If one were to divide the United States into quadrants beginning at the disputed Cartesian origin of the country (I do quite like the original method of deduction using a balancing point and a cardboard cut-out of the country, though I might have attempted some sort of catenary string model that also accounted for the psychological sinking feeling accompanying the relative locale) near Lebanon, Kansas, I am fortunate as of the past year to have now lived in each. Though I settled nearly as far from the shared vertex of each quadrant as possible, I know for a fact that within another year I will sure enough be living within a couple hundred miles, a pittance, from the susurrus of that sinkhole (strangely near the crossing of the two axes of my own Trefrian coordinate system), perhaps completing my geographic and biological destiny.

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It’s been a long time since I cafe tableaux’d. Let me get back to this cafe that practically tableaux’d itself even before my first visit. There is probably a LibreOffice document in the ‘tableauxes’ directory on the old banana cream Aspire under the bed in my spare room that begins, ‘The worst thing about Grindcore House is that it is four miles from my house…‘

Sike! I don’t have a house or a bed; I sleep on a curb alerted futon mattress on the cement floor of a basement SRO efficiency. In any event, I would have typed that lede a year or more ago – the day after whenever Grindcore House had its grand opening – a mediocre year or more ago at that: one amounting to nothing, sans accomplishment, sans highs and lows, quite distinct from the previous year, which should be 2009 — it’s difficult to determine without referencing a calendar – as that was the year of complete darkness, the accumulation of hundreds of hours of alternating between hammering my fists against my knees and lying catatonic on the carpet envisioning circles of ravens as black fog closed against me, until the latest DVD of Battlestar arrived from Netflix. At least I had time to bicycle to the top of Mount Washington once a week. This past year of squatting on the Grindcore tableau lacked such drama; it was only day after day spent sitting by the radiator and/or box fan, moving some text or photos of bison up and down the screen one pixel at a time.

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