26-V

Taurus Up

Broken Men

☭ He was the ☮ broken man who had fled to Beacon Hill seeking a ☮️ jazz note from Professor Lance Olivieri. The music he craved found him wandering the streets and lofts of Acorn Street searching for an Em7♭5 chord over an A. But Lo, Thou inet 101 lingered not, but the quest was interrupted by an empty isolation as he remembered his failing that Inet-101 course. He imagined, instead, a rich solitude full of purpose. The multitudes of cobble-stones he walked floated by in his peripheral vision, reminding him of the multitudes that had stepped on this pavement before. He listened closely and heard an A♭ over a B♭. Take it as the clue that he was very close, close enough, to finding the object of his desires.

Sixty-nine years had passed. They used Hallicrafters. A HT-32B Transmitter and a Model S-38C 5-tube communications receiver sat on a bench. woof radio There was a hot vintage “Morsetaste key as backup on the desk. They all hunkered in the basement next to his wife's photography lab and the GE Filter-Flo clothes washer. Receiving is cool but without transmitting it was a waste of time. The station's nickname was WOOF after the family dog who lived outside in a house next to the transmission staff. The stations logs contained conversations, routine notations, weather data, and obscure entries and observations gleaned from the outer ether space. Sometimes RxD and TxD had to be suspended during the rinse cycling. The washer wouldn't level on the floor and the vibration noises were disrupting.

Somewhere in the late seventies or eighties, Armando and Sal got the job in the East State Street CO (central office) of maintaining the transmission infrastructure that ran from the CO and through out the cities sewers to various other nodes. These were broader bandwidth signal paths that carried bank and stock transactions, inter-governmental records, and other assorted private data. Every once in a while someone would discard something into the sewer that would get hung up on a cable block. Rats would come and ferociously feed on the fetid refuse and chew right through the cables. They got triple time to do an underground splice. It was in their contract and would later be called a “racket” by unscrupulous politicians wanting to cash in on the lifting of manhole covers, hooking up all the support equipment, and disrupting neighborhoods. All this could take time and might require certain oils and greases to lubricate the numerous bureaucracies.

No dessert until you eat your mites..

☭☮

Standin' by Peaceful Waters

"We were standing, Standing by peaceful waters, Standing by peaceful waters, Whoa wah oh wha oh.. The dogs were barking as the cars were parking, the loan sharks were sharking, the narcs were narcing, practically everyone was there.¹" West Trenton, South Trenton, Lamberton to Alden. Brinton on a clear winter morning. Sheeba, a families dog, is abandoned on an vacant lot off of Perry. Automatic weapon fire from around about Stuyvesant. We counted the sounds of over sixty rounds. It appears the churches were empty again.

"Shall we do the broadcast here?" she asked.

Father Massimiliano Vaselli collapsed and convulsed on the floor. The sexton cupped his hands and grabbed some holy water from the font and splashed it on his twisted sweating face. A nun starting crying and another screamed, "call nine-one-one." I immediately thought to myself maybe I should call 411 and ask to speak to God or better yet I think I would call the Holy Ghost, as I could count on him. Father Vaselli belched, farted, and started softly murmuring ".. His light will not fail, .. His light will not fail, .." over and over again in a very slow Gregorian chant sort of way. I thought I smelled incense. A parishioner did a sign of the cross. Kazel, Quaderia, Flan, and Tierany were playing, laughing, and yelling in the street, creating thousands of indistinguishable mish-mashed children's playing noises. The cacophony of those children laughing and shouting was a breath of fresh air ...

A properly executed folk song is also like fresh air.

Keep a backup.

¹. Lake Marie.