i went shopping for pianos today, and the piano store was gone. replaced by a Nordstom‘s, i think. i guess i should not be surprised, but it makes it harder for me to get a trade-in deal on the 2 pianos i bought from that store. they appear to have another location way the hell out on long island so maybe i‘ll call them there. bummer, though, and a moment of increasingly familiar alienation as the places i thought i knew are gone. i mean, it happens, here as anywhere, but in new york it seems like the past is steamrollered with scary efficiency, and the occupants of the new places have no knowledge of what was there before. diners vanish, replaced by The Gap. bars abruptly shutter their business, replaced seemingly overnight by a Thai restaurant. Tower Records, that place of some nostalgia for me where I worked for about a year, was flushed out of its Lincoln Center location, and all its North America locations, with the Lincoln Center space briefly filled by the quickly-defunct Circuit City. i remember wandering that space, looking for vestiges of the Tower Records that I knew from before, the Tower itself a vastly different space since I had worked there, after a major renovation of the space which sent the store to a temporary location up Broadway at the Ansonia Building.

Anyway, the piano shopping was a failure today. i ended up at Beethoven Pianos on 58th Street, chatting with a gentleman about digitals and the piano shopping world of that part of Manhattan. my future, for the forseeable years, is in digital pianos, not “real“ acoustics. i have 2 Roland digitals i want to unload, replacing them with one.

i thought about buying stuff again when i checked my credit report this week. not to brag but that thing is a masterpiece. it‘s like i aced the SAT, and got the extra credit questions! my credit, according to this most recent report, is virtually perfect. i could buy you. in the past years i‘ve become accustomed to buying things outright. i have $0 in debt,, and i get nervous whilst owing $10 on a bar tab. that is how liberating a zero-debt life feels after graduating into an adulthood of seemingly infinite debt. i think that was 13 years ago now, that day i clicked the button on the credit card payment web site and paid away my credit card, this event coming just days after paying away the hated college student loans. all my money was mine from that day forward, the heaviness of debt lifted. that was why i took a corporate job, for to pay away my debts. i stayed at corporate longer than i might have imagined myself as having planned, but it was all good.

anyway, i might buy things on the installment plan these days, to fill out my credit rating and raise it to a golden perfection. it seems that credit agencies prefer you to buy things that way, versus buying them outright, like i usually do. to me it is antithetical to my debtlessness. isn‘t all debt bad debt? but if it proves something to these drones at the credit bureaus then hey, why not…

i never cared much about my credit rating until i had the identity theft episode some years ago. some people in Houston grabbed my name and SS# from who-knows-where and were able to open accounts at several stores in that city, including Sams Club and a car parts place. i never knew where they got my SS# and other information, but i assume i was just one of thousands whose stuff got stolen from some credit bureau or other. these credit bureaus are one of the great frauds of the last 30 years, i think, their incompetence and lethargic indifference to the responsibility that goes with collecting credit information on individuals sharply contrasted by the impact of their evaluations.

i remember a meeting at the first company i worked at in new york, circa 1993. it was memorably strange. corporate security called meetings with the entire company to announce that several boxes of information had been stolen from the company, boxes containing employee information and personal records of everyone who worked at the company, past and present. the man leading the meeting explained that you might want to be concerned if you have stopped getting mail at home. “just stopped,“ he said, punctuating the statement with the gesture that baseball umpires would use to call “safe“. at the time i thought it was a puzzling signal to look for. i mean, i didn‘t get much mail. i did not get mail every freakin‘ day. i might go days without mail. what was he saying? that normal people get lots of mail every day?

in 1993 i don‘t think anyone knew what identity theft was, but i have long imagined that this theft of boxloads of employee information by parties unknown was an early attempt by the thieves to create the identity theft genre.

i wish i had that meeting recorded, or documented. it was strange, and when it ended i don‘t feel like anyone knew what had just happened or why they had been summoned. the words “identity theft“ were never used but the profile of things fit the bill. i thought of this when i tried to imagine where the people in Houston got my info, though by the time that happened years had passed and i tend to think that little of the info on file at that company would have been useful to the thieves.

i think of successful criminals as innovators. innovation is not the privilege of the righteous. some weeks ago i think i unintentionally passed a bad $20 bill, a bill decidedly out of character with the other bills i had just received at a bank ATM. the other bills looked green, this one looked almost completely white, like it had been printed on laser printer paper. i did not use that bill on account of thinking it was fake, though subconsciously maybe i felt a need ot get rid of it. whatever the case, the cashier held the bill up to the light, looking for what i do not know, and then she called the manager who also looked at it under the light of the sun, looking for what i do no know, but pronouncing the bill genuine. i still think it was fake, but i got me thinking about counterfeiting bills and how easy it might be to produce passable small bills that most cashiers would never inspect. not that i would execute on these innately criminalistic instincts, but greed is a tempting force. it is like a vacuum. a black hole. under most philosophies and religions i think it is still admissible to have evil thoughts, it is the action that casts you into the flamepits. we had this discussion at great length in high school theology classes, the gawky adolescent unease about sexuality (with a celibate Jesuit priest moderating) guided the discussion about homosexuality into strangely accusatory realms. the shouts from the peanut gallery boiled down to, homosexual thoughts are not wrong, homosexual action is wrong. and on account of that one should become a priest if they find themselves inured to sexual peccadillos. it seems like an ugly stereotype about priests, but it was common among us, and it should have pre-populated our shock buffers when the priest sex scandals were announced in the 1990s.