i went to the walgreen‘s for to buy underpants, and whilst there i passed through the eyeball aisle, the eyeball products section, the eyeball maintenance and repair section, and whilst there i remembered that awful day, recently, within the last countable number of months, in which i got a stick of metal or plastic (we never determined what) in my right eye. the retinal surgeon who i eventually found removed the sword, that fucking dagger, after many long hours and failed attempts to get the thing out myself. many trips to the walgreen‘s eyeball aisle, and to similar aisles of other establishments. oh, woe, i won‘t retell the whole story now but it swiftly washed through my mind and i just thought i‘d share.

walgreen‘s had no underpants for me so i went to the shops on broadway. they were closed, shuttered for the holiday, hording the damn underpants and keeping them from needy individuals such as i too busy for doing laundry when, in the greatest country on earth, underpants should be always for sale up the street. alas, whence the stores were closed i ended up at the 99cent shop and found a bounty of cheap, quality, , XXL, “slightly imperfect“, dark-colored underpants, just the way i like it.

so the day was not a complete failure where underpants were concerned, though i had moments of existential resignation and angstiness regarding the futility and waste of my endeavors. i scanned and OCRed and edited all the content from an 1891 edition of the old magazines, charged to do it at first but progressively going cross-eyed from the physical labors and from the unfolding sense of hopelessness and emptiness lurking beneath my enthusiasm.

i remembered a party line i used to call, a pirate party line populated by phreakers and, oddly, elderly women. the thing was called “the bridge“ and when you called it you‘d hear people talking, sometimes in an orderly way but others times all at once, a gentle chaos of tangled voices, most of them calling in search of illegal information regarding VMBs and other phone bridges, but for some reason the line was also filled with elderly women talking amongst themselves about their lives, their families, their pasts and futures. i remember how those sullen voices lingered out there on the wire, talking of their children and their deceased husbands, and how one women in particular repeatedly described herself as “stranded“. her voice rose up from the others, even the bluntly interloping phreakers and phone pirates, she delivering a litany of sorts to the occasional grunts of acknowledgement and support from the other elderly women on the line. what was most odd about this line was the occasional comet of noise from the intruding phreakers who busted in asking for any VMBs, asking for any other bridges, looking for other phone numbers to explore and to raid. i am not certain the elderly folks heard those guys (and they were all guys) at all. it was like a multi-track phone line, and maybe the phreakers who set up the bridge did so with the appropriate skillset suchthat others using the line would not notice them. the elderly folks seemed to know where they were, i imagine thye may have been paying some by-the-minute fee to commune in this empty space, and that the phreakers found a way to tap in to the line and make themselves invisible to the paying callers.

today‘s encroaching moment of ennui reminded of that woman, her voice hanging in the balance, repeatedly saying she was “stranded“. i played this bridge party line for my mother one night and she heard it for but a few seconds before saying that it was “awful!“ with an exclamation point. i had a tendency to introduce my mother to the most depressing and bleak particles of culture i could find, true to my character then as now, but if i did it was because i thought she would identify with or understand it. when she heard those elderly women glumly speak of their vacant lives she recognized the substance of the discussion instantly. this was in the 1980s, probably 1987or 1988, when mother was far from elderly herself, but she always had an “aptitude“ for that stuff, for the hoarseness of old age and the quiet violence it inflicted on one‘s dignity. in recent years i came to believe that depressed people, people like my mother and me, have a more accurate view of the world. the “stranded“ woman was depressing, and listening in on her litanies was “awful“, but mother and i both fed on it.

got me some underpants.