My head is spinning, as it spin-span-spun on Monday, because I once again slept for almost 13 hours. Monday night I only slept 7 or 8, but this 13 hour routine is starting to wear me out. I always wake up feeling worse and more tired than ever. So much sleeping and eating to be done, how is there supposed to be enough time to do things? I don't know.
I think I'm going to buy a QuickCam for my PC today, if I can talk the pretty clerk at the software store into charging me $100, and not $149 for it. I'm more concerned with making her acquaintance than with obtaining her QuickCam, although I've been waiting for the Windows QuickCam to come out for quite some time now.
Man, something about sleeping so long just makes me feel both excellent and trashed all at once. Part of me wants to pull my face right off its head, the rest of me wants to withdraw into a dense wad of antimatter.
Any time I think that my work and employment situations might be getting a little hairy or a little uncomfortable (and this is not a common occurrence), I am pleased to learn that memos like this one circulate among employees at other companies in other cities. My friend Mike sent me this memo, which was e-mailed to "all female personnel" of a moderate-sized company in Florida. Reading it made me cringe, made me squeeze my face into objection.When I was in the 7th or 8th grade at the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa, the principal of the school came to our class in a fury to inform us that someone, presumably a student, had "defecated onto the floors and thrown their feces on the walls" of the boys room. Even then, I guess I was 12 or 13, I remember thinking that this whole lecture must be causing the principal a great deal of tribulation, because she had to know as well as anyone could know that this was the kind of thing we good old boys would reminisce about for the rest of our lives, and that every word she said would become the stuff of long and hearty laughs.
I don't know that the perpetrator was ever caught. It gives new life to the expression "caught red-handed," I suppose. Whatever the meaning of that person hurling his/her shit onto the walls, I know that the incident captured the imagination of us all, and it perpetually floated to the top of almost any round of wisecrack comments we bawdy lads were want to make during classes.
One in particular I always laughed at was when a teacher was going on about how demanding college is, and how none of us could imagine based on the work we were doing then (this was in the 8th grade) how massive was the workload at any respectable college (it was abunch of bullshit she was telling us). Then she said something about writing a masters thesis, and some guy threatened to "throw his theses on the wall." Bwuhahahahahahaha... It was the 8th grade. Not a lot has changed since then in terms of what I think is funny and what I am indifferent toward. During that same class the teacher told us about how Winston Churchill had ridiculed members of the press who commented on his frequent and ungrammatical use of dangling participles by branding their remarks "pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put." Muhahahahahhaahahah.
It was a catholic school, the Boys Academy of the Holy Names. We used to get yelled at for representing the school badly in social situations which had nothing to do with the school itself. Once a journalist wrote a restaurant review in the Tampa Tribune about a fancy-schmantzy restaurant near our school, and mentioned in her review that an "impartial review was impossible" because there were several students "from the nearby Boys Academy" who were "making a lot of noise and running around" the restaurant, and creating a variety of unspeakably immature distractions.
That same principal whose turbulent duty it was to tell us about the feces thrown against the walls was also obligated to come around and tell us that school policy dictated that any student who poorly represents the Academy, or who does something which puts the name of the Academy in a bad light, is subject to disciplinary action. I can't remember now if the feces hurling came first, and then the restaurant review, or if the two events could have been related in any way, maybe a malcontent 7th grader taking that restaurant review very seriously and blaming himself for the demise of that restaurant, then taking his anger out on The Academy by smearing his shit all over it like Bobby Sands was known to have done in his prison cells.
I'd always felt a certain softness for whoever was guilty of that "inexcusable" thing. I mean what if it had been an accident, and what if he was passively sitting there on the loo reading his Social Studies book and thinking he was done with his business only to find that after he got up and washed his hands he had the uncontrollable need to do it all over again, but with no warning the fecal matter came blurting out, and he only had time to rush halfway back to the stall and get his pants only partly released? Or what if he had actually stood at one of the urinals and his pants accidentally fell completely to the floor and instead of just peeing he got so flustered that he burst his bowels all over the place? Sensing that this was a dreadful accident, but not knowing what to do next, maybe he knelt down and tried to clean it up with his bare hands, and once he understood that he was holding a few ounces of his own feces in his hands, he became nauseous and repulsed and before vomiting all over himself and thereby making the situation 100 times worse, maybe he could only think to throw it into the trash, which as I recall would have been about 7 or 8 feet away. His eyes watering from the stink and his head screaming with fear of being discovered, he probably just pitched the shit across the bathroom while already halfway turned toward the toilet up into which he barfed his guts.
The whole incident may well have been so humiliating to him that the only thing worse would have been having the principal of the school, a prim, dictatorial nun with almost no hair, come stomping around to express her personal outrage at this terrible, terrible crime.
That, of course, is precisely what happened. She only gave her speech to grades 6-8, leading me to imagine that woman going into that bathroom and inspecting the scene, concluding that "this shit is too mature-looking, too robust to have come from the butt of anyone younger than 11 or 12 years old," then to tailor her lecture to each class and try to hide her own thoughts about who she thought did it, all the while becoming so determined to figure out who did this that she may have actually hired a coprophiliologist - someone who reads patterns in people's shit the way private investigators read fingerprints - to create a physical profile of the perpetrator's buttocks. This investigator would have studied the contour of the feces and examined whatever grooves and valleys there were along the sides of the shit, then used that information to determine the textural patterns of the hairs in the boy's anus; from that he could derive the exact shape and proportion of the boy's rectum, and from there he could crank up his Radio Shack TRS-80 and use it to produce a computer-generated composite sketch of the most likely physical appearance of the waistline which housed the buttocks which housed the anus which served as the front-end for the rectum which performed this famous act of defecation.
Having produced these amazing sketches with this amazing technology, the coprophiliologist would have meekly requested of the principal that she issue him an official warrant allowing him to photograph the butthole of every single boy at the Academy above the age of 11 who, within the requisite TRS-80-specified tolerance, matched the general physical profile he created from his teary-eyed studies of some anonymous kid's pile of shit. The principal would have informally scheduled a day for these photographs to occur, but refrained from making an official announcement until she had more time to study all these marvelous digital sketches of approximated boys' butts.
She would have the printouts with her the next day as she sat in her usual spot during our daily 10:15 AM recess. While we were all playing soccer, she would secretly compare those computer-manufactured butts to the flesh-and-bloody butts of all of us running around on the soccer field. While surveying the 75 or so candidates' rear-ends, she would remember a time in her youth, before she decided to become a nun, when she thought about being a psychic. She had quickly become disillusioned with the sleazy practices of palm-readers and psychics, but her interest in such practices was restored when she saw an episode of "Love, Sex, & Violence" on PBS which described the obscure but ancient practice of buttock-reading to determine people's fortunes. She saw videos of these wise old butt-readers using their specially-attuned hands to grope the buttocks of the curious, all of whom hoped for some spiritual insight and advice from the mind of one so wise as to know that it is a person's butt which is the window to their personality and to their future and to their past.
The principal would spend a long afternoon sitting on that bench, letting us all have three unexplained hours of recess while she meticulously scrutinized the rear-end of every single one of us, allowing enough time for each rear-end to demonstrate the gamut of its expressive range, giving each rear-end enough time in which it might assume a posture remotely similar to the one assumed by the perpetrator at the moment the crime occurred.
Having zeroed in on one particular butt, and having familiarized herself with the character and personality of that butt to a point where she felt comfortable to call it her friend, she would summon the skills she had derived from that PBS show and attempt to determine what kind of anger and what kind of attitude and what kind of brain was connected to such a butt for it to have been driven to such an unspeakable act. Having become familiar with the subtleties of all our butts, she hoped to catch one of them in a moment of weakness, in which its savage, raw underside was inadvertently exposed, and its capacity to shit in anger was incontrovertibly revealed.
All of us exhausted from the hours and hours of recess we had been allowed that day, the principal announces that we are free to go home, but to be sure to remind our parents about the Academy Parents Association meeting that night. Little did we know how thoroughly she had absorbed the work of the esteemed coprophiliologist, and little did we know of her conclusion that among us 75 candidates there were 4 butts which might possibly have performed that ghastly bowel movement.
The fervent, positively fanatical principal takes her thrilling discoveries and her information to the members of the Academy Parents Association, who are flabbergasted to learn that the principal of the school has informally planned a day in which all the students above age 11 will have their anuses photographed for official purposes. Nevertheless, the principal finishes her speech. Somehow the pictures are never taken. The perpetrator got away with it, and the work of he coprophiliologist is laid to waste.
Of course, such an investigation would never have gotten very far in the first place. The feces, as I understood it, was a mess, having been angrily hurled and smeared the way it was. Based on the post-partum mutilation of the feces, there was virtually no way even the most expert coprophiliologist could have derived any kind of a meaningful portrait of the perpetrator.
It would be the stuff of Academy legend, though, all of us lining up in the gym to get our assholes photographed by some very serious investigator.
Instead, I think that the principal's attention focused on what kind of student would do such a thing, and what he could have been thinking when he planned to do this. He would have chosen the time of day and the bathroom; he would have thought about it while eating dinner the night before, having scheduled his deed based on when he could most accurately and dependably predict a bowel movement the following day. Then he entered the bathroom at the appointed hour, removed his pants and carefully folded them over, placing them out of any range wherein they might be soiled. He closed the door to the stall (so as not to be interrupted), then leaned against the wall as his face assumed that expression of earnest concern which clamps every one of us virtually ever day of our lives; he felt a strange rush of exposure, realizing he was shitting freely into the open air and hearing the plopping noises and the sounds of friction caused by his fresh feces making bold contact with the cold tile. But he remained determined in his angst, not becoming flustered or reticent, instead stepping carefully away from the feces, cleaning himself up and then taking the feces into his own hand and following through on his mission by pitching it onto the tile walls at the opposite end of the bathroom, and then running running running all the way home or all the way back to class or all the way back out to the soccer field or out of his mind or out to wherever it is a person runs after committing such a violently anti-social act.
I don't know who did it. Many among us did a lot of mischievous things. Most of us were so sheltered that the importance of most of these things took on far more significance in our minds than they genuinely merited.
Even now, 13 years later (is that all, it seems like so much longer), I'm still nervous to talk about that school in anything but a glowing, reverential way for fear they'll castrate me and make me sing boy-soprano arias in front of the student body.
I seem to have actually won a protest I filed against the NY state dept. of taxation and finance. They wrongfully billed me for $661.18 in state taxes last year. It's hard to imagine that I could ever have enough money that I would be billed that much in state taxes. I looked at the paperwork and saw that they had made a mistake by placing the standard deduction amount into the box marked "savings accrued." So it made it look like I had collected $661 in interest off of my savings account, which would be quite remarkable for me, I think I actually have about $12 in savings right now, from which I may have collected about 50� in interest over the last 2 years. I filed a protest which stated that they, in fact, owed me about $90, and it took over a year but I finally got the check and today I got the written confirmation that no execution for the earlier collection warrant will be pursued.
3:58 PM too damn cold outside. I need to do something productive today. I wonder what it will be. was standing at 75th/York just a little while ago
10:36 PM
Say, this turned into a not-very-busy day. 10:30 has come and gone and I can't remember accomplishing one damn thing. Did order that QuickCam from a mail-order company, should have it tomorrow; it was too cold to walk to the store, and I'm not a very good bargainer, but I'll see if I can engage the woman at that store in a conversation about Pinball programs for Windows. A QuickCam'll be fun for a couple of hours, then it will just kind of gaze at me from behind the CD player with a steady, vapid interest.
Somebody downstairs is practicing piano in his apartment. I think his name is Dan. We don't seem to get along very well, but at least he's never asked me to pipe down with my practicing. I'm trying to tell what piece he's playing. I think it's Gershwin. Bah, he keeps stopping and starting, and I can barely hear him anyway. No, I can't tell what he's playing. No idea, but I'm sitting here for several moments now in between sentences listening. Ah, OK, it's not Gershwin, it's a gospel song. The tune is familiar but I have no idea of its name.
My piano is horribly out of tune, especially above middle C. Charles Ives heard a lot of out-of-tune pianos in his days as a church pianist. I always thought his specification that performers should use out of tune pianos in the performance of certain of his piano pieces was brilliant. He didn't do that, you know, simply to be "modern" or abstract. He wrote for out of tune pianos in an effort to capture the sounds of the music he grew up with, which included endless church-hymns played on countless pianos which were severely out of tune. But for Ives to write specifically for two pianos, one piano "tuned a quarter-step higher than the other," well that just invites all kinds of generic, perfunctory criticisms and bland expressions of outrage from the boring circles of music critics who dreamily imagine themselves as having power and clout among whatever generation of sad-sack composers and audiences they see themselves as presiding over.
