...and the agony of the feet

I kicked the radiator earlier today. Not out of frustration or anything. I just didn't stop myself in time while walking. I checked a few times today to see if anything was broken. By all signs I can read, nothing is, but it did hurt like a bitch.

But here's the thing. The pain's subsided a lot. I figure after a few hours' sleep it will be mostly gone, although I think there's a bruise. The cliche about your body wanting to get better does seem to be true. Given time, you usually recover.

Popsicle toes

I heard this today in the comments of another blog. Wasn't my first time hearing it, of course. But it was the first time I'd noticed the Bob & Ray influence. The main announcer is totally doing a Bob Elliott character. Both the husband and wife could be said to be in a Ray Goulding role. And it's all just a little more openly macabre, but there's a spiritual kinship.

Unwieldy

I came home tonight to see an absolutely massive FedEx package at the side entrance of the building, the one most of us tenants use. I looked at the label and saw it was for my downstairs neighbor. So maybe I could get it out of everyone's way, I figured, so I grabbed it with the intent of carrying it the very short distance to her apartment door. No can do. Not only did it weigh as much as two of me, but it was weirdly distributed bulk that made it hard to get a hold of. Which I still could have done, but she's an artist and I didn't want to risk damaging any kind of wacky equipment she might have ordered. When I came home again it had been cleared away. Maybe she had help.

☰0☰

How rare is it to feel that your life, your very self, has no effect on anything or anyone? Probably more common than you'd think. But it's isolating. It's the kind of thing that, by definition, you don't imagine anyone else sharing.

And no, I don't know what you'd do about mice holding a bonfire in the middle of the den either.

Can't Live Without 'Em

Sleeping Beauties is the first new-ish Stephen King book I've read in some time. It's actually a collaboration between King and his younger son, Owen. But the prose remains Stephen King-like, which is to say pretty basic. Given that it's about 700 pages long, this is a practical choice.

King pere and fils feel engaged, in tough with the times. A mysterious woman wanders into a small Appalachian town and causes chaos. Women all over the world are falling asleep and being enveloped in thick cocoons. If anyone tries to cut the cocoons open, the women kill them. There's a certain amount of symbolism inherent in this premise, but the effect is material. What women used to do is just not being done, with cataclysmic effects.

Stephen King has been pretty open in recent years about being a recovering addict, and an intervention from his family had a lot to do with his becoming sober. So it's kind of hilarious that in this book, any woman who wants to stay awake has to do massive amounts of speed. Or for that matter that a male doctor pretty much on the side of good is a heavy meth user.

Yankee Doodling

As you can see, there's a statue/sculptor of songwriter and dramatist George M. Cohan in Providence. It's on Wickenden in the Fox Point neighborhood. I confess that Cohan to me is mainly the character that Jimmy Cagney won an Oscar for playing in Yankee Doodle Dandy. What kids who don't know who Cagney is either make of it I don't know. Nearby is George M. Cohan Boulevard, right on the edge of India Point Park. It feels much like a border street.

Another son of Providence, H. P. Lovecraft, has a marker in Wayland Square, near his birthplace. No statue, though. If there were, could they resist working tentacles into it?

Verge

Pretty sure spring is about to show up. The true spring, that is. Sunday it snowed some. Yesterday it was just rain, but felt cold nonetheless, especially with the epic winds. Today was a nice balance: coolish, getting a little wintry after sundown. A subdued, restrained day, which I like.

This is a college town. When it gets truly warm we'll start seeing - and more crucially, hearing - the college party kids. It'll be an adjustment. Well, many things are.

A deeper tan

As another example of the limbic circuit interacting with the wider body, consider the case of Rita Hoefling, a forty-year-old white South African housewife. Surgeons removed Hoeflings adrenal glands in the early 1970s after diagnosing her with Cushing's syndrome, which occurs when the adrenals release too much cortisol. The surgery stopped that problem but stirred up other trouble The adrenals check the activity of the pituitary gland, and with nothing holding the pituitary gland, and with nothing holding the pituitary back now, it began to churn out hormones that increase the production of melanin inside skin cells. Melanin changes the color of skin, and Hoefling began to turn bronze, then light brown, as a result. This well-known side effect of removing the adrenals (Nelson's syndrome) wouldn't have caused much of a stir - except in apartheid South Africa. Hoefling started getting thrown off whites-only buses. Her husband and son abandoned her. She was even barred from her father's funeral. After her ostracism, the colored community magnanimously embraced Hoefling, and she later spoke out against the evils of Apartheid.

That's just part of one of the endnotes from Sam Kean's The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery. It's a treasure trove of fascinating stories about human cognition and behavior. I mean, there's some depressing stuff like how the neuroscientist who first diagnosed kuru in Papua New Guinea turned out to be a massive pedophile, but on balance it's more interesting than anything else.

As for Mrs. Hoefling, what can one say? You never know what you'll wind up learning lessons from.

At root

Regardless of what Wikipedia - or anyone else - tells you, parsnips are not much like carrots. They look very much the same, except off-white instead of orange. The flavor is a little in between carrot, raw potato, and ginger. The texture is where the difference really comes in. Carrots are crunchy. You can just bite into them with a snap and eat them raw. With parsnips your chewing this fibrous stuff that doesn't quite taste right. They seem like they'd be better for soups and stews, absorbing the flavor of the broth.

They'd also make capital snowman noses, almost as pale as the snow itself. Something to think about when winter, just now departing us, rolls around again.

Smoothing out

Something I just recently learned. You get a much better night's sleep if you can make sure that your fitted sheet covers the whole mattress. Not just the sliver you sleep on, that is.

Of course if I weren't single I'd have figured that one out a long time ago. Or had it driven into my skull. But if I weren't single a lot of things would be different. Maybe better, maybe not, but definitely different.

Now hear these

This has always been one of my Platonic ideals of an absolutely gorgeous song. I never thought of such a radical reworking, though, the whole a capella thing. Kudos to whoever thought of the whole "Frere Jacques" opening.


Just to compare with the original. I'm guessing there was a little Talking Heads influence, but they were already their own thing.

The Whole Town's Sleeping

That's the title of a story by Ray Bradbury. One of his more devilish pieces.

It's also the truth. Even in fairly big cities, most people are asleep by a certain hour. So if you're awake, you're aware of an eerie silence, and every small noise.

Occasionally a car will go by. Someone's on their way to somewhere. But you don't know them, probably. You can fill in the blanks, though.

Across the Pacific

This week I started reading Kafka on the Shore. This is a Haruki Murakami novel, one I haven't read before. You could say it's about a runaway on a quest. There is also material about fallout - literal and otherwise - from the Hiroshima bombing.

It's very Murakami. Which is to say there's a background of people doing routine, dull things and thinking not-so-very-deep thoughts, all narrated in a deadpan tone. But that tone remains when more dramatic things happen, for the most part. Which by association makes the other stuff kind of eerie.

So far I've read the runaway hero of the book getting a hand job from a woman who, if I know my foreshadowing, is a blood relative of his. Also an ambiguously supernatural predator tries to goad a kindly old man into killing him by cutting the throats of defenseless cats. These are both, on differing levels, upsetting scenes. Especially the cat thing. But the book remains compulsively readable.

Cryptowhatever

Bitcoin is something that a few of my friends are interested in. Of course it's a pricey market, so even the most affluent people in my circle haven't dove in and invested in it yet. But still, I know some people who seem to think it's legit.

For all the intricate talk about blockchains, well...Call me a thick Luddite if you must, but it seems to me like someone had the idea of running an expensive numbers racket and using computers as props. Which, to be honest, I'm surprised no one thought of fifty years ago.

Musical chairs

Today I talked to a lady who works at Au Bon Pain. She works in the one in the Bank of America semi-skyscraper downtown. As I mentioned sometime before, the Thayer Street location closed a while ago. In the interim Au Bon Pain was reabsorbed by Panera Bread. But Panera has written off the bank building location, which wasn't making enough money. (Rent was an issue too.)

So while the takeover means stability in one way, this store is closing. A routine enough story, but it's worrying to much of the staff. I think they just have one more location in the city, and not everyone will be transferred there.