After tooling around with this blog nonsense, both the private one and this one here, decided to go ahead and update the server. oh boy, did fun then ensue.
first apache wouldn’t come back up for nothing. turns out the service pack installs the latest multiprocessor version which the old bastard i have just doesn’t know how to deal with. so i installed the uni-processor version.
after that i completely fubar’d the web interface to our email.
my solution? why, we’ll just apply the latest service pack to that silly thang.
anyway, long story short, 48 hours later i got working blogs.
when had there
when had there been a time when all the cliches were new?
when had there been a time when every word we thought was clever and fresh and never spoken before?
prowling the night like cats, lion kings on a quest stalking the streets, hopping trains. children old enough to envision just the edges of a future.
and now, mired in the present, disentangling myself from a future that i no longer look forward to, fearing it, wedging a foot between its chin and neck, holding it at bay.
i look at my daughter and i can see my youth all over again and sometimes, especially when she does one other thing she had never done before, sometimes it’s more than well worth it.
order of preference
when they’re first born, they’re miracles, needy, noisy fragile little miracles of flesh. nervous and scared to be alive.
then they grow a little, flap their limbs, learn to turn over, listen to the nervous world that is suddenly around them.
soon they start grabbing things and pull themselves along. up they go, up, up and away, knocking down everything in their stumbling path.
little pets they become to whom you teach stupid tricks. clap your hands, say mommy, say daddy, please and thank you, come here, no, no, that’s garbage, that’s daddy’s, that mommy’s and so on and so on.
you chase them just to keep them from growing up any faster.
and i had wanted
and i had wanted an end to this, this gnawing of the gums against elbows, this rubbing against the cement.
i had wanted to say, “this was,” and to turn and, pointing again, say “this is”
and for it to be radically beautiful and simple and elegant and final and certainly not this, this turning and turning, pointing and pointing, over and over, “this was, this is, this was, this is, this was, this is….”
testing pressure
testing the limits of my privacy. mz doesn’t want foreign unknown eyes to roam over me, the text, as if they are one and the same, when all this is prepetually different, differing, deferring away from me.
figuring it out
they’ll tell you it’s a matter of drawing a line into an arc and then back onto itself. of course, what they don’t tell you is the amount of pressure each progressive swing takes, and how the matter of your fingers twisting doesn’t factor into any of it. but it does and in the figuring of one gracefull movement into another, you find yourself tied in knots, wrists for thumbs, hands for elbows.
Hello world!
hello, welcome to some online nonsense. had to “fix” an already “bent” php installation to get it to work on apache 1.33
but it works, and here it is.
much changes ado…
you forget to continue
you forget to continue. The spoon perched inches from your lips and you forget, you hold steady but you forget and remain still. A still life, still passing for what’s called living. You then hear a truck blare its horn outside your window, or the clatter of garbage cans, a cat in the alley screaming for children. You stutter and focus your eyes. There’s the spoon full of mush, you bring it that much closer, clamp your lips around it. It’s gotten cold sometime between picking it up and swallowing.
All days come to this and for some sooner than others. I want oblivion, this bliss of absence, of forgetting of place, identity, of disappearing into the walls. I want to disappear. I do not want to grow old. I look at my daughter and although the fear is still there, I reminisce more often. I think of my childhood, more specifically my teenage years. I try to trace where I faltered, where I stopped being a successful student and let myself go to waste. I sometimes try to delineate that, but most of the time I am trying to remember for when she comes of the same age so that I might better understand her. She’s barely ten months old and already thinking of her teens.
You pull the spoon away from her mouth, gently caress the underside of her chin. Even after all these years, her skin is so soft, so pale. She slowly chews, eyes out the window at an indiscriminate point in our past maybe? When we were young and fought and loved passionately? Before we ended here wiping each other’s ass when it occurred for us to do so, when the stink provoked the shame out of us. We’ve turned into sacks of flesh that have forgotten who we were to one another, what the world meant with us in it.
affair chronology
i had decided to commit my life to writing when i was 20. i had a good teacher at the time, a very guru-like relationship that healed and broke all sorts of things.
i met my future wife towards the end of it and struggled through a graduate school whose politics overwhelmed me. i learned more about things i did not need to know, and with my passion bent, writing became a chore i abadoned.
i keep coming back to it however like a reluctant lover to his mistress and i thwart her everytime. i visit briefly, get my fill, plant a kiss and i am gone for months at a time. she is no longer an easy addiction i can afford.
in order to write, don’t you
missing days. Why, you do have to live in order to write, don’t you?
Snippets of this life: my mother, after having been hauled into the DMV to reconcile the mismatch between the name on her SS card and her driver’s license, wants to reconcile all her names into one common one. It’s entailed so far getting and translating her birth certificate from Greece, a trip into the city, and straightening out her driver’s license, marriage license and her SS. All that remains is her passport, which has the name she became a citizen with, her married name and her shortened first name, which bares no resemblance to her whole first name. Anyway, to wrap this segment up, I had wanted to go into the city with her again to the Passport Center but could not arrange an interview without first proving she had a ticket to leave the country within 15 days. In the end we went to the neighborhood Post Office and a woman there told us to just write a letter detailing all the name changes, from the divorce to her second marriage. Which I finally did, just today. Done.
We signed our end of the contract for the 5 bedroom house out in Oceanside. This is the third time I’ve written a check for such a large amount, and it’s never easy. Although I have to admit, that it has gotten tired. When we were going to go to contract on the first house we had wanted to buy in West Hempstead, our attorney, Bob Katcher, went over every line and clause, even took the time to go over the stuff that was crossed out. The second time, his partner, Alpa Sanghvi, summarized each section of the contract but I had forgotten to bring the check book. I brought the check the next morning. The third time however, all we did was initial and sign, breezed right through the contract not going over any of it all. There had been some concern over whether or not the sellers had certified the conversion of their garage into a den. I did not quite understand the concern considering that the converted garage should up as living space in the property�s tax records, didn’t the town after all, already know about it? Alpa had explained that when you filed for a building permit, the town right away taxes you based on the planned improvement, regardless of whether or not you submit the final work for a certificate of completion (which entails an inspection by the town). In addition, she pointed out, if I had never mentioned the converted garage or the second floor addition, as long as the survey the owners had was current, no one, not the bank nor the attorneys, would have raised an issue.
My brother-in-law Boris has come up to visit. He is intensely interested in our daughter Ioanna, which is not a bad thing, but there is something in his touch that strikes me as desperate, desperate for a child of his own. Currently he is involved with his first cousin, who claims to have divorced her husband in Colombia, and has brought her two boys with her to the U.S. She doesn�t want to have anymore children and I am surprised, given how Boris clearly is with children, that he has accepted this. Does he think he can change her mind? MZ and I broached the subject and despite our pleas, you could see he was becoming recalcitrant and uncomfortable. He even said at one point, “I came to visit Ioanna, not to be grilled…” We said to him, each of us in our own way, that he was much too special and giving to be with someone who could not give him what he so rightly deserved. The phone then rang, and he smirked, “Saved by the bell!!!”
And that what’s been going on, briefly, amongst other things for some other time.