The room

The room is rectangular with fairly high ceiling, from which hangs (and spins) an old ceiling fan. There are no windows, and the sole source of light is a fluorescent lamp placed width-wise on the ceiling. There is one bed in the room with a thin hard mattress.

I found a picture today

I googled the name of a person referred to in "The world is full of arrows", a previous post, and google sent me to a page that had the following picture, and its a pretty great picture I think.

This Italian movie

from the 1970s probably was on channel 47 with no subtitles. I don't know any Italian, but I watched anyway, when not channel surfing. I saw this about 15-years-ago now.

The story seemed to be about a teenage male who was perhaps wanted by the police, maybe for killing someone accidentally, but maybe for something else altogether. His mother, or family, hid him in their apartment by sealing him in this room with very white walls. Alone in this sealed-off hidden room (the police would come but never seem to find the room, despite searching the house) the boy began to paint on the walls, and as the movie progressed the number of paintings increased. And that was what dragged me in, or kept me returning to that channel. These paintings were kind of haunting (or were then) done with lots of primary colors. I guess the movie company had hired a really good artist to draw what a person trapped in a room might draw, trying to recreate his lost outer world on the walls of his room.

Eventually you arrive at

the logic of the string within the string. Hard to express clearly, this idea that the string has a string within it, the second string unseen because of its enclosure. The goal is obvious -- that the second string (the hidden string, the string within) should be revealed or extracated. Somehow this will improve things, or maybe not, but it is necessary.

Sometimes

I don't want the day to be quite as nice as it is.

I've been walking home from work lately. Its not a very nice route I have to take, crossing over semi-highway type roads (non-pedestrian at least) but the sky has been very clear blue, and lots of greenery on the campus. But a desire comes, for less sun, less clear sky, less trees and less green. Bring on the autumn country?!?

The cold storage room

is a room in my mom's house. It is a room in the basement, that you enter through a door tucked in a corner. The room is long and narrow, unfinished concrete blocks, musty smell, damp, and naturally cold -- probably because its not insulated like the rest of the house, and because it has no large windows for sunlight to enter.

But cold storage room seems like a good name for something else, a special memory storage space, not for main memories but those more obsecure. I thought about these old childhood cartoons that have been haunting me, and some of the other memories. I think they are all stored in some old cold storage room, a room for half-memories you almost never use.

Half-memories, because so many of the entries so far don't concern full-formed strong memories (though some do). Many are about things almost forgotten, or perhaps things almost never-known: a play areas I spent just part of one day in, a cartoon I maybe saw one or two episodes of, and so on. Things barely known or barely remembered, and now a desire to know them.

Once there was a snail

that was trying to get out of the garden, because it was very warm there, but the poor snail could only move slowly.

"I'll help you out," cawed a bird from a tree-top, and he swooped down, and swallowed the snail in one gulp!

"It sure is cool in here," said the snail. "Thank you so very much."

Shoomika

looks just like I do, but he doesn't live in my house. He might live on the roof. If I don't eat my food, he gets it, so I better eat the food. While doings so I will be entertained by being told of the adventures of Shoomika.

In a completely different vein, I seem to have nostaligia for the cartoons of my childhood. Not the ones that were overwatched, but the ones I can barely remember. Their was one on TV Ontario all the time, about the little bear named Jeremy. "I'm a bear called Jeremy, won't you come and play with me!"

see:
http://www.geocities.com/topspeed_jmv/jeremy/


Another cartoon, and this one I probably only saw a few times, though I think my brother saw it more often (why do I think this?) was about some mysterious railroad. Was it the hidden railroad, secret railroad? Google provides answers: it was the secret railroad. A quick google search reveals many others looking for this cartoon. For example I quote from:

http://www.snappedshots.com/mt-static/archive/Purple-Panoply.html

"Hhm? Do you remember Secret Railroad? It was a cartoon I used to watch in the late 70s. There was a little girl, Stella, maybe, with hair like Lisa Simpson. And a black cat named Melody. And an old man who took the train called Passenger or Mr. Passenger and of course a little kid, perhaps named Simon. Perhaps it’s just been fermented and distilled in my brain, but, at least now, that cartoon seems very surreal and mysterious. "

I don't remember as much as the author, (I remember a little boy not a little girl) but that last sentence just gets it right, "surreal and mysterious", and thats exactly how so many of these cartoon memories are.

http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/tvo2/secretrailroad.html

When we are in poor neighborhoods

or just those that are run down, this sung phrase enters my head, "on the pulse side of town". Or maybe its not "pulse" but "polse". Either way makes little sense to me.

The aquarium

will have no fish in it, just aquatic plants: different types of seaweed and aquatic moss (is there aquatic moss? must be). The water, however, should remain clear so that the plants are visible. Mossy, but murk-free. There won't just be one such aquarium, but lots of them, all over the house.

(This draws inspiration from the original Solaris movie.)

In an article in the New Yorker I read a while ago, this Japanese animator was being quite misanthropic, looking forward to an end of all people, so that wild grasses could take over our habitations.

When I was in Wales

I hitchhiked 13 times or so in one long weekend. I still have the notebook somewhere, listing each of the drivers and their characteristics. They were all united in none actually being from Wales originally, all had settled from other parts of England.

One man was a vermaculturist, a worm farmer. When he pulled up I thought I was about to be run over. Another man was a lobster farmer (he actually gave two of the 13 rides), and there was a couple who offered a place to spend the night (an offer politely declined). The last few rides were really not in Wales, but transport back to London because the trains were on strike: A virginal truck driver, and then a strange upper-classy man who was living in France but commented that he was proud of his Britishness.

One day you'll discover

a room in your house that you never knew was there. You've lived there for years, or maybe your whole life. But the house has its secrets, and one is this room that you somehow never noticed. It might be entered only through a door that's in the back of a large closet, just like entering Narnia. Or maybe it'll be a secret attic, and you never noticed the hatchway, or who knows where else it will appear.

What do you do in the room now that you've found it? Is it for decorating and fixing up? Or is there something in the room that you discover, and so it links the new room to unusual events?

Revisiting

the past seems to occupy lots of these posts, so much of this is based on memory, but I keep thinking that I will forget which things I've written about, and then continue to mention things that I've already said before.

Put differently, I'm afraid that in noting down my memories I'll forget which I've already remembered, and remember them too many times.

Same thing with thoughts -- will I carelessly keep repeating the same thoughts from month to month?

After we entered

that hotel in downtown Boston -- the one with the giant clock -- we found that the first floor or two was taken up with some sort of exhibit, I don't remember of what. On the second floor of the museum and exhibit there was a narrow staircase , and we began ascending it, up and up, and at some point we knew that our goal would be to go to the very top. It took a long time, and towards the end instead of a door every two flights of stairs, we had to go up four or so, to see the next door. Finally the stairs ended and there was just the final door. Would it open? It did. We were looking into someone's apartment, or really that person's hotel room. I think that's what it was. There was a large window, looking out onto Boston skyline, and the Miami Vice sountrack was playing. Was there the slight sound of movement? Maybe not, but we dashed down and down and down and out.

That was the same day as a number of other things I think: The parking garage with flowers emblemizing each underground parking layer (e.g. a rose is level A, the lilly is level B). And sort-of crashing SteerRoast at MIT, and my friend's melancholy about it.

I sense

a canoe in the future, or some sort of rowboat in my future.

There was a guy I knew who was into Kayak competitions. His challenges were acrobatic, like getting one tip of the kayak to go into the water with the opposite tip pointed straight up into the sky, and then spinning the kayak in cricles -- could this really be true?

The sort of boating I want to do is slow and steady, like rowing to go a long way, an equivalent to walking all day. Living next to water might help.

When I asked

the British guy I briefly talked about his favorite aspect of travelling he admitted that it was the process of getting from one place to another, like the process of arranging the train tickets and then taking the train to the new destination. An odd and honest answer.

We were in Manali. I think I only talked to him that one time. He was sort of boring in disposition, but had interesting background information -- fluent in Chinese, had travelled in China. We were waiting for the Glacier to melt so we could head out of Manali and into Ladakh. I'd been there too long, and I gather he had too.

Asian Supermarkets

are by far the best because the necessity of shopping for food is transformed into an adventure with unexpected possibilities. Most staples are available (though cheese can be a problem) but in addition to these are endless strange items to look at, perhaps buy, perhaps taste. There can be a feeling of adventure and the unknown -- feelings so rare these days that most people watch television to come by them -- and all while shopping for food.

The subways of Washington DC

provide evidence that science fiction is now lagging behind current times.

This pilgrimage has no destination

The route is not known in advance. I don't even know when we begin. But we will start at Finch and Yonge in Toronto. Better start around this time of year, or even earlier, just as the Winter ends. Set out on foot, and follow those giant electricity towers. Probably best to follow them West, not East, because they'll probably go on for furthe, but I don't know how far out they go.

It's a giant dog

Trip to Montreal in my early 20s. Went with close friends who were a couple, we stayed in this cheap place and shared a room. Midnight walk one night to this 24 hour bagel bakery. I think this happened that night.

We saw this huge dog walking in the night by itself. You don't see that a lot, dogs usually aren't that large, dogs are usually on leashes. There was something terrifying about the thought of this gigantic creature alone by itself in the Montreal night.

I think each of us said one part of the three part utterance:

Its a giant dog

and its all alone

oh my god.