An "Andala post" (as he calls them) for alionunderaw (who could use a post dedicated to him these days...):

There's definitely something sinister in the air right now. What is it? Well that's hard to say, but it certainly makes itself known in a multitude of ways. Some having to do with hot irons, some with edamame heading down the wrong pipe, some having to do with Tom Cruise's "little squirt that made a splash (CNN)" and some not.

I attribute it to the fact that it is not currently November.

It was Tony Bennett who put it best. I was sitting in a theatre waiting for a movie to find its way to the blank screen before me when Mr. Bennett came on the pre-show-entertainment-music-bonanza with a special rendition of "My Romance". When he reached the part of the song where he describes his romance, the music skipped and pieced together some nonsensical word after "my romance is:". It was a strange word, somehow many images squashed together into a confused pastiche, but also a thing unto itself; starting with a majestic glimmer of hope but trailing into a panic of choppy consonants that finally winked out with a blasé whimper and a twang of guitar. It repeated relentlessly, "my romance is (???)" over and over and over. For the full 10+ minutes early I was, the sentence droned on while people covered their ears in fits of anguish.

I felt the way firefighters must have felt on Tuesday in Union Square where a giant, promotional popsicle melted "faster than expected", flooding several streets with unfrozen Snapple juice. Local men of the ladder raced to wash it all away, but it just kept coming back in sticky, pink waves, again and again.

It used to be that the fuzzy beast with a water tower sprouting from its head, hanging from the telephone lines at Tompkin's Square Park would warn me of these things before they would happen. My what it must have witnessed and acquired great wisdom from. How many more times than I must it have watched the men with bats and metal pipes from that pizza place on the corner smash up the cars belonging to the guys that drive in from Loisaida trying to steal a free lunch.

Still I found myself sitting in another theatre, watching the (unsurprisingly disappointing) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. Part way into the film, a command is given to the ship, switching on the improbability drive and sending it hurtling through hyperspace. As if on cue with the ship's departure, the entire theatre starts blinking with red lights mounted on the walls and a siren goes off. Large doors open in the theatre walls and flood the room with more chaotic acoustics. The crowd, who has allowed themselves to get drawn into the movie, interpret this as some sort of coordination between the film's content and some special cinematic features of the theatre facility. The voice of the film's narrator slows down to a distorted slur, and again people seem to think this has to do with the effect of warp speed on the spaceship. Soon people realize something is wrong when firemen rush the audience, one of which actually starts watching the movie for a moment. Now that people understand that they are witnessing a fire alarm, at least 50% of the audience makes the obligatory Hitchhiker's "DON'T PANIC" joke that you saw coming. We were ushered into a passageway that resembled the interior of the Vogon ship we'd seen earlier. After emerging somewhere around the corner from the theatre and being let back in through the door, past employees shouting this and that about a false alarm, we were treated to more unexpected theatrics. For at least 5 minutes, the resumed movie ran with the pre-show advertisements superimposed over it. This resulted in such visual treats as a Vogon commander groping the woman in the "Forever Tango" ad, and a sequence where the spaceship flies to the Korean Garden, a local East Village restaurant. Alas, this lovely segment ended and the film resumed its less interesting (and more probable) navigation.

I feel like when the nuts and bolts of life start coming apart, you can at least enjoy those moments where you find the caretakers of the universe playing hooky. They're like Atlas, setting down the globe in order to chase after a cosmic ice cream truck cruising through the milky way. I found one of them trying to find her way back to her command post. She was wearing pink ribbons and yelling "How do I get into the zoo, babe? Cuz I think that looks good!"

Then there was that German guy by the Hari Krishna tree with all the fire. And the guy behind me that was yelling at him: "Hey, that guy has a chicken. He's gonna burn it! Hey man, don't hurt the animals! He's gonna burn the chicken!"

At times like this I feel like heading out with a good book, and taking portions of it here and there. A few paragraphs sitting on a tree stump. A little on this stoop, and some on that one. A few park benches. Squatting on the sidewalk. A little here and there. When you settle into just the right place something wonderful usually happens and it becomes like a sanctuary where the world can whirl safely around you. Case in point: I had been moving about with my book for a while and came across a seat next to a man that I recognized. He hobbles around my neighborhood all day and seems to study everything in a most peculiar way. I have wanted to engage in discussion with him for 5 years now. Finally, sitting on the bench next to him, he started singing. I don't know which language it was. So I began whistling along. We made plenty of organic noise to the tune of sweet chaos. Then I continued down the street, supremely satisfied.

I leave you now with some Zen photos from a fishing trip I took at Lake Mooselookmeguntic in Maine. Not pictured is a large woman named Beautiful who served us diner-style breakfast every morning and sarcastically instructed someone on how to consume toast and potatoes when he asked a silly question.

( Witness Some Transphotographic Mooselookmeguntics )