I saw receipt #238889 and did some research to see what that number might teach me. My findings follow.
Goliardo
This image is exactly 238889 Bytes, and comes from a series of photos titled La Posada Del Goliardo (The Inn of the Goliardo).
Relying on various automated translation tools I find that the word “Goliardo” “was used during the Middle Ages to refer to certain types of clerics vagrants and poor students pícaros that proliferated in Europe with the rise of urban life and the emergence of universities in the thirteenth century” source)
Deferring to English reference sources I find that our English word “Goliard” has a similar definition: “a wandering scholar in medieval Europe; famed for intemperance and riotous behavior and the composition of satirical and ribald Latin songs.”
I never thought to ask how Goliard Concerts (a local chamber ensemble) chose its name. Until now I thought Goliard and Goliardo etymologically connected with words meaning church bells, though I draw a blank trying to remember the word in my mind that sounded something like Goliard and had a meaning related to bells.
Further research into the meaning of “Goliardo” leads me to the film career of Goliardo Padova. According to numerous sources this actor played the painter in the Bernardo Bertolucci movie Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione).
SPFPA
Quantcast, a company describing itself as “the World’s Only Open Internet Ratings Service,” recently ranked SPFPA.org at #238,889 in its index detailing audience reach of Internet web sites.
SPFPA (Security Police Fire Professionals of America) describes itself at “The First Line of Defense Against a Terrorist Attack
Representing over 30,000 Security Police Professionals Nationwide.
According to WHOIS records, SPFPA.org is based in Roseville, Michigan. The Mayor of Roseville is Harold L. Haugh.
Mayor Haugh has been married for 37 years with four adult children and three grandchildren.
Joe Viola
Parabox Media’s Product ID# 238889 is Angels Hard as They Come, “a melange of sex, violence, leather, and souped-up Harleys with a note of topicality added in by having some of the bikers dress and behave like hippies.”
This film was directed by Joe Viola, a director who shares his name with a woodwind professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
The Joe Viola Era is an essay which includes this photo of Joe Viola and several of his saxophone students playing their instruments in a stairwell.
Beef Chocolate
Food Down Under’s recipe #238889 is for a “Spanish Roast.”
I read the list of keywords as a complete sentence, and mis-read one word and thought this tagline was “Beef Chocolate meets Spanish.”
I just ate some chocolate, and later I will eat some meat, but I am not an adventurous culinary explorer such that I would choose to eat a single concoction of Beef Chocolate, such as a Beef Chocolate Bar or a Chocolate Meatloaf.
“Chocolate Meatloaf” sounds more like the name of a 1970s acid rock band than an edible cuisine.
It reminds me of the “Meat Shakes” hoax which I and many others fell for.
Meat Shakes were, purportedly, milk shakes with various types of finely ground bits of meat mixed in. The menu included Steak Shakes, Pork Shakes, Vanilla Ham Shakes, and a Green Salad tossed with “Meaty-Mystery Bits!”
The Locations page of their web site listed a location at 51-35 Northern Boulevard in Queens, and I admit that one day on my way to the Staples up the street at 51-10 Broadway I did keep an eye out for the Meat Shake store only to find a McDonald’s at that address. The presence of a McDonald’s further illustrates the depth of the hoax: A closer look at that list of locations page shows that most if not all of the addresses actually lead you to a McDonald’s.
“Meat Shake” is a song by the band Ugly Duckling. As a promotional gimmick they set up the hoax web site for a fast food chain named Meat Shake. The song (excerpt here) parodies the fast food business.
Piaractus brachypomus
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Specimen ID #238889 is the Piaractus brachypomus. According to the USGS, “Many Piaractus taken in U.S. waters have been misidentified and reported as the red piranha Pygocentrus nattereri.”
The USGS further adds that the Piaractus is a popular aquarium fish, and its appearance in non-indigenous waters is likely the result of aquarium owners dumping the fish into lakes and rivers.
One such non-indigenous find occurred on September 5, 1993, at the retention pond at the Stoneridge Apartments in Gainesville, Florida.
It is possible though far from certain that this image, borrowed from Gainesville-Rent.com, shows the retention pond into which the USGS says that non-indigenous Piaractus was found in 1993.
What follows is a list of incidents known or said to have occurred on or in relation to September 5, 1993 (the day a Piaractus was found at the retention pond at Gainesville’s Stoneridge Apartments):
- Dave Perry read the Cleburne, Texas Times-Review
- Toastie watched some NFL football and then went to the Perkins Library at Duke University.
- Theresa A. Mullins entered the room of an elderly woman who was attempting to hold onto the bathroom sink to keep from falling
- Moishe Miller called Sally Weiss
- David V. Herlihy claims Pierre Lallement invented the bicycle
Coming in at exactly 238,889 bytes is the scanned image of the Clark, Lucinda C. through Climer, Bertha page of the Index to the Applications Submitted for the Eastern Cherokee Roll of 1909 (Guion Miller Roll).
According to Archives.gov, the Guion-Miller Index “includes the names of all persons applying for compensation arising from the judgment of the United States Court of Claims on May 28, 1906, for the Eastern Cherokee tribe.”
This index includes names of all who applied. Those rejected are on this list with those accepted.
U.L.
Comment No. 238889, in response to Zenab Eve Ahmed’s “Chastity and choice,” begins: “I’m waiting for your reply to my comments on this thread. I have no intention of disappearing. Meanwhile, you keep harping on the Quran vs the Hadith, as if the argument somehow validates your viewpoint.”
The posts ramble on in that disembodied way of most comment boards, and includes reference to a St. Petersburg Times story about a Tampa woman’s conversion to Islam.
The St. Petersburg Times is located in downtown St. Petersburg at 490 1st Ave South, about 5 minutes away from Tropicana Field.
I grew up across the bay in Tampa, but have not been to “The Trop,” which is the home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Rays have consistently ranked among the worst teams in baseball for all of the franchise’s existence, but my baseball memories of Tampa are of a higher order.
I went to at least one spring training game at Al Lopez Field, a baseball field that I think was located on Dale Mabry Highway where Legends Field is today.
The New York Yankees play their spring training games there today, but when I was a kid that field hosted pre-season games for the Cincinnati Reds, awesomely known to my 12 year old self as the “Big Red Machine”.
At one game in 1978 or 1979 the Reds played the Kansas City Royals at Al Lopez Field.
My clearest memories of that game follow:
- Johnny Bench hit a home run, and waved to the crowd as he rounded third base and headed to home plate. For years I bragged about the all-American experience of having seen Johnny Bench hit a home run.
- A woman sitting behind me made fun of U.L. Washington’s name. Throughout the game she repeatedly muttered “Yew Ell” in a sarcastic hillbilly droll. I had a U.L. Washington baseball card, and to this day I can not see that card or contemplate Washington’s name without hearing that woman’s voice.
- Yew Ell
- I also remember my dad sitting next to me, on my left.
Tasty Pizza
Receipt #238889, the receipt which started this journey, is from Tasty Pizza. The receipt documents my purchase of a double pepperoni pizza, ordered for delivery.
I do not frequent Tasty Pizza much any more, and I have no explanation as to why. They make good pizza, and have been in business for many years now.
I probably lack Tasty Pizza in my life because they are not located on my way to anywhere else.
Summary
I hope you enjoyed this journey through the number 238889.
∞
I am trying to avoid distraction today. It is not the big things that distract me. Tiny distractions cause enormous drains on my focus and energies.
Accomplishment, a wise man once told me, is simply a matter of doing things.
I learned this from a composer who described his decision to move to a shack in Vermont to write the great American opera.
He did what many composers do: “I wrote for a couple of hours one day, maybe an hour or two the next. For a couple of days I didn’t do anything.”
He had Spartan business cards printed up with only his name and the word “Composer” underneath. No phone number, no address. He handed them out while attending pretentious avant-garde concerts to which he could scam tickets.
I don’t know what prompted his breakthrough (or if his eureka moment came from a single incident) but he wisely realized that the bulk of his time spent “being a composer” included little time actually composing.
“Composers compose,” he discovered. “One day I realized that if I wasn’t composing 10 or 12 hours a day 6 and 7 days a week then it was just a waste of time.”
His statement impressed me with its dumb simplicity. It further suited my belief that few things in life are complicated.
What is the difference between writers and non writers? Writers write every day. Non-writers write as the mood strikes. To put it another way, writers write and non-writers do not.
The difference between photographers and non photographers? Simple. Photographers take pictures, non photographers do not take pictures.
Am I a composer? I was a few weeks ago, but not today. I might allow myself 24 hours of composerly afterglow in the event that I composed for several consecutive days.
If I continue to write all day today and every day this month I might call myself a writer in January.
At what level of pettiness need such distinctions be made? Perhaps among real writers it comes at dust-jacket time.
(I must stop using “perhaps.” It is an uppity sounding bit of hokum).
For most humans I think the distinction between what you are and what you are not is based on the existence of a paycheck for your efforts.
As much as that composer’s experience impressed me I came to question the idea of life’s all-encompassing commitments. I pondered with some dread the “Chosen Path” down which one travels for reasons eventually forgotten.
To be one thing in life, and one thing only, is that honorable? Is that righteous? Is there only room in life for one distinction?
I dated a woman who said, repeatedly, that all she wanted out of life was a career as a dancer.
She made her point with stuttered emphasis: “I want to be a dancer. That. Is. All.”
She talked about it as one would describe quitting smoking, or saving money to buy a house: A single definitive goal.
That relationship seems like a lifetime ago, but it is not. She was so skinny it was like going in on a birdcage. Our conversations had a similar caged-in quality.
Years later I hearkened back to birdcage girl when I, chagrined, discovered that thickly ribbed prophylactics produced a similar effect. That was with a woman I never connected well enough with to share such an observation.
I thought of writing a letter to the makers of that product, suggesting they call it “The Birdcage” and explaining why.
OK, now I am distracted.
I have been thinking lately about those chosen paths, and how the identities we assume in life are often determined by a small number of experiences within a narrow span of time.
I sometimes hear people describe moments in their lives when they knew this was It. This is what they wanted to do, what they wanted to be, where they wanted to go. These accounts are usually told with a sense of triumph, as if the greatest single mystery of life — what shall I do with my time here — had been solved.
These accounts can be genuinely stirring, but once in a while these stories are accompanied by echoes of ambivalence. Bullet points of events and milestones delivered in unintentional deadpan, it makes one think life is never more than a list.
Most people I know have an Everything. That Everything is usually sex or gender. Other people’s everything is politics, religion, or even sports.
I do not have an Everything.
Most of the time I do not even have an Anything.
∞
I am, to paraphrase one of the greatest lines ever written, typing blind.
“I am writing blind,” wrote the Kursk sailor whose submarine had sunk to the bottom of the sea, slowly suffocating all on board.
Motivated by what none seem to know, but confronting that ghastly fate the sailor found pen, paper and the need to write.
I am not blind in any such dramatic way. I am not writing from the bottom of the sea. I am not trapped in a coal mine or waving for help from the top of a doomed building.
It is, I accuse myself, mere bluster to announce myself this day by robbing that Russian sailor of his words — words which startled me then as now.
My blindness is more of a legal designation. A technicality. I am typing without corrective lenses, making this keyboard a blur and the computer screen a streaky blob.
It is an ascetic experiment, perhaps, to start my days with no artificial assistance. Gradually I allow myself the trappings of civilization. My civilization.
Colors are more beautiful without corrective lenses. I have never owned glasses through which colors look as nuanced and sweet as they do without.
It is an experiment in silence, perhaps. Of late I am clearing out my spaces, physical and mental. Silence is not always what I hear but what I see. The physical detritus may look like so much junk, but I find the physical trappings of one’s life truly are its mental furniture and its mental noise. Most of the objects formerly in this room are either gone or stashed in another room, leaving a space of silence for me to look into.
I try to start each day in silence, and in a place of no technology. No radio, computer, television, or blinking lights. The only exception I must make is my piano, which is digital.
This morning I plucked through my current re-fascination, Chabrier’s Idylle, feeling like a caricature for craning my neck to get my eyes an inch or so from the score to read the passages not memorized.
At my first real job in New York I sat at a computer and, having never really used one before (I lied to get the job) I typed blind into a bottomless little window. I made the text too small to read. It was visible only as a squall. Forgetting the words as I typed them I imagined myself creating a time-capsule, my experiences scratch-encoded for future technologies to read.
If typing is not as valuable a skill as before then I wish it at least felt more viscerally satisfying. The thunder and ruckus of an old typewriter is not waiting for release from these cheap plastic computer keyboards, though a line of wildly expensive novelty gifts claim to emulate the feel of the old typewriters.
∞
Ah hah. I just did the Amsler Grid test for the first time in too long. I know I was avoiding it.
The Amsler Grid test helps screen for symptoms of macular degeneration and, in my case, any worsening of the condition.
It has been too long between tests for me to say what it might mean, but it looks a little bit worse. Not a lot worse. A few more splotches of a different consistency than I remember from before, though some of the bigger splotches appear gone or less pronounced.
My one-year-after appointment, in which we may determine if I need the surgical procedure, is scheduled for next month. I might schedule the appointment sooner.
I do not worry about it much. Blindness (which would take a long time to arrive via this condition) might actually suit me. Going deaf, on the other hand, would make me instantly go ape shit. I could not live without sound.
I seldom talk about it with friends. I have found it impossible to clearly distinguish between macular degeneration and other more common eye problems. No, I can explain the difference clearly, but as with most places in my life I simply do not talk loud or fast enough to fully express a concept before getting interrupted and talked over.
Macular degeneration is rare but hardly unique among people my age. As a regular listener to the Paul Harvey radio program (and as someone who does not fit the demographic for that program) it is perhaps ironic that I would be tagged with this problem. Paul Harvey regularly promotes products that claim to slow or halt the progress of MD. His promotion of these products is clearly targeted toward the elderly. The Amsler Grid which I keep on my shelf is a sheet of paper commonly carried around by folks in their 80s, an age range I hope never to reach.
Some of my earliest memories of the house I grew up in include Paul Harvey. My father, driving me somewhere, would change the radio from whatever station it was on to catch Paul Harvey’s mid-day spot.
Then as now, Harvey would introduce absurd stories about bungled robberies and Chinese women growing horns on their heads with the same steely, holier-than-thou voice he uses when talking of illegal immigrants wanting the same rights as “Us. U.S.”
Us. U.S.
For as many times as I’ve heard Paul Harvey say those words with the deliberate cadence he applies uniquely to that phrase, I have to say that it looks strange as written text.
Us. U.S.
The phrase does not look like it sounds. It would look spitty and indignant if it looked like the way Paul Harvey says it. The esses are curvy and wobbly, not demonstratively righteous and unassailable.
Paul Harvey tells some tall tales. He recycles or re-purposes urban legends at times, particularly in his closing “For what it’s worth” coda.
I do not mind this. I detect the character of a Santa Claus or a story-telling grandma who everyone knows spins yarns to make the grandkids happy. But even the youngsters know these lies when they hear them.
∞
When I can not sleep my first trick is to breathe through my fingers, then through the palms of these hands.
That calms my mind and then my body.
This technique often fails, though, at such times when I bolt awake early in the morning or the middle of the night.
This happened last night. My brainstuffs, twitchy and warring, sent flashcackles of shutup through my head.
I have read that blindness in humans is not dark but red. Red waves. Pulsating veins. Endless and infinite patterns heaving and whoring. The only darkness is not blindness but sleep, or death.
I think about blindness when, trying to force sleep, I shut my eyes and keep them shut, summoning and perhaps goading into action the red pools of mush that pour through the thin coat separating one’s vision from the world.
As an exercise in forcing sleep I interpret the transmogrifications, as a cloudgazer might do while lying in the grass staring into the sky.
Yesterday morning I was restless and wide awake at too early an hour. I shut my eyes and, as seems typical, the first image that formed was of a woman’s breast, her hand partly covering it. It faded lingeringly like the ocular shock of a flashbulb.
I waited for her to move her hand, but the hand evaporated. The breasts became telephone cables, then snow boots, then some kind of dead tree. Two breasts formed, no hands covering them. I last remember a shape approximating a screaming face, similar to the album cover for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Strangely, this image seems to have sent me back to sleep.
Staring into the back of my eyelids usually reveals non-descript patterns: Amoeba-like squalls reminiscent of a 1970s light show or the bioluminescent phenomenon I saw as a child in the canal off Old Tampa Bay.
It was one of the questions of my youth: what are these sensations called.
In high school I learned the answer: Phosphenes.
I am told that pot, LSD, and other such influences can intensify the phosphenes, but in my experience nothing has made them more intense than simple lack of sleep.
The most memorable drug-induced visions I had were in college. Too much pot too fast had me seeing the words that others spoke. Those words, flitting about like worms on a sidewalk, assumed shapes and colors appropriate to their meaning. Sometimes these forms suited the tone of voice used to speak them.
Words spoken with a sneer had orange fire-of-spit underneath, and wriggled limp from the speaker’s mouth to the floor where they disintegrated into the carpet.
Slogans and come-ons spoken by television commercial voices stampeded through the room like a bucking bronc.
Sentences spoken quickly were the most exciting. The sentences, too small for all they tried to contain, shattered. The words blasted out in many directions forming a solar system of incoherent words circling the ambitious suns that caused the explosion.
