Last night, Danielle and I headed over to the harbor nearest to the US Coast Guard building in the North End. There is what one might, at first glance, perhaps, believe is a scary alley populated by nogoodnick gansgters. What better place to dispose of a body than the docks next to a government building and behind what seems to be an abandonned public pool? Ah, but here the clovers grow thick and their scent mixes with the brine of the see. Across the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill Monument shine (until midnight or so, then they shut down the Hill. Same goes for Old North Church, which, no less stunning, resides directly behind the playground — inlandwardly.)
But that’s not really the meaning of this post. What I mean to tell you is this: The internet is everywhere. With my laptop less than twenty-four hours old in hand and the Strawberry Festival Full Moon (also the Rose Full Moon to some) waxed complete, it was time to take this puppy on the road. (At this point it should be noted that Bubbles, Danielle’s iBook came along, too. In fact, I’m writing this post on Bubbles right now. Danielle has Jacobi, my laptop, held captive until she finishes another of her practice GRE tests.) Once we found parking in nearby Charlestown, she and I headed over to the clover covered patch to — you guessed it folks — study math. I hit up an article on the Penrose Inequality (gr-qc/0312047).
Not too long ago Greg Valiant told me that the CIA asks during its interviews for new employees if they have ever wanted to be a florist or had an interest in flowers, something like that. Statistically, he explained, there is a high correlation among those who have and those who suffer from, euphamistically speaking, mental instabilities. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me at the time. But I accepted this fact on faith, until now.
Danielle exhibited reservations at first, but once she picked her first clover, she, and they, were done in. The sort of fastidiousness, the calculation, the avariciousness, it all smacked of torture. And that was convenient. During our walk from the car we had discussed the merits of torture, or rather, the lack thereof. But as she ruthlessly reached for the thickest clover, no, now the longest one, oh, this one bent, I’ll grab another one, we both began to understand the wisdom of the CIA.
Of course, as she hunted her next victim, I couldn’t help myself. After all, I had successfully found and logged onto an unsecure local wireless network and emailed my excitement.
By the way, the bouqet Danielle arranged looked nothing short of magnificent. I wish I knew more about plants so that my description could mean more. It looked largely like a purple broccoli, punctuated by the long, pointy closed blossoms of some small lily-like wild plant. The bouquet symbolized all the buzzwords from a syllabus on literature: nature and the city, order and chaos, and, my favourite, beauty and brutality.