A friend writes

Our names are so similar. I always
think of the word "affinity"
whenever I consider the mystery
of the similarities of our names.

My discovery on the banks of the river hackensack

The reeds sprawled across the ground lay in patterened placement, mimicking motion of water or wind. As I paced back and forth they broke beneath my feet and became disarrayed, the mud below appearing.

This in New Jersey?

Wish of paper transmission

Dear ________, ___.
Nice to meet you.
I am Kyushu University graduate school Human environmental educational
institution in Japan
Psychology course Master one year.
I am doing research on the theory of mind now at the graduate school.
That I am now the most interested is whether change is looked at by tasks
parformance by giving the character characteristic to the characters of a
false belief tasks.
Your thesis was found when the reference about that was looked for.
May I ask you a favor? have then, your paper "Do children attribute false
beliefs by attending to characteristic features?" sent by the attached
file -- is there nothing?
Although an impolite thing is thought by sudden mail, I am waiting for a
pleasant reply.
Sincerely.

The bridge on the river hackensack

Well she done did it, there, taking that nice photo.

Wild Laver

Behold the wild laver. I do not know what it is, but just looking at the label raises in me a vague feeling that I may have to go on an expedition myself, to retrieve the wild laver, searching it out in its natural and isolated habitat, perhaps somewhere in the further reaches of northeastern asia.

Two things my father warned me about

1. Reliance on the color black in painting
2. Reliance on drums in music

This is a jump photo. 

Dreams I never had.

1. A man kneels in the corner of the room. There are two piles of shoes next to him, both enormous. He takes a shoe from the larger pile and I see him doing something to it, though I can’t tell what. Something falls from the shoe. He picks it up and throws it, and then the shoe, into the smaller (though also huge) pile. He repeats this procedure, and as I approach I see that he is cutting the sole from each shoe.

2. We were on a bus. Another bus ride. The trip was supposed to be long, but the bus ride seemed to continue forever. Outside the terrain was bland and indistinct. As night approached we began to wonder when we would reach our destination. It seemed we should have arrived hours before. Everyone seemed to be dozing and for some reason we didn’t want to disturb the bus driver. The bus drove on and after night came you fell I began to grow tired. Where were we going?

3. The field seemed to go in every direction. The grass and weeds up to my knees, but growing sparsely. Bits of old junk here and there, also sparse: tin cans, old mud covered coins, a scrap of plastic, weathered yellow newsprint, perhaps remnants of utterly destroyed shacks. I felt I wanted to stay forever. Something was there. But after wandering aimlessly for a while I somehow found my way to the hill, went down, found the bridge and the tracks, and went home.

4. I was taking a tour of the great pipeline. The guide had taken me out of the city on foot. After hours of walking, the houses growing fewer and fewer, we arrived at the Great Pipe Park. He opened the black gates with a key and we followed a narrow paved path through thick woods. The sound of the air suddenly changed, the path turned, and there stood the entrance to the great pipe. It was amazingly dark as we entered and began the descent, but the guide produced a light and I was able to glimpse the corrugated surface of the pipe. “It’ll be a long time now,” from the Guide. We continued to walk.

5. I had found a blank pad of pages. I searched for a pen and finding that began to number each page. The numbers followed the usual sequence and only one per page. But each occupied a different position of the periphery of the page. And each written differently and some with designs around the number. On the first page I also wrote a title, “A book of numbered pages” You had been watching and suddenly asked, “Why are you doing that?”

6. Two reptilian creatures dashed at each other across the pavement of the parking lot. But as they were about to collide, a dog barked and both scurried together into the shadows of the open garage.

The air

at night comes in through the window, slightly open. The outdoor air is a bit cooler than is the air already in the bedroom, and it has a certain smell and dampness that takes me back somewhere, or maybe not back somewhere to some previous time, perhaps it just takes me somewhere else. Unfortunatly I think that mingled with that air, at least now, is the exhaust from the fast food place next door, so there is that special air smell as well as cooking grease smell.

The adventures of supercreep

are many and varied. Who knows where he lurks, or why?

Just had to type that. Not idea why.

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.