Amtrak Train
Today is 10/20, and at 12:00 noon I feel a bell ring in my head, that bell which tolled on the hour and on the minute I left Tampa for New York on Amtrak train #88, which went first to Philadelphia before NYC.
10/20 is a milestone for none but myself, but I remember that day well. No, I remember half of that day, the half which started at 12 noon on October 20, 1990, and which has lasted for 20 years. The 12:00 hour arrived and the train left Tampa, right on time, right to the second. As my ass hit the seat the train left the station and I looked out the window and saw my mother, looking away from the train, stepping with her bad-knee duck-waddle off the train platform and back to her car. Her assumption that I would fail and soon return home engulfed our conversations and correspondences all the way through 9/11 and beyond, until she either believed me when I said I loved this town or else she gave up asking “Do you still like New York?”
The train then passed through parts of Tampa I had never seen.
If the moment sounds like one of loftiness and high hopes then it was not. It was anything but an inspiring time, though I remember that particular train ride to New York with great nostalgia for the interesting people I met. The feeling of separation from the past felt like an escape — a dismal, confusing escape, one full of lies and weighty debts. I had no real job prospects, though I lied about this, saying I had several opportunities lined up through agencies. At the time I was unaware that employment were professional time-wasters, though I eventually learned that you simply had to lie to them to get a job. On account of college loans and other financial incursions I had more debt than I could even comprehend at the time. I had never really even held a job, save for food service work and self-assigned busywork at the college radio station, but never the type of office job I had in mind. The only real plan I had for this escape was to stay with various friends from college, friend in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. All those friends have moved on in life but I remember their generosity.
Stepping out of Penn Station I remember thinking I smelled the music of Philip Glass in the air. I was amazed at the phone book, the white pages, for there were so many famous names just sitting there, with street addresses and phone numbers. I met a lot of musicians early on, and for years to come, and my interests spread to other things, though music remains central to my days. Among all the things I do for a living the music is the only thing for which I have any training. Everything else just came along and I faked it until I learned how to do it.
10/20/90 is the day my adult life began. It was, at last, the point of separation, that day I had fantasized about since youth, though as I say it was hardly an uplifting moment. School was over, forever, that ambiguous rite of passage finally graduated away, and I could get on with this life. I wrote about that in one of my notebooks at the time, in April or May of 1990, writing for only myself to see that now was the time for me to get back to being me. 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, though there are literal and complete memories of days throughout my teenage years in which things I wanted to do or things I assumed I would do were intercepted. O youth! I believed then as now that the ritual of school was an arbitrary but mandatory charade.
10/20, too, is a beautiful symmetry. 10/20/10. 10/20/2010.
I look forward to 10/20/30 and beyond in the only city where I have ever wanted to live and wander.
I had reservations for the Oak Room today, but I had to cancel on account of this nightmare-inducing flu, this only a month after my first flu shot in 15 years. I have always imagined that the reputedly obligatory flu vaccine was an ineffectual scam, and I have no particular explanation for choosing to get a flu shot this year, but this matter of me contracting the flu after getting immunized helps confirm my suspicion that the flu shot has no merit. I got a flu shot, and a month later I have a flu. Slamdunk. A waste of $30, the time spent getting the shot, and the time and expense of dealing with this persistent annoyance.
The flu dreams this week have been wildness. In one dream I lived in a house full of giant rats, 40- and 50-pound vermin dangling from the ceiling, each of them hissing at me through their one yellow tooth.
I woke up screaming this morning but I can’t remember the dream. My screaming voice today sounds the same as I remember my screaming voice from childhood: Icy. Frozen. Paralyzed. Trying to scream for what seems like forever, trying to scream from beneath a buried voice, I can not let out more than a gruff rumble until the stop is yanked off the drain and the yawp escapes from my throat.
I often dream of flying over the Triborough Bridge, and of diving from the skies into the East River. That dream has returned this week, as did the post-9/11 dream in which hundreds of planes flew toward Manhattan over the Hudson River, most of the planes dropping like stones into Buttermilk Channel but 1 or 2 of every 1000 of the planes slamming into a building. I dream, too, that Broadway and 5th Avenue are rivers of viscous lava, and that I must wade chest-deep in the stuff to cross these streets. And for the last few months I have dreamed that the dead walk among us, the spirits and bodies contemporaneous with their pasts and presents and futures. This week those dreams have been on fire.
After visiting San Francisco in February I had sporadic dreams of plunging from outer space along a roller coaster made of air onto the Golden Gate Bridge, but I never landed on the bridge, I circled around it, in the air, looking for the suicide hotline telephone.
The dreams have been crazy this week, is all I mean.
Speaking of 10/20/10 and symmetries with the number 10, I recently switched my regular news radio station from 880 WCBS to 1010 WINS. 1010 WINS is probably the first radio station I ever heard in New York, through the General Electric alarm clock radio my grandmother gave me and which I plugged into the wall of Room 1422 at the Parc Lincoln Hotel. The constant background sound of the fake newsroom on 1010 WINS drove me crazy and I switched to 880 WCBS.
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. When 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 this was an intentional element of style at 880, and that they did not want any possible confusion among those who heard them say “ten ten” and thought it meant they were listening to 1010 WINS. I posted this observation somewhere on the Internet and noticed about a year later that WCBS no longer announces the 10:10 hour any differently from the others. “It’s ten-ten,” they now say. I thought it curious, this insignificant fleck of minutiae.
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 a great number of these extra stations. I have not ponied up the extra coin for this “must-have accessory” because I believe that a “must have accessory” is not an accessory at all but something that should be an included component of the radio, or the mobile device, or the 63″ television.
When I encounter this upsell phenomenon of the “must have accessory” I remember a web site I encountered several years ago. The URL showed up in my access_log as referer_spam, and I decided to see what this was, just for fuck’s sake. Today, of course, I ignore any company which advertises itself via referer_spam but this was early in the referer_spam blight that has helped turn hit reporting into garbage.
When I hit the referer_spam web site it was not a poker or erection portal but it actually appeared to be run by a legitimately misguided web person who thought referer_spam was a clever 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 for depositing turds of free advertising into the access_logs of the world. Some visitors looked at the rest of the sight’s offerings and found that the site 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 explanations of charges which would be incurred if one actually used 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 (or what he thought he meant) was that the service *existed* for free, as in free for you to think about and appreciate, but that using it cost money. This business plans 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. Until I compromise my principles and spend $30 for the extra antenna I guess I’m stuck with a half-born product.
I am light-headed and nearly deaf with flu right now. After waking myself this morning with a ghastly nightmare scream I remembered the dramatic fall onto my ass earlier this year, when I woke up screaming and throwing punches at a phantom intruder. I nearly broke my ass and had a glorious bruise to show for it. That was probably the only time I have taken pictures of myself naked, this for the sake of fully seeing the gigantic bruise on that hard-for-me-to-see eastern buttock.
From that incident of throwing punches at a phantom intruder I remember sitting naked on the floor for a half-hour, for 2 hours, for 63 hours and 77 years, waiting for the coast to clear, waiting to know that the intruder was gone.
