At the bookstore there is, in the back room, a fire alarm-type-siren which is so loud that to be in the room with it when it is wailing causes disorientation and nausea.

This morning at 4:00 I discovered that there is an identical siren on the roof of the local jewelry repair shop, less than a hundred feet from my bed. Apparently a glitch in the wiring set it off. It screamed for a good half-hour before one of the dozen or so police responding to irate phone calls managed to disconnect it.

No sign of the owner.

I can appreciate that the siren is there to make the building more safe and secure, but I feel that it should be mandatory that he have a duplicate siren in his bedroom, which can only be shut off from inside his store. Fair is fair.

In other news, I am considering, in my extravagant free time, performing a scholarly comparison between Dostoevsky and Mishima. If you don’t know what I am talking about, then click on the BOOKS link to the right and spend a little time browsing. I will perform the comparison on my trombone. I bet no-one has done THAT yet.

Charles T. Sell was a dentist for a number of years before he was arrested on over 60 charges of insurance and other kinds of fraud. He has spend the last five years in jail because he is suffering from serious mental illness and has been deemed not competent to stand trial.

Unless he is medicated.

Given his current state of mind, which includes the fear that the government is trying to kill him, this medication would have to be forced upon him. So he is appealing the decision.

Did you catch that? The government, in order to make him sane enough to stand trial, is trying to force medication upon a man who is suffering paranoid delusions that the government is trying to kill him.

The legal community is rather nonplussed. Adding to the confusion is the fact that he hasn’t actually been convicted of anything yet.

I don’t feel much of anything about this case, one way or the other, but wow! what an odd situation to be in. In order to cure his paranoia they need to feed it.

I have updated the Books page to include only those books which I am reading/have read during this year. Also, I have started on a new collaboration, this one a site about sloths.

This morning my daily ritual of repeatedly hitting the snooze button was interrupted by loud noises from outside, where several police officers were breaking down the front door of the neighbor’s house and hauling some of them away in handcuffs. An angry man stood on the street out front shouting “I told you he was a punk!!!” and something about a dog. Several young women with babies in carriers evacuated the premises at about the same time, and one woman, wither holding her stomach or cradling her arm, went away in an ambulance.

This is, I think, the third time that Grand Rapids’ Finest have come and cleaned that place out. The most recent was over this past summer, when one of the residents at that time had walked up the block and shot one of the employees of the local scummy convenience store in the legs.

Two weekends ago I noticed that that scummy convenience store, on the corner of Fulton and Diamond, has lost its liquor licence. “Until Relocation or Closure”, it says on the notice. The Powers That Be finally got fed up with them selling liquor to minors and looking the other way when drug deals and muggings happen out front and in their back parking lot.

This past fall someone tried to mug Master Lee at that store. As he was getting out of his car someone hit him in the back of the head with something and yelled “Gimme yo fuckin’ wallet!” and other such niceties. Master Lee turned and advanced on the guy, saying “You want my money? Come take my money!!!” The guy turned and ran. Probably the wisest decision he has made in his life.

Unless he has since decided to commit suicide, which would be a truly neighborly thing to do.

mmmmmmyep….

I recently finished reading The Red Hourglass, a nifty book about all sorts of predators like Black Widows and Praying Mantids and Pigs and Rattlesnakes. The chapter on pigs had some interesting things to say about humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The chapter on black widows had this neat description of how doctors determine if that ungodly pain you are feeling is, in fact, a black widow bite: They ask you if this is “the worst pain you have ever been in?” If the answer is Yes, then it is likely that you have about a year of painful recovery ahead of you.

If you survive the next 24 hours.

So for the rest of the evening, I will read Richard Dawkins, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and eat Ethiopian food from Little Africa (the best food in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan).

Oh! Before I forget: Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs .

I am sitting in a concert hall, waiting for the performance to begin, I am not sure who or what it is, but the audience is well-dressed and well behaved. Directly in front of me is a mother and her two small sons, both in the five-to-eight age range. They are restless and she suggests they sing a song – softly – to keep them occupied until the curtain goes up. They choose “Down To the River To Pray”.

It starts with just the two of them, hesitantly, in the pure, crystalline, self- conscious- yet- completely- open manner of young children:

“As I went down to the river to pray…”

The people around them turn and look for a moment, then join in. Quietly, not at all professional, but with the same purity and clarity of voice. With each word, each line, more join in.

“O brothers lets go down
Let’s go down, Come on down
O brothers lets go down
Down in the river to pray”

By the end of the second verse the entire audience, hundred of people, are singing this simple, beautiful song. The performers come to the edge of the stage and join in

At the last lines of the song this moment has become one of perfect beauty; these two young children are the seeds, the nexus of something extraordinary, which never happened and will never be repeated.