tomorrow is 10/20, and at 12noon i will remember the hour and the minute i left Tampa for New York on that Amtrak train. it‘s a milestone for none but myself, but i remember that day well. i remember it whence the 12:00 hour arrived and the train left the station, right on time, right to the second.
i regard that day as when my adult life began. it was, at last, the point of separation, that day i had awaited since youth. school was over, forever, that necessary but largely ambiguous rite of passage finally graduated away, and i could get back to being me. i remember writing about that in one of my notebooks at the time, in May of 1990, that now was the time for me to get back to being me. of course at the time i would have been unable to recall when that fabled period of me-being-me had ended, and how far back i had to go to resume my normal activities. there are literal and complete memories, though, of days in which things i wnted to do or htings i assumed i would do were intercepted.
10/20, too, is a beautiful symmetry. 10/20/10. i look forward to 10/20/30 and beyond in the only city in which i have ever wanted to live.
speaking of symmetries with the number 10, i recently switched news radio from 880 to 1010 WINS. 1010 is one of hte first if not the first radio station i ever heard in New York, through the General Electric alarm clock radio my grandmother gave me. the constant background sound of the newsroom on 1010 WINS finally drove me crazy and I switched to 880 WCBS. the reason i think of this is that whilst listening to WCBS a few years ago I noticed that the announcers would state the time of day as “eight-eighteen“ or “eleven-eleven“ as appropriate for the hours of 8:18 and 11:11, respectively.whenever the 10:10 hour would strike, though, they would demonstratively change the format of their time of day announcement by stating “Ten Minutes After Ten.“ i assumed that this was an intentional element of style at 880, and that they did not want any posisble confusion among those who heard them say “ten ten“ and thought it meant they were listening to 1010 WINS. I posted htis observation somewhere on the Internet and I noticed about a year later that WCBS no longer announces the 10:10 hour any differently froim the others. “It‘s ten ten,“ they now say. I doubt if my posting to the intertubes had anything to do with the change but I thought it curious, this insignificant fleck of minutiae.
1010 was the first radio i remmeber hearing in this town, through the radio my grandmother gave me in Room 1422 of the Parc Lincoln Hotel. terrestrial radio in NYC is not a premier component of the cultural landscape here, but it ain‘t bad. i got an HD radio some months ago and have been largely ambivalent about the additional programming. on an HD radio some of the usual stations broadcast a couple of extra channels, though one needs an extra and expensive antenna to properly receive great number of these extra stations. ki have not ponied up the extra coin for this “must-have accessory“ because i believe that a “must have accessory“ is not an accessory but something that should be an included component of the radio, or the mobile device, or the 63“ television. every time i encounter this upsell phenomenon of hte “must have accessory“ i remmeber this web site i encountered once. i saw the URL show up in my referer_log as referer_spam, and i decided to see what this was, just for fuck‘s sake, this was early in the referer_spam blight that has helped turn hit reporting into garbage.
when i reached the referer_spam web site it was not a poker or erection portal but it actually appeared to be run by a legitimate web person who thought referer_spam was a great way to reach out to fellow access_log junkies.
alas, the message board on this site was a spew of vitriol from site visitors who felt they‘d been had by this referer_spam, and who pronounced the webmaster a sorry opportunist who deposited turds of free advertising into the access_logs of the world. beyond that, some visitors actually looked at the rest of the sight‘s offerings and found that the sie owner was trying to sell some kind of VOIP internet phone service. the service was billed as being “100% Free“ but the “free“ tag line was followed by detailed explanaiton of charges which would be incurred by actually using the service. the service was free, as the web site owner repeatedly affirmed, but using it cost money. i never got to the bottom of that gentleman‘s logic but i gave him some credit for defending himself so vigorously. i think what he meant was the the service *existed* for free, but that using it cost money, which means, essentially, nothing.
that is what i remember whenever i buy a gadget which requires several “must have accessories“ for it to fully function, and the Sony HD radio which I bought earlier this year falls into that category.
i am light-headed and nearly deaf with a head cold right now. since getting that flu shot i find i have a flu only 3 or 4 weeks later. it is a cold that badly wants to become a flu, and it has many of the same characteristics, but it is not quite what it wants to be. i guess it is just a cold but it wants so bad to be a flu. i have had some wild and panicked dreams this week. really crazy shit. rats, buildings evaporating into the earth, i woke up screaming this am though i can‘t remember why. i remmeber that dramatic fall onto my ass when i woke up screaming and throwing punches at a phantom intruder. i nearly broke my ass na dhad a glorious bruise to show for it, but mostly i remember sitting nake don the floor waiting for the coast to clear, waiting to know that that was just a dream and that the intruder was none.
