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| Goodbye, Sweet Machine
I'm thinking about not writing in this blog anymore. Can I tell you a little bit about it? I think I will. I started writing entries WAY BACK in the summer of 2004 when I was working in the curriculum office at the university. I would get in at 8am and hang around until 10:30 when Dr. David Merryl, the English Professor with a lazy eye, would come in and tell me to cut out clippings from the newspaper. That was the extent of my work there, cutting up the Chronicle of Higher Education. Sometimes it would rain when I was doing that.
I didn't have anything to do during that few hours, so I usually walked down the hall of the Admin building and got styrofoam coffee from somewhere. The computers in the office were HP desktops with Avery labels on the monitors that read ADMIN-112. I was clean-shaven then, and had black tennis shoes. Our dog Sam was still around. I didn't have a car, a cell phone, or a silver ipod. I lived at home during the summers. I started writing on DiaryLand because Naomi Arnold wanted me to.
http://thelawnrobot.diaryland.com/030819_9.html
Now it's 2008, almost two in the morning and the windows are open. It's windy, and rain keeps wetting the screen and my curtains. I can hear shutters and corrugated aluminum fences rattling and banging in gusts of wind that come out of nowhere like sudden sobs and shake the loose wings of houses, spinning rusty weathervanes in circles. Midnight birds are spiraling overhead, trying to steady themselves. Sometimes when the wind blows so hard, it sounds like a great crowd of people running in back Reebok tennis shoes, like they're coming from a great distance on the wind to warn me about something, but the sounds end abrupty and fades out into the sound of windchimes and a newspaper skittering across the street below.
Looking back on everything, it feels like I would have been better off writing emails. Most of the entries felt more like personal messages than actual updates on my activities anyway. So if you're a real person and want to write emails back and forth, that would be better. Maybe I'll approach you one day.
You are in my dreams always,
- Andy
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| Lounging 'neath the Sycamore Tree
It was a cloudy, historic sky today as I rested my bones ‘neath the quiet of a rose garden in Old City, a rose garden planted by the Daughters of the American Revolution. To get to this spot, I had to walk through Washington Square Park, where a Sycamore tree is planted that was taken to the moon when it was just a seedling, in 1971. Aptly, it is called the “moon tree.”
In colonial America, Washington Square Park was used as a burial ground for strangers, the homeless, epidemic victims, slaves, and catholics. One 18th Century historian called the place “sorrowful” and admitted that the only joy that the park ever saw was when, once a year, thousands of freed slaves from Philadelphia would gather around bonfires, singing in the tongues of their Guinea ancestors and dancing to the same, pounding their feet on the earth that covered over the thousands of dead and forgotten. In the morning, they would come out and adorn the soil with flowers and bottles of rum.
I walked to New Jersey a few days ago. I had to cross the mighty Delaware by way of the Ben Franklin Bridge. It was beautiful on the bridge, the sky as blue as Atlas, a clear and open land between the twin monsters of Philadelphia and Camden. At the center of the bridge, at the highest point above the water, there was a copper plaque set in stone that read: COMMEMORATING THOSE WHOSE LIVES WERE LOST IN THE BUILDING OF THIS BRIDGE.
There was an ice storm here a few days ago. I was returning home from Megin’s cool house with my hands in rabbit fur pockets and icicles on my hood when I noticed a tow-truck hauling the corpse of a Ford Taurus behind it whose front end had been smashed in a wreck. No doubt the tow-trucks were busy that night rescuing smashed-up cars, taking them home, or at least a garage. But it was strange to me, because it seemed likely that the trucks themselves could spin out of control, there on the slick, and slide headlong into a damage of their own. It was sad thinking of all the cars on the road that night, all powerless against the ice-storm, crashing into houses and Fed-Ex depositories, falling in heaps at the feet of telephone poles. Some days were meant for staying indoors, I guess.
It would have been good if the astronauts who took the Sycamore seed to the moon in 1971 had kept it there, adapting it to the low gravity and lack of oxygen. I like to think that if that tree had by some miracle survived and reproduced, we could look up at the sky sometime in the future while swinging on some front porch, playing jaw-harp and tangerines, and see the moon as green as wonder hanging like a beach ball above our knocking heads.
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| BusinessPop
Most of you already know that the Music of Today has come a long way from the stuffy, conservative, family-value centered music of our parents' generation. We all remember sitting around the record player in our parents' den listening to such stodgy "classics" as Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Brain Eno, and No Doubt when we would have rather been listening to something that really MATTERED to us.
Well, since you're in the swim with Billboard Charts and current radio trends, I shouldn't have to tell you twice about the exciting new developments in popular music that have literally been taking the world by storm, shocking and thrilling music fans all the way from Orlando to Catalina Island. "So what's there to get all fussy about?" you may be asking yourself. Well shut up, everybody, it's "BusinessPop!"
Here are the top 15 BusinessPop tracks for this week, including the top pick for next week.
 | MICHAEL PERFECT & THE SMOOTHE-STREET BAND #1. JazzyFunkyKool
#5. Sweet n' Low Sunrise
#7. Pineapple Rag |  | LUVTRAQ #2. End User License Agreement
#3. It's More Than Just Love, It's Progress
#18. Nasdaq Rock! |  | CONNIE DAUGHERTY & THE PANTYHOSE #4. Cryin' on your shoulderpad
#6. Cryin' at the Arby's
#8. Pantsuit Junction
#21. Funky Side Up |  | CONNIE DAUGHERTY & THE PANTYHOSE #20. Funky Side Up (remix) |  | DANNY VALUE & THE CASUAL CREW #11. "Continental" |  | MICHAEL PERFECT & THE SMOOTHE-STREET BAND #9. Funky Lil' Ford Taurus
#10. Wall Street Blitz |  | THE SILK SHIRTS #13. Nicorettes and Chocolate Milk
#17. I Put a Spell On You (I Put a Rufie in Your Martini) |  | LUVTRAQ #12. End User License Agreement
#16. Get on the Dance Floor and Shake Your Hands
#19. Touchin' Your Tushie at Nokia Center |  | LOVE MANUAL (VARIOUS ARTISTS) #?. Lunch Break! |
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| Recently, Sleep
Helmet
Here are some things I feel like
mentioning:
- Josey has recently cried
during, and because of, a Pedigree dogfood
commercial.
- I
recently listened to the song "Kiss From a Rose on the Brain" by Seal
when I was taking a shower.
- Lonnie was recently writing essay questions for the CLEP
test and came across this reference to an academic article about
raves:
- "A rave can be a hard-core techno-blast; you just have to
find out about it in time. By: Shea, Christopher. Chronicle of Higher
Education, 5/12/93, Vol. 39 Issue 36, pA39, 2p, 3bw; Abstract:
Describes an all-night partying craze among students called `raves.'
Aura of secrecy; Origin; Maintaining an illusion of an outlaw culture;
Rave as a genre of music and as a state of mind; Drug use in raves;
Returning to childhood; Escapes offered on the dance
floor."
- I recently left a candle burning in my room or 36 hours.
When I was in my sleeping bag on the floor, it would make a gentle
flickering on the ceiling the way a fountain in a mall makes the
ceiling glow with reflections from wishing
pennies.
- I
recently found out that Lauren Fatzinger is a notorious slepwalker.
According to sources, Mrs. Fatzinger allegedly saw a light in the attic
in the middle of the night and went up to find out why. She found her
daughter standing in the middle of the attic with her arms above her
head, fast asleep. When Mrs. Fatzinger asked Lauren what she was doing,
she replied, "I'm looking for my
friends."
- Mike Gerkovitch recently killed a unicorn. He had flourescent blood on his hands for hours.
- I've recently been wanting to build something called a "sleep helmet," although I don't know what it will do. You can help me! We can build it together.
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