today was mostly wasted staring at the printer, trying to coax that stubborn beast into printing, as if screaming and dancing and squealing for attention would summon functionality from the f0cking thing. i didn’t think it made snese that it wouldn’t work all of a sudden, and it turns out i may have been right, though in the end i don’t care why it works again, just that it does. evidently i had to reboot the router, or rather i had to “power cycle” the thing, which is a phrase the pretentiousness of which i do not understand. when did turning a device off and then on again become something so high falutin as Power Cycling? anyway, i figured it out all by my bad self, as is the rigeur for the singularly self-employed with little patience for customer support lines. and in this case i think my skepticism proved righteous, since i think i would have been on hold with th eprinter company tech support for hours before we got to consideration of other (unsupported) devices.
and then the coffee machine blew up, sending a pool of coffee all over the counter. fucking Cuisinart. and then this droid phone started choking, apparently in response to stepping outside into the high humidity. i’ve had that experience with other gadgets. the abrupt change in humidity makes them slow to a scrawl. and apparently my acocuntant is in the midst of a meltdown… haha, i mis-spelled accountant but i think i will leave it as acocuntant, no reflection on the individual in question, but he’s apparently drowning in new IRS rules, new software, and a mass of late filings from his clients. of course the IRS forbade early filings this year on account of changes to their software, so this extra 3 days of filing time doesn’t really amount to much.
i’ve been exploring the piano music of Jelly Roll Morton, in a volume of transcriptions published by the Smithsonian, a volume which i bought a few years ago. it’s really good stuff,man. the volume is very fat, very stuffed and hard to keep on the piano music stand. each transcription is heavily annotated, and at the end of each one is some footnotes saying that “Morton played an E-Flat here in the blahblahblah recording” or “Morton skipped this reprise in the blahblahblah recording…” I laughed all day, though, when I mis-read one of these footnotes as “Moron played an E-Natural here in the blahblah recording.” Yeah, I’m sure he played lots of wrong notes in those recordings but is it appropriate to call him a Moron? Yeesh.
after a day mostly wasted trying to make the printer work i bolted the homestead and headed over to 30th avenue and 48th street, whence a very very very old sign still hovers over the sidewalk outside an old old old tavern. the old sign is from the Bell System days, and might be 80+ years old, stating that a “PUBLIC PHONE” was once situated nearby. there is a payphone nearby, but it’s not a rotary dial as was probably the case when the old old old sign had more currency. more relevance.
i was bummed about the pub, then. i don’t know hold old old old it is but it was obviously renovated recently, and the smell of paint was hallucinatory for me. old school, mold school, i do not know, but it had nothing inside that looked older than a few months. i am looking for more rotary dial payphones, you see, and i thought that the ancient payphone signage outside this place might indicate such treasures inside. alas… it was just an old man irish pub, mid-day, with one loud old man spewing racist invective as the white people laughed.
i almost begin to love Astoria some days. so much comfort in the anonymity of its streets. htis is why i moved to new york in the first place, for the anonymity, the disappearances i take into its infinite avenues and communities, where every turn of the road leads to a different life, a different interpersonal morasse of families, a different city into which i can vanish.
