Around the corner from my place resides a fence that contains a message hastily scribbled in once bright orange silly string that has faded to white:
I think the shapes are hieroglyphics of some unknown underground language:
You know that feeling you get when you just woke up from a dream where you were on a long road trip on an old army-issue motorcycle with two side cars–one on the left, one on the right; the trip that started at that small ski resort in Nebraska, where you stayed because you could afford their low summer rates, enjoyed the silent calm, and reveled in the adjacent antique/thrift store until the mood turned because your cousins decided to steal antique radios from the store–radios that couldn’t even tune AM stations let alone FM–and the sweet old lady running the store reminded you of Katherine Hepburn, but not so harsh, so when your cousins decided they had to kill her to keep their worthless haul out of the police spotlight, you, in your infinite fairness and civility, thwarted them by making her an unwilling accomplice in your unnecessarily dramatic escape plan, only to see the store burst into flames in the tiny round mirror on your side car, a side car that would eventually be occupied by Woody Allen as your road trip traveling fellows morphed from familiar cousins to unfamiliar directors, unrecognized TV stars, and beautiful baristas from your local cafe; this was in the wooded mountain roads of West Virginia as you made your way to some southernly, unknown destination, and it was shortly after this that the majority of your crew, four of the five people on this double sidecar motorcycle, decided they had enough of Woody Allen and released the pin holding his sidecar to the motorcycle and watched as he careened into the woods and down the mountain to a horrible death accompanied by that whine that we’d all grown annoyed with but was now splitting our sides; this act was shortly followed by the decapitation of the unrecognized TV star by a low hanging limb that, ironically, tree-cutting crews were making their way towards, and it was during this event that you decided to pull over, unload the decapitated body of that unrecognized TV star onto the side of the road and cover it with some of the freshly cut branches, then, when returning to the motorcycle thinking you had the two lovely baristas to yourself, a male member of the tree-cutting crew insisted on joining your road trip, but you wouldn’t have it and in the midst of your heated argument the aforementioned unembodied head rolled between you and the interloper, who bent over to see what it was, giving you enough time to abscond with the women? You know the feeling, right? I wish it wasn’t so fleeting.
Friday was spent in multiple locations, starting in Rochester, then to Gowanda, then Buffalo, and back to Rochester.
In the morning I started my day with the intention of biting the hand that feeds, which is to say I felt compelled to join the anti-war protesters on campus as they gathered around the military recruiters visiting us today. Compelled because of the Solomon Amendment. In short, the Solomon Amendment requires that any institution that accepts federal funds has to allow military recruiters on site or have the federal funds for research stopped completely; I interpret this as nothing less than the taste of military issue leather in my mouth as I am sprawled out on the ground trying to yell uncle. As more and more high school graduates enter college the military has redirected their recruitment focus on colleges. The most chilling document that blurs the line between commodity and humanity has to be Policy Options for Military Recruiting in the College Market. You can read the whole document, complete with linear regressions applied to their data in order to calculate the minimum change that will get more soldiers out of the college market. Chilling.
This is not to say I am against the military, nothing could be further from the truth. (The current use of that military is another story, of course.) The truth is that I believe if a soundly educated individual feels a call to duty, then I wholeheartedly encourage them to enlist and I will regard them with genuine awe for their dedication to our country. The problem I have is with the bad apples in the pool of recruiters, the aggressive tactics that flirt with illegality and that we have all heard about. The fact is that impressionable minds, be it in college or high school, can be easily swayed by the half-truths offered in the recruitment pitch and there should be a voice providing a view that is contrary to the view imposed by the military and facilitated by the Solomon Amendment. I believe that the presence of anti-recruitment protesters keep mal-intentioned recruiters in a moderate check, i.e., those that wanted to enlist will still enlist, those who might have been talked into it with half-truths, are less likely to do so.
Furthermore, and the last time I will harp on this issue, recruiters are in the better position to know what is legal and what is true, keeping or bending information given to a potential recruit is simply dishonorable. You might say, well the potential recruit should have known better but why should he believe that the person in authority would give him anything but the whole truth? This is similar to the argument that people who took loans they couldn’t afford are to blame for losing their homes, when it is the lender that shouldn’t have offered it in the first place. Predatory lending/predatory recruitment, a bad practice, hands down.
Following this incursion into foreign territory, I made another into the little known Zoar Valley near Gowanda, NY:
It was a beautiful autumn day, the leaves were brilliant, the sky was a blanket of light grey clouds, filled with diffuse autumn light. I hiked around the ledges that line the rim of the valley and down in the valley, where I grabbed that panoramic image. There are some more images in the foto stream.
After the hike and the short drive to Buffalo, I visited Betty’s where I feasted on one of their dinner specials: mushroom stuffed ravioli with vodka-red beet sauce. Yes, vodka-red beet sauce, it made the food look martian and taste out of this world!
At home, I watched Little Murders after the recommendation by Roxane and my head exploded, over and over again.
My camera has been returned and is in the safety of my possession. The neighbors across the street wrote a message on their upstairs window, it reads, “Why so serious?” Clearly it must be directed at me, or is that just how every vain person would respond to such a sign? It recalls elements of that particular story in Cosmicomics, I wonder if I should reply?
Speaking of vain people, I have an uneducated theory about people who drag their feet. I think we would all agree that it suggests laziness, but I think that what is actually at play here is vanity followed by a laziness that crept in behind the initial wave of vanity. Consider the person who talks just to hear themselves talk (or blogs just to read their own blog, hi), they are driven by their voice, the fact that they are the source, regardless of whether or not they make any sense, they continue to talk. Now consider the first instance when one inadvertently drags their feet. It becomes a voice, you are behind that voice, and you enjoy hearing it.
Consider walking in fresh, unpacked snow (scrunch, scrunch), just thinking about that sound recalls moments of heightened self-awareness. Suddenly your life becomes cinematic, and your inner voice carries on this monologue, “I am walking. This is the sound of me walking.”, and you voice is deep with a foreign accent, like in Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human:
So you established a temporary positive reinforcement system when initially dragging your feet. But, as with all highs, sustaining the high is impossible. You crash, but since the high was so slight to begin with and it required a massive redirection of your self-consciousness from where it traditionally focuses, your face, to your mostly forgotten feet, you don’t think, “I am going to stop dragging my feet now.” Oddly, a seemingly self-aware process gives rise to this self-oblivious state of life-long feet dragging and you won’t stop until someone else makes you self-conscious of it.
Stop dragging your feet.
Yes, I did just score an all but new, hardcover copy of Bolano’s Savage Detectives for three dollars! Given that new translations are slated for some other books by the author, I think I’ll start the book tomorrow! Three dollars, people.