a minor fifth is made of phantoms
I was hoping it would mean Green Line to Lechmere but it meant Red Line to Harvard because shit is under construction. Which is too bad because Anoush’Ella is moving in to the CambridgeSide Galleria and that means that Armenian-Lebanese cuisine is somewhat more accessible. At least they have food stalls because holy shitsnacks does the area around Harvard Square suck. Maybe if they’re the kind of banks that offer lollipops.
It doesn't matter because I'd have to take the bus from Braintree to Broadway even though (a) Ashmont doesn't have to take the bus from Ashmont to JFK and (b) they're only working on that stupid bridge anyway and (c) whatever "inspections" they're doing can't possibly take over two days.'
Overheard:
“is this your stop?”
“no, this is Patrick.”
For lunch, I had from Singh’s Roti a bowl of rice & beans, jerk chicken stew, and curried potatoes. Yum. I wanted tacos for dinner but they sold out right before so I just had chicken biryani. Today for dinner I had Filipino street food, that is to say, chunks of pork marinated in pineapple juice, brown sugar, ggo (?) black pepper, and grilled in its own juices and topped with crispy onions and sriracha and green onions, along with some cornstarch noodles sauteed with vegetables (beans and garlic cloves) with lime juice. If I had to describe it, I'd call it Chinese food by way of Latin America.
I found the second and third Phoenix Legacy books by M.K. Wren at Harvard Books. I said I wasn’t planning to go there but I had free time. But not the first one. No wonder they were so cheap.
I’ll keep my eye out. I’m not picky. The cover art makes them look like historical fiction.
I also found a Catalan book. I didn’t buy that one.
The Mermaid Promenade included some stiltwalkers, a merdog, Jacquelyn the steampunk mermaid, now with a witchy broom with a painted water bottle filled with eldritch kryptonite green gauze and the knob from a spigot attached to it, a funnel trailing even more green gauzy stuff, a torc with a butterfly, from a few years back, a Chinese dagron and a group banging on gongs and cymbals and a big drum.
My experience with dogs is that they love water but they hate being wet. If that makes no sense, you aren’t a dog.
They replaced the rock stage from years back with a world stage. Albino Mbie was the first to play. The stage was comparatively dark and the park was comparatively bright so it was hard to tell what was going on.
Gabriella Simpkins played guitar.
Anju sang about Minnesota winters and how she wished she could be anywhere else, and a paean to rivers because water is life so maybe she’s actually from Arrakis. Maxfield as in Parrish played guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and some things we didn’t get to hear. She said the wind was her third bandmember but it did steal her setlist and fling it.
She sang about a sense of unbelonging but belonging among nature, she sang an ode to her childhood.
The song Dragonfly on her youtube has sarangi.
The music makes me think it’s August, not June. It has that mood to it and it was a relatively cool day.
Emma is a children’s book illustrator with hair so blonde it’s white and a tattoo of her grandmother’s signature on one arm and on the other, a boot with a serpent and flowers. Every part of her ear is pierced.
Kotoko Brass is an ensemble inspired by traditional drumming of Central Ghana.
Brooklyn has a tattoo that says family in Farsi, not Arabic. So close geographically but so far linguistically.
It looks like this:
خانواده
At least, I think Brooklyn is her name. Her necklace says it. I’d imagine anyone who has even thought about taking lessons in not just Farsi but Dari, Tajik, Mazanderani, Tat, Middle Persian, Avestan, Old Persian, or Parthian, thinks that Brooklyn, especially South Brooklyn, is a wretched hive of Trump voters, ultraorthodox cultists, and antivaxxers.
Mercedes Escobar sang a song about a bad day she had and put a magickal realist spin on it because that’s what they do in Latin America. Most of the songs I heard except for her last one, which was a happy song in English, were in Spanish.
Johanna isn’t used to seeing herself depicted with glasses because she doesn’t always wear them. She has on her arm tattoos of a peering eye with rose petals, a flower, a leafless willow tree in winter, a raven, a key, the growth rings of a tree, on her fingers a bunch of glyphs including snakes and stars and an hourglass and the sigil of Cuchulainn the Impure, a skate egg and a flowering vine with a cardinal. She had around her neck a purple stone wrapped in wire. Kody was wearing a pendant of eight stones surrounding one that she borrowed from Johanna. Johanna says it’s all transient and will one day break.
Kody has tattoos of hands.
Kody had to deal with some bullshit and I said I can’t deal with that techie crap and she said she still uses a flip phone. I still had one until recently because it’s become a pain in the ass to function in society without one. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I wouldn’t even be able to get an e-mail addy if I ever needed one. Which I think I need to get a phone. I can’t remember though. Some things just become so routine that you no longer remember doing them.
That and my iPod Touch gave up the ghost.
But anyway, I told her that I’m glad I now have a camera and I get it just around that time that people are no longer posting pictures of MFA/ICA/PEM exhibits on Instagram, or maybe they are but I’m not finding them, and Elon buying Twitter, or excuuuuuuse me, X, just made it even harder. But hey, now you can like Nazi shit and no one will even know.
Margaret has a tattoo of a blue and purple bird in flight and a fire-hued fenghuang. She’s the proud human of a chow chow.
The name Veronica Robles Female Mariachi Band is self-explanatory.
Molly & Casey is Casey on guitar or cello and Molly on fiddle. Molly sang a traditional song about following a soldier off to war because she wants to but "I personally wouldn't" says Molly. They played a duo of instrumental songs inspired by the heat of summer.
I did two drawings in between listening to their songs and petting the two dogs behind me and let them pick one in exchange for a CD. Well, I let Molly pick one. Casey was off doing other things.
Almira Ara says that as folk artists, we have a sacred duty to hold up a mirror to reality. She sang songs about things she considered important at the time.
Sage had an ushanka hat and a star pendant and ribbon shaped pendant. She writes songs that were meaningful at the time but have lost their meaning because while being cheated on sucks at the time but years later, it’s kinda unimportant in the great scheme of things, no?
Jane has tattoos of scribbled hearts and the word “upwards” on one wrist and “onwards” on the other. She has a shark tooth and an eye of gold around her neck.
Meg’s tattoos are a boa constrictor and another snake on one arm, a forest at night with giant snowflakes and pine trees and a luminous white moon below the constellation of Cancer (she was born on July 15), a crescent moon and an insect and some bones.
Natu Camara's first song was her introduction. She was born in Guinea and sings in five languages. She sang a song about child marraige, which she evaded because she was a stubborn child. She sang about her brother's village.
Sarah is from Connecticut, which is an inbetween place between Massachusetts and New York City for most people unless you’re a) visiting colleges or b) visiting relatives. The people next to her were visiting from Ireland. I told them I knew they weren't from Kerry, which is where my great grandfather comes from because they don't talk like they have a mouthful of marbles. I've never heard him speak because he died in the 1930s.
I told her I recognized the writing on a passenger’s pendant (it’s Amharic) but I can’t read it.
She asked me how many books I go through and I have maybe 20 over 10 years. Things stopped during the pandemic and it too me an entire year to fill up the previous book because I was taking the bus more than the train and when I was on the train, there were fewer people.
The bridge is a slow zone but only northbound and I mean there were people out there walking faster than we were. I was a bit distracted on the southbound route.
She only had to go as far as Broadway.
I normally don't try to draw people while riding the bus because it's so much harder but I saw several passengers and decided I had to. The one with the tattoo of pastel wings on her arm got off before I had the chance to. You can see the difference between a train or park drawing and a bus drawing.
Reid Duran (like Duran Duran, I asked) sings in a band and Jimmy plays guitar. Once Jimmy hit some cymbals with a sledgehammer and was like “these are cheap so I can hit it with a sledgehammer if I want to.” Jimmy had rainbow earrings with musical notes, a pendant with the estrogen molecule (C18H24O2), and a t-shirt for the band Godfuck which depicted cats filtered through a Japanese lens along with what I can only assume is the band name in incomprehensible EXTREME BRÜTÄL DËÄTH MËTÄL scribbling.
Reid and Jimmy now want to bash the floor with a sledgehammer in their music even though I told them Mahler beat them to the punch over a hundred and twenty years ago.
Reid has two dogs, a doberman and a sheepdog-poodle.
Chris might be the guy with the Princess Zelda tattoo. I’m not sure. He had Majora’s Mask on his back because he knows Majora’s Mask is the best Zelda.
Alex has tattoos of smiley faces with a rainbow background on his arm and on his head tattoos of frowny faces and a psyduck and a guy in a jester costume. Krusty the Clown and a shyguy and a boo giving a fist bump or what passes for a fist bump when you both have fins instead of hands and
burning question: hey do you that that boos are the ghosts of shyguys because Yoshi’s Island made shyguys canon? What the hell, I was going to ask a question about the movie Dick anyway. Or maybe one about convenience stores.
It doesn't matter because I'd have to take the bus from Braintree to Broadway even though (a) Ashmont doesn't have to take the bus from Ashmont to JFK and (b) they're only working on that stupid bridge anyway and (c) whatever "inspections" they're doing can't possibly take over two days.'
Overheard:
“is this your stop?”
“no, this is Patrick.”
For lunch, I had from Singh’s Roti a bowl of rice & beans, jerk chicken stew, and curried potatoes. Yum. I wanted tacos for dinner but they sold out right before so I just had chicken biryani. Today for dinner I had Filipino street food, that is to say, chunks of pork marinated in pineapple juice, brown sugar, ggo (?) black pepper, and grilled in its own juices and topped with crispy onions and sriracha and green onions, along with some cornstarch noodles sauteed with vegetables (beans and garlic cloves) with lime juice. If I had to describe it, I'd call it Chinese food by way of Latin America.
I found the second and third Phoenix Legacy books by M.K. Wren at Harvard Books. I said I wasn’t planning to go there but I had free time. But not the first one. No wonder they were so cheap.
I’ll keep my eye out. I’m not picky. The cover art makes them look like historical fiction.
I also found a Catalan book. I didn’t buy that one.
The Mermaid Promenade included some stiltwalkers, a merdog, Jacquelyn the steampunk mermaid, now with a witchy broom with a painted water bottle filled with eldritch kryptonite green gauze and the knob from a spigot attached to it, a funnel trailing even more green gauzy stuff, a torc with a butterfly, from a few years back, a Chinese dagron and a group banging on gongs and cymbals and a big drum.
My experience with dogs is that they love water but they hate being wet. If that makes no sense, you aren’t a dog.
They replaced the rock stage from years back with a world stage. Albino Mbie was the first to play. The stage was comparatively dark and the park was comparatively bright so it was hard to tell what was going on.
Gabriella Simpkins played guitar.
Anju sang about Minnesota winters and how she wished she could be anywhere else, and a paean to rivers because water is life so maybe she’s actually from Arrakis. Maxfield as in Parrish played guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and some things we didn’t get to hear. She said the wind was her third bandmember but it did steal her setlist and fling it.
She sang about a sense of unbelonging but belonging among nature, she sang an ode to her childhood.
The song Dragonfly on her youtube has sarangi.
The music makes me think it’s August, not June. It has that mood to it and it was a relatively cool day.
Emma is a children’s book illustrator with hair so blonde it’s white and a tattoo of her grandmother’s signature on one arm and on the other, a boot with a serpent and flowers. Every part of her ear is pierced.
Kotoko Brass is an ensemble inspired by traditional drumming of Central Ghana.
Brooklyn has a tattoo that says family in Farsi, not Arabic. So close geographically but so far linguistically.
It looks like this:
خانواده
At least, I think Brooklyn is her name. Her necklace says it. I’d imagine anyone who has even thought about taking lessons in not just Farsi but Dari, Tajik, Mazanderani, Tat, Middle Persian, Avestan, Old Persian, or Parthian, thinks that Brooklyn, especially South Brooklyn, is a wretched hive of Trump voters, ultraorthodox cultists, and antivaxxers.
Mercedes Escobar sang a song about a bad day she had and put a magickal realist spin on it because that’s what they do in Latin America. Most of the songs I heard except for her last one, which was a happy song in English, were in Spanish.
Johanna isn’t used to seeing herself depicted with glasses because she doesn’t always wear them. She has on her arm tattoos of a peering eye with rose petals, a flower, a leafless willow tree in winter, a raven, a key, the growth rings of a tree, on her fingers a bunch of glyphs including snakes and stars and an hourglass and the sigil of Cuchulainn the Impure, a skate egg and a flowering vine with a cardinal. She had around her neck a purple stone wrapped in wire. Kody was wearing a pendant of eight stones surrounding one that she borrowed from Johanna. Johanna says it’s all transient and will one day break.
Kody has tattoos of hands.
Kody had to deal with some bullshit and I said I can’t deal with that techie crap and she said she still uses a flip phone. I still had one until recently because it’s become a pain in the ass to function in society without one. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I wouldn’t even be able to get an e-mail addy if I ever needed one. Which I think I need to get a phone. I can’t remember though. Some things just become so routine that you no longer remember doing them.
That and my iPod Touch gave up the ghost.
But anyway, I told her that I’m glad I now have a camera and I get it just around that time that people are no longer posting pictures of MFA/ICA/PEM exhibits on Instagram, or maybe they are but I’m not finding them, and Elon buying Twitter, or excuuuuuuse me, X, just made it even harder. But hey, now you can like Nazi shit and no one will even know.
Margaret has a tattoo of a blue and purple bird in flight and a fire-hued fenghuang. She’s the proud human of a chow chow.
The name Veronica Robles Female Mariachi Band is self-explanatory.
Molly & Casey is Casey on guitar or cello and Molly on fiddle. Molly sang a traditional song about following a soldier off to war because she wants to but "I personally wouldn't" says Molly. They played a duo of instrumental songs inspired by the heat of summer.
I did two drawings in between listening to their songs and petting the two dogs behind me and let them pick one in exchange for a CD. Well, I let Molly pick one. Casey was off doing other things.
Almira Ara says that as folk artists, we have a sacred duty to hold up a mirror to reality. She sang songs about things she considered important at the time.
Sage had an ushanka hat and a star pendant and ribbon shaped pendant. She writes songs that were meaningful at the time but have lost their meaning because while being cheated on sucks at the time but years later, it’s kinda unimportant in the great scheme of things, no?
Jane has tattoos of scribbled hearts and the word “upwards” on one wrist and “onwards” on the other. She has a shark tooth and an eye of gold around her neck.
Meg’s tattoos are a boa constrictor and another snake on one arm, a forest at night with giant snowflakes and pine trees and a luminous white moon below the constellation of Cancer (she was born on July 15), a crescent moon and an insect and some bones.
Natu Camara's first song was her introduction. She was born in Guinea and sings in five languages. She sang a song about child marraige, which she evaded because she was a stubborn child. She sang about her brother's village.
Sarah is from Connecticut, which is an inbetween place between Massachusetts and New York City for most people unless you’re a) visiting colleges or b) visiting relatives. The people next to her were visiting from Ireland. I told them I knew they weren't from Kerry, which is where my great grandfather comes from because they don't talk like they have a mouthful of marbles. I've never heard him speak because he died in the 1930s.
I told her I recognized the writing on a passenger’s pendant (it’s Amharic) but I can’t read it.
She asked me how many books I go through and I have maybe 20 over 10 years. Things stopped during the pandemic and it too me an entire year to fill up the previous book because I was taking the bus more than the train and when I was on the train, there were fewer people.
The bridge is a slow zone but only northbound and I mean there were people out there walking faster than we were. I was a bit distracted on the southbound route.
She only had to go as far as Broadway.
I normally don't try to draw people while riding the bus because it's so much harder but I saw several passengers and decided I had to. The one with the tattoo of pastel wings on her arm got off before I had the chance to. You can see the difference between a train or park drawing and a bus drawing.
Reid Duran (like Duran Duran, I asked) sings in a band and Jimmy plays guitar. Once Jimmy hit some cymbals with a sledgehammer and was like “these are cheap so I can hit it with a sledgehammer if I want to.” Jimmy had rainbow earrings with musical notes, a pendant with the estrogen molecule (C18H24O2), and a t-shirt for the band Godfuck which depicted cats filtered through a Japanese lens along with what I can only assume is the band name in incomprehensible EXTREME BRÜTÄL DËÄTH MËTÄL scribbling.
Reid and Jimmy now want to bash the floor with a sledgehammer in their music even though I told them Mahler beat them to the punch over a hundred and twenty years ago.
Reid has two dogs, a doberman and a sheepdog-poodle.
Chris might be the guy with the Princess Zelda tattoo. I’m not sure. He had Majora’s Mask on his back because he knows Majora’s Mask is the best Zelda.
Alex has tattoos of smiley faces with a rainbow background on his arm and on his head tattoos of frowny faces and a psyduck and a guy in a jester costume. Krusty the Clown and a shyguy and a boo giving a fist bump or what passes for a fist bump when you both have fins instead of hands and
burning question: hey do you that that boos are the ghosts of shyguys because Yoshi’s Island made shyguys canon? What the hell, I was going to ask a question about the movie Dick anyway. Or maybe one about convenience stores.