11/3/2021

Since the courthouses were closed yesterday, I took the day off rather than working at home. My plan: Visit Cape May and then attend my monthly support group in May's Landing. While heading down the Garden State Parkway South I realized I constantly think about Esperanto. Trying to translate everything I hear or read into la internacia lingvo. Learning new words, sometimes forgetting the new words not too long afterwards, but also how it's giving me a greater appreciation of the English language, its structure, its grammar, its etymologies and so forth.
For example: It's easy to dismiss English as a creole formulated by Norman invaders to facilitate their attempts to seduce Anglo-Saxon chicks, but its evolution from old, middle, and contemporary English over the course of 1,000 years has given that 'pidgin' some linguistic credibility. Sometimes when I mind subconsciously attempts to do a literal translation of an English sentence into Esperanto, I realize how many idioms and metaphors color English and how Esperanto seems relatively sterile in contrast.
Whether this has anything to do with my understanding of Esperanto has yet to be determined, but during my translation attempts when I hear "he dropped everything to go help someone" or "she gets it", I translate it as "Li ĉesis ĉion helpi iun". Literally translated, "He stopped everything to help someone". "Ŝi komprenas ĝin" is "She understands it".
Yet I think if I said "Li demetis ĉ helpi iun" literally translates to "He dropped everything to help someone" and "Ŝi prenis tion" literally translates to "She gets it", I'd confuse non-Anglophone Esperantists who would wonder, "What did he let fall to the floor? How did that act help someone?" or "What did she take?" for the latter. I fear literally translating English idioms and metaphors into Esperanto would alienate others, undermining Zamenhof's hope to have everyone understand each other on an equal footing.

In Cape May my first stop was Sunset Beach since it's my happy place. I arrived around noon or one, the tide seemed to be low since the narrow beach wasn't as narrow as I recall from my spring and summer excursions to Exit 0. There was a gentle, but steady, cool breeze coming in from the ocean under dark gray and cloudy skies. Cloud cover was heavy enough that the sun wasn't even a pale disk shining through. I parked myself on the sand and began poking around for pretty pebbles and Cape May diamonds. Mind you Cape May diamonds aren't really diamonds, they're quartz pebbles typically no bigger than a pea but sometimes one the size of a dime can be found. For the first time since the autumnal equinox I felt cold and it was glorious. Soon the rare need to warm up drove me to wander into the gift shop. I wanted to buy a post card to send my friend Jeon in Korea and wound up finding a wooden postcard featuring a bigfoot/sasquatch looking out across the water at the wreck of the S.S. Atlantus.
The Atlantus was a concrete ship built at the ass-end of World War I during a serious steel shortage as an experiment with alternative materials for ship construction. It was slow, really didn't function, then found itself relegated to be part of a mooring station. During a storm it broke loose, drifted, then sank off of Sunset Beach. Considering I write for a fortean website, I had to buy it. Wound up buying a postcard featuring the S.S. Atlantus for Jeon and another postcard for my friend in Bloomfield along with my bigfoot find.

After mailing my postcard to Bloomfield, the post office clerk put a stamp with tentacles upon it for postage, I headed towards the other beach on the east side of Cape May, driving to the bottom of Beach Ave. to the Sunset Pavilion. This spot affords a fine view of the Cape May lighthouse and winds up being a place for quiet reflection. Especially in the off-season. It's a gazebo (kiosko en Esperanto) and when I arrived I had to look up the word. Wrote down a few things in my notebook before being overwhelmed with the memory of the last time I was at Sunset Pavilion.
I was with Leah at a time when it seemed that our relationship was healing and I felt a flutter of hope inside. The time was definitely the off-season because I was wearing my black tuque. We had walked down from our car, hand-in-hand, to the pavilion. We talked, looked at the sights around us while sitting close together so she could maintain some warmth, and snapped a few pictures with our phones.
Now "snapped a few pictures with our phones" is a phrase which would be akin to a word salad to people before 2007. Pardon the digression.
Deep down I felt that awful tickle of melancholy demanding release, hope for catharsis to process my thoughts and feelings, so I opened YouTube and played Molly Drake's I Remember and subsequently wept. It was like a razor drawn across my wrists giving release to all that bad blood, mourning the harm I did to myself and the harm I did to Leah. Took me a while to get myself together, get up, and start my journey to May's Landing for my support group.

Heading up on Route 50 North I passed a dead orange cat in the street. He was splayed on the double yellow line. Seeing he was orange, since orange cats are almost always male, made me think of how devastated his humans would feel upon finding him. By now it was raining and there was a pick up truck behind me so I couldn't pull over to pick up the cat and lay him to rest away from traffic.
I was afraid his humans would see me doing that and believe I was the one who struck him.
I was afraid I'd pick up his battered remains, hug them, and weep not being able to let him go.
I really miss my cats.

I was one of the first people to arrive at support, I didn't know the other early birds but my friend Rameen showed up not too long afterwards. I told her how I appreciate she introduced me to this group, contrasting it with my experience last Saturday at the Hallowe'en party where Peanut's human dismissed and disrespected my wishes to not be hugged. Consent is very important to me, for a partner and for myself. Rameen said she was sorry that happened to me then asked if I was alright in the context of Tuesday evening, not last Saturday. I felt my voice break, caught it, stopped to collect myself, and grumbled, "Fuck, I thought I had a poker face."
"You do. But I noticed it."
Rather than be the misery guy, I kept to generalities. Also I was out in public at a diner at a series of tables pushed together to accomodate many folks who I really don't know. That small exchange about my poker face demonstrated to me that Rameen is a good friend.
Yet knowing she's a good friend, I don't want to push her away by being an inconsolable black cloud of melancholy.

Support was good, and so was standing outside after the diner closed where we continued to shoot the shit about a wide array of topics. I didn't feel the cold and felt good about that.

Gotta say this was a full day and I'm glad I took the time off.