bloated haunches made the steep decline more hazardous but the beast was cunning. It crept back across the open plains and again noticed the gray monolith jutting out of the ground. From within there was a most delectable smell. It was luscious and raw, like the dust of the earth from which all life is formed, but somehow crafted and delicate, as though massaged by unseen hands for ages in darkness before emerging and taking flight in utmost perfection. It was wholly unnatural, and wholly irresistible. The beast’s stomach spurred its brain towards the side of the stone-gray rock, where a dark opening emanated the delightful smell. The beast placed a greasy paw upon the floor of the cave within, sending tremors throughout the interior. It was unstable. Yet the scent drew the beast onward and onward and paw over paw it went upward into the unnatural darkness and the scent was stronger and stronger and stronger. Then with a crash that shook the foundations of its world, the gate slammed shut behind the beast with a sound that was at once the jaws of Thanatos snapping at its soul and the Supreme Sapience laughing as its fist closes upon primordial chaos.

And the beast would awaken in a place far away, free to revel in its own nature and never to trouble civilization again.

The real reason SEPTA should not get rid of paper transfers:

It's something I would do if I were put in charge.

The sweltering week. The week of smoldering asphalt. Windless week. The week of the never-evaporating.

My fan has become my best friend. Cold water, my god. Mosquitoes thrive on my feverish blood. I would wage unholy war upon the crawling and flying vermin, but my energy has fled for cooler climes. I get tired after walking for thirty seconds.

In the past, people must have fought wars to escape weather as stagnant and sapping as this. I wish I could as well.

I am normally a fan of a good, solid portmanteau. Yet there’s something about “ginormous” that kind of throws me off. Gigantic and enormous mean the same thing. Is there really a point to sticking the two of them together? If something is gigantic and it’s enormous, that seems to be the same as if it were just one or the other.

Still, it didn’t stop Merriam-Webster.

I feel the same way about “guesstimate.” And I’d prefer it if no one mentioned “crunk.”

I’ve realized that all I ever write about on this platform anymore is my annoyance with transportation. I’m still going to do that, only this time I’ve translated it into an indecipherable code.

His home had become a swamp. During his absence, the colossal stones which made up man’s marvel, the Great Road, had crumbled. The trees thickened their roots and like parasites the tendrils sought the heart of the rock. For centuries the mind had worked to layer conglomerate upon granite upon bricks of hornblende and monoliths of metallic osmium, and within weeks the rapacious, insensate forest had ground it to dust.

Bubbles breached the surface of a still pool and ripples lapped the fringes of moss and tails of lizards hanging off the shore. The stench and the heat and the tumult were overpowering. Armies of insects overwhelmed each other in root canyons. A tapir collapsed in a bush, victim of a sweltering chase. Swarms of howling birds fluttered overhead, flitting their dark green shadows where beams breached the canopy. Green was the color of the air and sky, the color of the frogs’ motionless eyes, the color of the ancient moss upon still older bark, the color of the airborne motes which once were the Great Road. Black was the color of the bubbles which now burst in the clear water. And every droplet that breathed its first and last upon the still surface was a thought of the deep below, the untouched autochthonous force whose hand moves nature, and whose memory has no beginning.

In case anyone is still wondering, the beastly commute I have described continues to endure, though perhaps less annoyingly. It reached rock bottom a couple of weeks ago when I attempted to reach an event in center city that started at 7:00 PM and was late for it. After missing three trains I began to scribble some venomous invective while on the most wretched bus ride I’ve ever experienced, but the more I thought about it, I couldn’t really muster any real anger.

I used to summon great globs of annoyance. I called it “hate” but it was really crystallized annoyance. Yet at some point in college I witnessed the same venom gushing from the mouths of others and henceforth I’ve been unable to truly muster a truly emotional beam of destruction. The irrational and illogical can demolished without guilt, but it’s harder now for me to focus on anything else. There was no illogic to me being late, it simply was.

I feel like I have had very little to say for the past month. This disturbs me a little.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, a mere eight months after first procuring a pennywhistle, I played for a dance.

It was “Balance the Straw” for the Renegade Morris team rehearsal.

Transportation Post Scriptum

One of the things I enjoy about my commute is that I often run into the Sports People. A while ago it was the Eagles people and now it’s the Phillies people. These festively colored and exuberant folks gather at Fern Rock Transportation Center (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one—though it does sound nicer than “Concrete Parking Lot Transportation Center”) to take advantage of the special express trains that run directly to the stadium. I enjoy these trains too because they get me home faster. As an aside, SEPTA employees often don’t know what to call these trains. Yesterday it was announced as a “Phillies Tripper,” which sounds like something else if you say it fast.

The Sports People themselves amuse me. Many of them have clearly never delved into the sordid operations of the Broad Street Line before. Yesterday there was a group of college-looking girls, one of whom remarked as the train arrived “ugh, orange? We get the ugly train.” Her friend replied that she thinks all of them are the same color. The usual sullen commuter crowd is not quite so entertaining.

I do most of my reading on the bus. Often I will try to read in another place, which is my couch. Only rarely do I succeed at this endeavor without eventually falling asleep against my will. I’ll think “oh, this book is so good, but the urge to close my eyes is overwhelming. Let me just try it for a second or two.” And then some amount of time passes, between one and five minutes, I imagine, and then I blurrily try to go back to the book. The only reason I think I don’t just fall asleep at that point is that I’m spending a lot of concentration on maintaining the mental illusion that I’m going to keep on reading the book, which means I’m holding it open with my hand. So my little rest wasn’t all that restful and I think “okay, I’ll just put my bookmark in the book and roll over so I’m more comfortable.” I guess I do this with the idea that I’m done reading but I don’t really want to go to bed but I’m not sure why I do it. It will no doubt surprise no one to know that at that point I wake up at 1:15 and all the lights are on and I’m still dressed.

Anyway, I thought I might mention the last couple things I read on the bus and sometimes on the couch.

Roughing It by Mark Twain. This book made me want to travel and was amusing. I feel like he was the master of the sardonic wit. If only my journal entries here could be so entertaining! The trouble with this book is that it also made me feel like the world is bereft of possible adventures, that Twain’s bygone age took with it the possibilities of America the unexplored, America the frontier. Any adventure I could conjure up in this, the age of information, would only be a kid’s trip across the street when stacked next to Roughing It.

Lyonesse by Jack Vance. Apparently my “thing” now is fantasy not done in Tolkien’s style. The story is relatively simple. It serves as a vehicle for moving between a series of folktale inspired encounters whose tones range from magical to mysterious, heroic to hilarious. In the end I suspect the series got a little carried away with itself, though it was certainly unlike anything I’ve read before.

In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say:
Long Summer loaded the orchards to excess,
And fertile lowlands lengthening far away,
In Lyonesse.

Came a term to that land’s old favoredness:
Past the sea-walls, crumbled in thundering spray,
Rolled the green waves, ravening, merciless.

Through bearded boughs immobile in cool decay,
Where sea-bloom covers corroding palaces,
The mermaid glides with a curious glance to-day,
In Lyonesse.
—Alan Seeger, Lyonesse

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. I’ve seen the movie for this and to me that film is the future version of Conan the Barbarian (interestingly enough, the score for both films was composed by the same man: Basil Poledouris): pure violence and sex. Many so-called serious science fiction fans, readers of “hard sci-fi,” objected to this interpretation. The novel was so much deeper, I am sure they said amongst themselves at their discussion groups. The film is so mindless, so adolescent-teenage-male, etc. I will not argue with the facts: the movie is ridiculous, yet oh so entertaining.

The book, on the other hand, is at its heart a very long description of Mr. Heinlein’s ideal socio-military implementation. This was pretty interesting for a while, and I really enjoyed the trials and travails of “future boot camp” (which, I’ll note, were the only parts of the book deemed worthy enough to make it into the movie). But after a while I truly ceased to care about who outranks whom on a starship and proper etiquette when your superior officer “buys it.” It’s possible I’m not military oriented enough to find it all fascinating and instead have to concentrate on remembering what the difference between a squad, a division, a battalion, and a unit is.

Possession by A.S. Byatt. Apparently my other “thing” is reading novels where you have to have a dictionary on-hand to understand what’s going on (though in the case of Starship Troopers some kind of army handbook might’ve been more apropos). The language used in this book, a love story between two Victorian poets, was tremendous. One could read the book and pine for the lost art of the letter, overtaken now by the “txt,” and lament that the death of language is the death of humanity, a slow unraveling of the mind’s dreams that will leave our race with naught but anemic lips that toil to chirp out straw thoughts. One could.

I also found myself sympathizing with the book’s obvious villain, whose crime was apparently having more money than the rest of the characters. And being American (though he’s from New Mexico—maybe that’s why I don’t hate him).

Anyway, that’s about all I can write about this.

( Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day )
There was a time when I cared a great deal about the danger of forgetting. I didn’t want to lose anything to an inadequate memory. I’ve become more lax about this. I used to save everything. Went to a play? Save the program. Went to a concert? Save the ticket (I still have some of those from eighth grade). Got a Christmas card? Save it (I don’t even want to know how far back my pile of those goes). It was like all those things were keys to doors in the mind. It wasn’t even that I wanted the objects themselves; I wanted to remember what I was doing when I got them. The same way an archaeologist can (or claims to be able to) piece together the lives of ancient Egyptians from their dusty relics, I wanted to be able to do the same with my own life. It was insurance against the awfulness of forgetting.

Now I’ve come to recognize the silliness of some of this. I threw out my collection of year-old Newsweek magazines and illegible movie ticket stubs. I now relish and savor removing items from my apartment (“oh, look at this huge pile of paper I haven’t touched in months. I wonder just how much of it I can throw away?”). It’s also possible to, you know, remember things without some kind of physical artifact. Lots of people use pictures for the same purpose. I don’t. I think a lot of times pictures inject a falseness into the thing you are trying to preserve. It limits the memory. If I go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower, I can try to remember everything about the experience. The hugeness of it, the clouds, the people walking by, the odors of the atmosphere. On the other hand, looking at the picture, the five-by-seven glossy rectangle, is nothing like remembering what it was like to be there. I also think that taking a picture lulls people (or me, at least) into a false sense of security. Like, “okay, got that picture taken, don’t need to remember anything else about this. My memory’s on film.” So I don’t go crazy about taking pictures of everything.

Digital memories are another thing entirely. Unlike the aforementioned huge pile of paper sitting my apartment, files on my computer are almost volumeless. So I still have very few compunctions about archiving every single bit of text ever directed to or from me ever since I learned how to send email, instant messages, chat messages, or anything else. There was one time, in a fit of what must surely have been madness (actually, I remember exactly: I was trying to set up a networked game of Heretic with my friends and I needed to free up a lot of disk space on one of my computers quickly) I deleted a bunch of log files that I still feel so utterly stupid and foolish for having done.

I don’t even really look at any of that stuff. I just like knowing it’s there. I feel like my experiences are safe from forgetting.

They aren’t, though. For all my trying, it cannot be denied: no one remembers everything. All our experiences gradually slip away as we are removed further and further from them. The crystal clarity of the present cannot be captured by any power known to man. All the transcripts, video recordings, journal entries, and—most valiant of all—human brains in the world cannot preserve everything in its perfect state. The black gulfs in our lives will wax without end, and the ineluctable tide of oblivion wash over all.

( Le Calmant )