strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Apr 28 04: checking in
Paul has been in Memphis with his family over the last few days. I’ve been keeping busy by filling my days with jury duty—criminal case—and my nights with large doses of THE INVISIBLES. I got out the trade paperbacks and read the whole go over the last 36 hours. Ow, my head. The more linear bits are still totally brilliant, and the less linear bits are still…well, they still suggest total-brilliance-if-you-could-only-figure-out-what-was-going-on.
On the other hand, I wrote a new short story as well, plus a poem that may have some good bits in it. So maybe it wasn’t a completely reckless undertaking. I may post the story in a day or two.
Until then, go read about Japan.
Apr 17 04: déjeuner sur l’herbe
Today was the first day of spring (observed).
This morning I dug out my shorts and sandals, and then Paul and I took Robin (back in town for the weekend on Oxford business) down to the garden store. We bought herbs—lemon thyme, sage, lavender, rosemary, lots of basil—and planted them in the window boxes. We picked up sandwiches and ginger ale and extravagant chocolate-chip cookies and walked up to the Sheep Meadow and sat on the grass. We watched small children run in circles. We observed the shirtless men at play. (The latter were, I confess, more interesting.) We smelled the turf; we felt the breeze. We dozed upon a blanket as the sun ambled amicably over our heads. Life was good.
But isn’t it always?
Apr 9 04: drive-by epigrams
I’m so thrilled whenever anybody leaves a comment on one of my blog entries that I go rushing off to read it. Who could it have been? What did they have to say? Is it somebody I know? Or a total stranger wandered in from who-knows-where?
So when I saw that somebody had commented on a posting that was over a year old—from the earliest days of the blog, when I was swimming at the Games in Sydney—you can imagine my excitement. The new comment was at the bottom, from a person I’d never met: one Brockway Kim.
Who? I’d never heard of this person. And the content of the posting was equally mysterious. Just a pithy little sentence that either (a) had no real connection to what I’d been talking about or (b) was delivering some sort of extremely oblique compliment. A drive-by epigram.
What else could I do? I googled. One of the other Brockway Kim hits provoked an array of reactions:
- Hey, look! A Clay Shirky reference! Yep, he’s still out there…
- Huh. Brockway Kim doesn’t seem to add much to any conversation. Just these little phrases…
- That’s unexpected…Steve Espinola does this sort of Zen commentary as well? How funny is that? Paul knows that guy…he had that music-happening thing down on the Lower East Side a while back. Played the electric tennis racket.
- Aw, crap. This stuff is just spam, isn’t it?
Yup. I had hoped that perhaps it was some sort of act of DaDa, but no. It’s just spam. In my case, my anti-comment-spam mechanisms stripped out the URL it was trying to peddle….leaving us with an interesting bottle from which the rancid contents had been drained.
I guess we can just leave the bottle on the windowsill for now.
(Oh. And the quote is from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As it turns out. At least the spambot’s drawing from a good database.)
Apr 6 04: ecce puellula
Okay, I’ve addressed the Bad Uncle thing. You may now ooh and aaah over my delicious niece, who is the cutest thing ever, in the photo galleries.
Go on, what are you waiting for?
Apr 5 04: consumer reporting
Anybody in the market for a new laptop bag? Even if you’re not, please allow me to recommend one. Just trust me on this and make with the clicky. (Via BoingBoing.)
Apr 3 04: shocking development
News flash: Andy and Paul bought a couch today. Sort of a sagey-green one. It will go in the living room. The old one will be given away to a good home; if you are a good home for the old couch, please make yourself known. Delivery will take place sometime mid-June.
That is all.
UPDATED FOR CLARITY: By ‘delivery,’ I meant the arrival of the new couch. You’ll have to come pick up the old couch yourself. Apologies.
Apr 2 04: note to self
You, Andrew, are a bad uncle. Your delightful niece is nearly a year old and do you have a gallery dedicated to her? No. No, you do not. You haven’t put anything at all in your photo gallery since before she was born.
Rectify this straightaway.
Apr 1 04: yet another NY moment
Oh, and just now a parade of Mitzvah Tanks went up Sixth Avenue and made a right at the park. At least fifty white Winnebagos in an unbroken single file ten blocks long, with police escorts and sirens and everything.
You know, I’m beginning to suspect that the Rebbe may not be coming back. Do you think this is starting to occur to the Lubavitchers? And if so, what do they do now?
something good happens
So I just got off the phone with the Assistant DA who handled the attempted-rape incident that happened beneath my window a while back.
The perp pled guilty. Two years in the state pen, followed by ten years as a registered sex offender. End of story.
Although I guess it isn’t the end of the story. The perp’s story will go on, and in what way I can’t imagine although I hope that it ultimately involves him putting something good back into the universe. The victim’s story is mysterious. What little the ADA could tell me about her was that she’s local to my neighborhood, and that she still has no memory of the event, and that she has no telephone and has chosen to have little to do with the case and would prefer to move on as if it never happened. If she doesn’t remember it happening…well, I guess it’s worth a shot, and more power to her.