passage of earth

There's no reason to expect Emma to be there and there's no reason to dwell on it.
I pay attention to her events feed not to meet up with her but to keep in touch about cool events happening throughout Boston, Somerville, and Cambridge.

A man had a stormtrooper helmet, skull, and Edgar Allen Poe tattooed on his arms.

Lucahjin would be like "you just ate a whole watermelon in front of me" except she didn't eat a whole watermelon, it was just a tupperware container with watermelon chunks and she ate it with a fork. But it would be hilarious if she pulled a watermelon out of hammerspace.


Somebody did this to an old payphone.

The Steve Walther Orchestra is described as "exuberant and melancholic" and "a spiraling dervish of strings and horns."

Margaret Moody put on a puppet show of a badger meeting faeries and wanting to fly like birds and butterflies and faeries and Alison Plante composed music for it.

There are seven members of Shy Five. The booklet described them as similar to the Joy Division, but I thought they sounded like the Durutti Column with a saxophone.

Angry Toddlers covered Johnny B. Goode.

Last time I saw The By and By last summer, they had a trombonist, guitarist, and drummer. At Artbeat, they had a mandolinist and an upright bassist. On their new album, it's vocals, upright bass, and mandolin, just like in concert. They just released their album. Leah had one of those coconuts with a straw in it that matched her dress but she didn't want to hold it while playing because she has to clap and move her arms around.

Dan Blakeslee is a multi-instrumentalist. I didn't get to hear him play but the art on his CDs is nice. He did a Christmas song with Amy Kucharik.

I went back and forth between Amy Kucharik and friends (friend, mostly) singing a campaign song about the problems of gentrification in Somerville and a thinly veiled political song and the Sharq Arab Ensemble who sung mostly Arabic songs from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Morocco singing songs from their homelands and songs of their homelands and songs about leaving their homelands but one song in English about a guy who moves back to Egypt to become a tuktuk driver, with ney and possibly mizmar, upright fiddle, something that is a rebaba according to a list of members, and various kinds of hand drum.

I finally have a copy of Cunning Folk that I've been wanting to get my hands on ever since before Atlas Lab played their first concert.
She sang about being a ukulele girl in love with Jake Shimabukuro, who is married alas, she sang a song from an upcoming album, she sang a campaign song about Somerville and the problems of gentrification, she sang a thinly veiled political song.

I love how Amy Kucharik's sticker depicts Amy as a mermaid playing the ukulele and Christie as an octopus playing the washboard and trombone at the same time because octopodes can totally do that thing.
Tyler the trumpeter didn't appear in my drawing because he disappeared. But fortunately Amy is great at making fake trumpet noises and she actually taught us how to do it. Christie plays washboard like on the sticker and also kazoo.
Her t-shirt depicts a squid-balloon holding a bathtub with a stripy cat in it, "because you all love octopi… octopodes… whatever."
She drew an Alfonse Mucha inspired picture of herself holding a ukulele and Daphne Lee Martin holding a guitar and scanned it in and colored it in in Photoshop.
Ukulele and ukelele are both correct spellings.

BBB (which stands for Boston Bhoepa Band) is a rock band with Tibetan members. They play guitars and bass guitars and what I described as some kind of Tibetan banjo, which is called a dramyin or dranyen, depending on who you ask. Sgra-snyan in the Wylie transliteration.

It's just too bad they didn't have one of those human femur flutes they have at the Museum of Fine Arts. If you asked Emma Mahler, Emma Weill, and Emma Kodaly, they'd say to make it out of Emmy Goering's femur.

I heard the tail end of Bad Superstar's performace, which is Haitian and danceable despite sweating like Roger Ebert and being tripped up by roots when you're in the shady parts of the park.

I have a demo by Funeral Advantage and I'm not sure what prompted me to download it. Way too early for Vanyaland and Boston Hassle and Allston Pudding and Emma.
Pants were a bad idea, says their lead singer. One of the songs they played was a cover of a Cure song they don't play very often.

This guy's contribution to those works of art he was carrying around is seeing that they were free and taking them. It really makes you think: are we human or are we robot or we could be both but maybe we're neither and we're all just holograms.
see that guy over there watching Amy Kucharik? He's neither human nor robot, he's a dagron.

A man with red in his hair and a woman with blue in her hair had a dino bubble gun.
At least it roars and lights up. He said something about it not being a proper triceratops and maybe that's why: it looks like a hybrid of a tyrannosaurus with its stubby little arms and a triceratops with its three horns and frill.

Someone had a dog named Princess Leia, who is totally Frenchy despite her pug-like pattern and mask, or maybe not, as Pug Vader may be her father.

Someone called me the dog whisperer because their dog let me pet him and he never allows other people to do that.

A man who liked my shirt said that people can be divided into dog people and cat people. I said that you could say that about countries. There are dog countries, like China, Laos, the UK, Canada, Mexico, Malta, Hungary, possibly Japan, and there are cat countries, like Somalia, Egypt, Thailand, Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey, and Burma. So if the cat countries and dog countries went to war, it wouldn't be a battle between good and evil, it would be a muddled mess like World War I.
I haven't figured out France. I guess they're a dog country because of Frenchies. I definitely haven't figured out what Italy or Poland or Ukraine. Madagascar is a cat country mostly because the indigenous carnivores are closer to cats than dogs.

Emily Garfield paints street maps of imaginary cities. She's originally from New York and I said that I found Boston easier to navigate because the streets and subway stations being numbers instead of properly named but she says if you're used to it, it's easy to know where you are and how close you are to your destination.




SepiaLepus paints maps of various real locations.
I've never heard of a Loveland Frogman or a Tornit or a Grassman, but I've heard of the Dover Demon and the Jersey Devil, and I know about the ogopogo from Final Fantasy IV, which is a dragon thing you fight deep inside the moon, and she's utterly amazed by this.
I learned Chupacabra in Gothic. She was impressed by that but I couldn't tell her how to say it because I forgot how and you really don't get too many opportunities to converse with people in Gothic.
I think the Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia inspired the aliens in Majora's Mask. That's a jackalope in the compass rose and an oarfish up near British Columbia, but they aren't cryptids, and I don't know what that thing near Baja California is.




Tracy Lévesque Chromatic Acrylic Paintings. Sorry they're so tiny. They're acrylic and painted on odd materials.




Sydney's Pop Zoo sold paintings of dogs, cats, and parrots. Sydney… Hardin…wait a minute.
She wore a pendant of green scales with a blinking eye at the center and a vial with snake vertebrae that she got from a curiosity shop in Union Square. She doesn't have steampunk-style mechanical arms after she gave her real limbs to the gods, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately because she needs real arms to make art.

Arlette Laan Fiber Creations
They're all made from socks. Sweeties are meant to be cuddled. The gallery doesn't work and neither does the store.

I like kitties but imgur doesn't.

I resized this one thinking maybe Imgur hated the first one because it's giganterous. Maybe it's because they're hosted on Blogspot? At least the capchas are actually working. This one time I tried to upload an entire sketchbook to imgur and it asked for a capcha and then gave me errors.

A woman was drawing full-color portraits to people who would tell her stories. I didn't do it because I had places to be and bands to hear. She puts the stories on her website and she may publish a book of them. No transcripts, just recordings.

A woman with green hair, a skirt depicting rainbow jellyfish, plastic sunglasses with spiraling bits, a silver torc, golden eye earrings with jeweled irises and hanging teardrops along with smaller eye stud earrings, looking at puppets depicting jellyfish, sea stars, monsters, spiders, and even custom made characters. They're by Crefftwr's Trees, Crefftwr being Welsh for crafter and trees because that's how the creations are placed.
I am a critter of fun
I'll ride on your hand
and we'll make people smile.

I can't remember the other poems. Something about sharing secrets. The larger puppets like Aldous the Jailbird and Lady Hilda the Red Hat Lady have stories to go with them but I expected to find them online and didn't want to type the whole thing.


A guy said he got stung by a jellyfish and how everyone says it feels like a bee sting but he doesn't know this because he's never been stung by a bee
Good thing he wasn't in Australia. People stung by the irukandji want to kill themselves or at least saw off their legs. Anything to stop the pain.

Someone wore a Dump Trump t-shirt.
A guy wore a Make Art, Not War t-shirt.
A woman at the Art Asylum table wore a t-shirt with backwards writing that was a common printmaker's error and was intentionally unreadable.
A woman walked around on stilts where a chalk drawing of roots and circles was drawn. A guy said she's tall because of all those growth hormones.
A woman had a tattoo of Heracles fighting the Hydra.
A woman had "here comes the sun" on her shoulder and a watercolor orchid with Chinese writing on her back.
A woman wore a marzipan fruit necklace. Not made out of actual marzipan but it looks more like marzipan fruits than real fruits.
I was talking to a guy at the Actors Shakespeare Project about how I'm looking forward to The Tempest and which of his plays I've seen and the context of Romeo and Juliet and I said about the ending that maybe their deaths will change things but probably not. I said once that I want to see all of Shakespeare's plays by August 9th, 2022 which is about 10 years after I saw Coriolanus on the Common, and it is a lofty goal but more realistic than New Years Eve of 2019.

There was a guy dressed as Elvis.

Someone named Aastha, which is Indic if pronounced with voiceless alveolar plosive but Slithzerikai if pronounced with the voiceless dental fricative, overheard this conversation about the quote "not all who wander are lost" set amongst clothesline poetry: "That's so deep! Is that a Bible verse?" "On my gosh yeah I think so!"

Ha, fuck you, Milo Yanni-polis. A woman's pin said "proud SJW" but when I saw that I'm thinking we need to diversify. We need social justice paladins, social justice wizards, social justice clerics, social justice rogues, social justice ninjas, social justice mimics, social justice dragoons, social justice bards who play out of tune ukuleles and kazoos and tambourines and maracas and rainsticks.

I'm pretty sure I'd be neutral good but leaning slightly towards chaotic, and any bit of chaotic makes me too chaotic to be a social justice paladin. Maybe I could be a social justice rogue. That sounds like fun. Maybe a social justice ranger or a social justice beastmaster. Or maybe we're looking at things the wrong way: social justice gelatinous cube. Social justice rust monster or better yet, social rustice monster. Social justice ogopogo. Because if I was a social justice monster, I'd want to be the hardest boss in Final Fantasy IV. But if we were sticking to Dungeons and Dragons monsters, I'd want to be a Social Justice Tarasque, which can regenerate health and can't be killed and can only be wished away and the only people who can wish it away are Social Justice Wizards.

Esmé wore an elephant pendant and a top with an elephant motif and a pendant of hanging discs and spiral earrings. Adam, who goes by Adamoo or so says Grace, has a mushroom pendant. Esmé and Grace were playing with hula hoops while Adam played with a hackeysack. They didn't stay for Funeral Advantage because they were seeing someone unfamiliar to them at Outside the Box and on my trip home, I was thinking "geez, I hope they could find another way there" but it's actually not that bad because the buses are always there and they don't have to go around Boston Common and then follow a convoluted path through Cambridge like they do when going from Park Street to Kendall.

One of the worst parts about the bus thing for everyone and not just people who have to go between points beyond Park Street and points beyond Kendall is that the displays that show how long you have to wait until the next train arrives is inactive for reasons unknown to everyone.
Waiting for the train was a woman with blue in her hair and floral tattoos on her arm.

She's a bookworm so that's why she just got that tattoo of a face with books on her head. books on its head? Hungarian or Finnish would make life a lot easier. Her dress depicted a white sun, the numbers one to twelve, and the zodiacal sigils with a graphic representation of their animal or inanimate object in the case of Exodus. Famfrit was on the bottom so it follows that Hashmal is on the top, though putting Belias on top would make sense because he's the first esper of the Zodiac and the first esper you obtain in Final Fantasy XII. Taylor would say it's because Hashmal is the best sign but I think Ultima and Zeromus are the best, even if I am a Hashmal in most alternate realities in which I was conceived at the same time and my digestive system wasn't fucked up. Also, Zosma is a star in Leo and that dredges up memories of Zosma Tower.

A woman with pale green hair and a colorful knit hat wore a t-shirt that depicted Link wearing a mask from Crash Bandicoot. I thought it was supposed to be Odolwa at first.

burning question: which is worse: ultra-expensive, gourmet food in portions too small to feed a field mouse, or places like Trump Tower that charge outrageous sums of money for Applebee's quality food? Someone described it as a 35 dollar burger that's arguably worse than Denny's or Chubby's.