i seem to have IMBUED MY DAYS WITHA SENSE OF DISCIPLINE, WHICH IS NOT NEW TO MY LIFE BUT IT HAS NOT BEEN COMMON LATELY, THESE PAST YEARS. I‘VE HAD NO NEED FOR IT, REALLY, BUT RE-WORKING THOSE OLD MUSCLES (just noticed the caps lock) of focused energies brings it all back quickly enough. i used to practice piano in high school and at the conservatory 10 hours a day, and it often felt like no time had passed, or very little time. at the time i sometimes wished i had another useful outlet for my energies, another source of focus, not to distract but to re-focus and re-articulate those energies. today, i went out walking, intending to make a long and directionless wander of it, just like old times, but i just did not have the sense of wanderlust, nor could i think of any place around here to which i have not already walked any number of times. nothing seemed interesting, and i knew i had work to do at home, so home is where i went and work is what i did.
last week i decided to lease a new server, a web server, for my erstwhile kingdom of content. i decided to pay for the full year in advance, for to save money eventually, and in fact i got a flatout bargain, though the server is not ready yet so the proof is not yet available. after i submitted the order and did the necessary followup with the always-perilous-seeming billing department at my ISP, i went to the supermarket and got a phone call from the ISP saying the credit card transaction had been declined. not surprising, i said “it‘s because it‘s a large amount of money,“ and i said i‘d get it straightened out within the hour. i had intended to call the credit card company when i got home from the grocery store but as i stepped in to the checkout line i realized that my purchase here would probably be declined, too, because the intrusive credit card company likely put a hold on the card in response to the attempted transactions of relatively large purchases. that, i thought, was annoying as shit, but to be declined at the freakin‘ grocery store on account of this interception would be embarrassing. so i got out of the line, and stepped into a secluded spot in the pasta aisle, and i called the credit card company at the number on the back of the credit card and punched some buttons to verify that i was the card owner and that i recognized the attempted purchases from 20 minutes earlier. i never had the privilege of dealing with a human being, but progress comes with compromise, and streamlining fraud detection does not necessarily need the human touch.
the last time i confronted this type of automaton nonsense was when my mother died, but at that time i had the presence of mind to call the credit card # and (again, without the privilege of human contact) i was able to alert them to a large purchase coming soon, this being the outsize cost of funeral arrangements which we put on my card because i seem to be th eonly one involved who had a credit card and the payment had to be made right away. i couldn‘t send a check or money order, though i probably could have wired the money, but it was a lot of coin and i don‘t remember if i had that much liquid cash to wire. i remember walking through midtown and stopping in my tracks, to call the credit card company, that supervisory entity which authorizes my purchases, to tell them that aa ccoonspicuously large purchase was coming soon from a funeral home in florida. the details didn‘t matter, since there was no human to explain this to. only the approximate dollar amount of the impending purchase mattered to the robots at the credit card company.
i have been freeing space in my environment. freeing clutter. box after box after box of shit has gone to the curb and been spirited away by the trash collectors. i hear them in the morning, the garbage trucks, and sometimes i can tell when they are throwing away my junk. or if i can not tell specifically that they are tossing my old office chair or my old piles of magazines or my old 27“ television then i at least know that the task is being done, with or without the specificity of the sounds associated with the objects. there was something unkind about the television being removed, that old whore which absorbed so much of my fascinations for so many years. in the end i wanted to try for one last project with the thing, but it was not to be. since the transition to DTV (has it changed your life? has it?) the old TVs are worthless piles of plastic and glass, and i held on to this one out of love for the thing, out of genuine love for the dumb object. there are ways to make old TVs DTV-capable but if you‘ve seen the instructions that the FCC recommended i think you‘d laugh, like i did.
the last straw, the incident which made me think i should probably unload this hulking box from my life, was the night i woke up screaming and throwing punches, trying to hit a phantom woman who was circling my bed, existing only in my head but a descendant of someone i had met in a bar that week. she was hating on men and calling us all pigs (like a lot of women i meet, this woman was far from unique)and for some reason it struck me not as a joke but as a threat to my dignity. i sat up in bed, then stood up on my knees, yelling at this woman to “go away! go away!“ i hurled punches at her but they went right through her, and she never looked at me, instead turning toward the wall and dismissing me as another useless male. i swung punches and lunged toward her,falling full-force off the bed and toward the floor, smashing my right asscheek on the corner of the 27“ television, living with a massive bruise that lasted for a couple of weeks but which carried with it the comfort of knowing that i could have smashed my ribs or balls or head other more vulnerable part of my body into that sharply-dull cornerof the old television.
after it happened i sat naked on the floor for what seemed like hours, still fearing that woman who i had tried to attack but whose body accepted no punches. it seemed like hours but was certainly not that long. i heard activity in the upstairs and downstairs apartments, suggesting that my 5am outburst had disturbed the strangers upstairs and the stranger downstairs, and lifted them from their sleeps. i felt more than naked. my bare skin was the least naked part of my body.
i began thinking it was time for the old TV to go, after this incident. the TV did nothing wrong, but it posed a useless hazard, and the big box was, more than ever, empty.
