The weather cleared, and I finally got into Cambridge yesterday, for my usual luncheon with a friend whom I meet whenever I am there. We ate at a place that had much history for me, an underground restaurant space where I had worked in 1979 and 1980. It is a Thai restaurant now, but back then it was a Mexican fast food place called "Paco's Tacos." I did not work in the kitchen. I was the counter person, selling tacos and burritos and taking in the money at the register. I also did the artistic menu signs which changed every day. It was the closest I have ever come to being a stand-up comedy performer, because I would entertain the customers waiting for their tacos with jokes and rants and funny remarks about Harvard life. I called myself the "Lunch Counter Revolutionary." I often handled Saturday afternoon crowds. At one point, a customer even invited me to perform my Paco's Taco's schtick at a local comedy club, but I wisely refused, since I am not able to be funny deliberately. Nevertheless, I did entertain the taco eaters at the restaurant. The commercial art techniques I learned making menu signs were good training, years later, for my current gig at Trader Joe's, where I am thankfully not required to perform or be funny.

Other of my Cambridge workplaces either have been transformed, or have simply ceased to exist. The "Science Fantasy Bookstore" where I spent many hours and dollars is long gone, as is my other Cambridge work experience, "Sky Light Books." Sky Light sold an odd combination of New Age and Russian Orthodox books, and eventually disappeared when the owners became totally Orthodox Christian, rejecting the New Age. The story of that bookstore, and the esoteric order behind it once known as the "Holy Order of MANS," is a story in itself which I might tell someday if my rationalist scientific readers could stand it. Sky Light's retail space is still there but it is a realty office now.

I spent money on my usual Harvard Square items: art and architecture books and art materials. I only buy things which I can't get where I live. Why schlep it back from Massachusetts if you can get it in Virginia? There are some things, though, which are only present in Harvard Square, or at least in an urban university setting. I love people-watching, and there were plenty of fashion statements, from the chic to the academic dowdy (my fashion role model) to the slick chickies with their bare flat little bellies to the tattooed bourgeois-punk in his expensively ripped jeans. And then there were the professors, always recognizable in their well-dressed decrepitude. I wonder whether any of my own professors are still alive, let alone teaching there. I could not tell whether any of the professors I saw on the street or in the coffee shop were physicists, even though physicists are said to give off visible radiation under the proper conditions.

My trips to Massachusetts, despite pleasant visits to Cambridge and attempts at housework for my parents, don't allow me to do much work, either on art or mathematics. I am still working my way through mathematical functions, contemplating their composition in which one function is processed through another, and their deconstruction, in which a function can be broken down into two separate functions. I will be glad to resume artistic and mathematical efforts with more dedication when I return to my studio in Mid-Atlantica.

Posted at 1:34 am | link