Homeless guy.

The other week I had biked out to the lake and read there, then hit up the grocery store on the way home.

As I was walking home, grocery bags around my shoulder and walking my bike, this one unshaven fatter older (white) homeless guy in a wheel chair who was on the sidewalk near a fastfood restaurant was like, “Got a flat tire?”.

I stopped and looked at my bike tires and they were fine, so I was like, “No.”

“You don’t got a flat tire?”, he was like.  “Then why are you walking?”.

I then told him that I couldn’t bike with groceries.

“Thanks for checking on my tire,” though, I was like.

Odd Dream: Emory.

The other week I dreamed that I was in the departmental office of the religion department at Emory, and everyone was packing up files and boxing computers and everything.

The department head (who I actually met when I interviewed there for the Ph.D. program, years ago) said that there had been a university email the previous night eliminating the department.

I saw one comparative religion scholar boxing up a monitor, and despite the free spirit indicated by her bouncy curly hair and her muu-muu, she seemed oddly silent and passive.

“A Most Pecular Aberration.”

From Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs (1968), a memoir of being an English cook in the interwar period (pp. 177-179, additional paragraph spacing added for easier readability):

It was after I had been there some months that I discovered [the master of the house] had a most peculiar aberration. 

If he came down to the house on his own, he’d always ring the bell in his bedroom at about half past eleven at night, after we’d gone to bed.  It rang upstairs on the landing outside the bedrooms, and Hilda or Iris, the housemaid, would slip on a dressing-gown and go down to his room.  Then he’d ask them to bring him a whisky and soda, or a jug of water, or even a book that he’d left in the library. 

I said to Hilda one night, “Why does he always wait until we’ve all got in bed before he rings that bell?” 

So she said, “It’s because he likes to see us in hair curlers.” 

I said, astonished, “What do you mean?”

She said, “He likes to see us in hair curlers.”

People in those days didn’t have hair rollers like nowadays, they were all those dinky steel curlers, and we did our hair up every night in them because it was the fashion to have a mass of frizz, and the bigger you could make it stick out the better it was, you see.

So I said, “You’re joking.”

“No, it’s the truth,” she said.

I said, “Well, what does he do then when you go in wearing these curlers?”

So she said, “Well, he doesn’t really do anything much.  He asks us to take off our hair nets and then he fingers the curlers in our hair, you see.”

I just couldn’t believe it, it seemed pointless, stupid. 

I said, “Is that all?  He feels your hair curlers?”

She said, “Yes, that’s all he does.  And he’s always happy and pleased when he does it,” she said.   

She just sat on the edge of his bed and he just felt her hair curlers, and that’s all.

Well, it struck me then, and it does now, as a most peculiar way of getting pleasure.  It just didn’t make sense, I mean whoever heard of anyone wanting to see anyone in hair curlers, never mind about feeling them?  But Hilda and Iris did quite well from this peculiarity of his, because they used to get cosmetics or boxes of chocolates or stockings each time.

I could have got them as well if I liked...  [T]he reason I wouldn’t go was because it was yet another demonstration of servants’ inferiority...

[But Hilda] said, “I get quite a kick out of it, and when I’m waiting at table,” she said, “and when [the master] is sitting there talking so high-falutin’ to his guests,” she said, “I often feel like slipping a hair curler on his plate!”

But I never heard of such a peculiar aberration in my life as hair curlers.  I wonder what was the cause of it?  Something tied up with his youth, I expect, perhaps his mother had them or something.

. . .

An Odd Night of Barhopping: Memories.

So the other Monday night I was downtown for a labor activism informational meeting with my one hippie friend from Michigan and then to do some work at the art school, and afterwards I began to hit up some bars.

At like the fourth bar that I was at, this kind of swanky-looking “farmhouse” place in a touristy area with high turnover, I walk in, immediately to be greeted with a “Bon soir!” by this short moon-faced Frenchman with a wrinkled face and a freshly-trimmed van dyke beard – and, this odd smell, of pickled vegetables, and dark fatty organ meats like pate, and body odor, that was exactly how my dead Hungarian grandmother used to smell.

I was overwhelmed, and ready to cry, since I hadn’t thought of my dead grandmother in so long, and it had been even longer since I had remembered how she smelled.

The fact that I was going on the 4th beer of the night didn't help, either.

At some point, the owner said something in heavily-accented English to me, and then I asked him to repeat himself, and he was like, “But I am speaking English,” and then said again that he apologized that the air conditioning was broken, it had been working earlier that day.

Then, I realized that the place was overwarm and a bit clammy, just like my grandmother used to keep her house and just like her arms used to feel when she hugged me – she used to wear sleeveless house dresses, so you could see liverspots on her upper arms and wobbly fat where her muscles used to be - and that was part of it too.

In the bar part of the restaurant there was this very thin younger (white) guy with dark hair and big eyes, and a fat Frenchman in his mid-40s (?) at the end of the bar, with a big gut and a thick gold chain around his neck and nestled among the chest hair bursting out of his open shirt, and maybe with a facelift, too, because of the slightly strained look around his eyes and hairline.

The fat Frenchman turned out to be a restauranteer in town for a convention; he owned a major French restaurant in a small Rust Belt city where he had chased an American woman to years ago, who had drawn him away from Orleans, and every time he was in town he stopped through this particular French place.

He was also working on opening up a wine bar in that same Rust Belt city, as a more casual companion place to his main restaurant, which was more of an expensive place for couples, rather than a place to stop through after work and have a bit of wine and some food with friends.

“You know,” I was like, “If I owned a wine bar – and stop me if I’m full of shit –”

- and at that point I temporarily broke off to apologize for my language, and the fat Frenchman said not to worry, since he spoke like that too –

“If I owned a wine bar, I would have a weekly ‘Men’s Night’ special, just like they have ‘Ladies’ Night’ at some places.”

I let that sink in, then I continued.

“Some of my single female friends,” I was like, “used to go to wine bars to relax, and they would never meet any men, it would just be other women and couples there, so the thing is, you already have business from women, if you can get single men, you get their business, and even more women to come in.”

Then, I said that maybe some upscale single male workers from downtown would stop through his wine bar for the special – like a “dollar off per glass of wine for every male” – and then they would find out that they like the place and make a habit of coming through, and women looking for men would especially go there, to meet the eligible working men with good incomes.

At that point, he said that he was going to be very careful not to call the place a wine bar.

“When people hear ‘wine bar’, they think ‘French’, and they think ‘expensive’, like my other restaurant,” the fat Frenchman said.  “They do not know what a bistro is, but that is okay.  I will say ‘wine – beer – casual dining’, and they will come.  It will mostly be good wines, but I will have craft brews also, for the people who want that.”

Then he said that some restauranteers from another Rust Belt city warned him away from labeling anything “small plates” or “tapas”, since customers categorize that as upscale, rather than a casual drop-through place.

“Eighty percent of all restaurants fail,” he was like.  “And when you start with the wrong name, you are doomed, and it is too late to change it.”

Later, just as he was leaving, he asked me what I did, so I said I was teaching college and finishing my doctoral degree, and we began talking about BDSM and transsexuals, and he immediately began to linger.

As I started expounding in response to some question of his, he stopped me and was like, “How do you know all of this?”

“I read books,” I was like.

“But where do you find the books?”, he was like.

“I just find them,” I was like.  “I find them because I love them.”

Then, I went back to explaining how for male-to-female transsexuals, they peel the skin down off the cock like a banana, remove the banana part and throw it away, gouge some shit out in the pelvis, then layer the peel internally to preserve nerve sensations in the genitals.

“But how does it look?”, the fat Frenchman was like.  “A woman, you know, she looks, complicated,” and he kind of gestured his hands in a mound-like gesture, and slightly and slowly wriggled the tips of his fingers to indicate the various folds of skin.

“I actually have no idea,” I was like.  “Google it.  There’s probably a website there, two pictures, one with a real woman and one with a transsexual, and you have to guess which genitals are real.”

“There is such a website?”, he was like.

“I don’t know, but probably,” I was like.  “And if not, let’s make one, I’m sure there’s money in it.”

He then related the story of a deliveryman at his restaurant; in the guy’s old age, he decided to become a woman, and his wife decided to become a man, and they’re still together, but the husband is now the wife and the wife is now the husband.

After he left, I spoke with the slight (white) bartender guy, and he said that the smells in the restaurant really come out on hot days.

He also turned out to have worked there for 5 of the restaurant’s 17 years – it has been there a while, but I had no idea it was there! – and he teaches ballet on the side.

After I left, I ended up down the street at this yuppie bar with dark wood and lots of flatscreens and a banner up above the bar like a stock market ticker, only giving sports scores and news.

Lightning had been flashing as I left the French place, and at some point a downpour started, and yuppies came in from the patio, just around the time that I started noticing that the lit banner was obsessed with sports injuries, every few minutes flashing “...TORN LIGAMENT...” or “...SPRAINED ANKLE...” or “...SEVERE CONCUSSION...”.

The bartender was a jocked up white guy from the south part of the state, and I asked him if anything had ever triggered him thinking about his dead grandparents.

He said every time he goes to his hometown, just seeing the signs at city limits with the name of the town makes him think of them.

Graphics Editing a Coded Manuscript.

So since I found out last year about this one never-uncoded manuscript in an unknown script from the mid-15^th c., I’ve been dying to get print-outs of it somehow, so I can start treating it like a puzzle and see if I can figure it out, since I already like puzzles and already do them in my spare time, and since I already know Latin, the primary suspect language (or at least one of the primary ones; Hebrew and maybe Greek would be the others).

Anyhow, a friend had somehow found a pdf file of the entire manuscript online, and sent it to me in 3 chunks.

At first, and this was like this fall or winter, I tried hiring the (female) (African-American) graphics artist who has done work for my one lawyer friend from Missouri.

She came highly recommended and a few people who I know had jobs done by her were satisfied, but I gave her 2 jobs, and on the 1^st one she didn’t follow instructions and then tacked on 30min. of time in order to correct the mistakes she made (!), and then on the 2^nd one (the manuscript), she didn’t follow the page range, pages she split were out of order, and there was other stuff too, but I didn’t feel like getting her to correct that, since she had been dishonest with me about the other corrections.

So, I told her I wasn’t paying for the 2^nd order, since I’d start all over myself, and she wasn’t happy...

In fact, one time, getting on the subway, I passed her as she was getting off, and she didn’t see me (purposefully?).

I haven’t run into her since.

Anyhow, the other week, I decided to start editing the pdf file from scratch while I have the resources of the art school available, and so I went in to the art school’s printing office and got set up on a computer near there and kindly asked the student workers if they could help me by showing me what to do, and I’d do everything they told me like a monkey, and then eventually submit the file as a print job that their office would take care of.

The one student, this Asian-American 18 or 19y.o. with a dyed blonde hair, was very kind and helped set me up on the right programs to split the images, crop them, and increase contrast.

At first, too, when I explained to her what the project was, and how I wanted a file to doodle on while I read a 15^th c. Latin astronomical text to compare and look for patterns in the unknown script, she kind of got quiet.

Then, she was like, “Wow, you’re like Dan Brown.”