from home to rockefeller center and back today, is a long enough walk, but i feel barely winded, and not even tired. whoot, i guess. more likely: who cares
whatwhatwhat…
i picked up some copies of the old magazines, having run out of storage on the drive where those scans are stored. that was unexpected. a terrabyte ain’t what it used to be.
i am starting to feel bad about the dating situation. it is not working out. most things do not work out. i am feeling bad for the happy times, though. i mean, if it’s over, i am not sad for that. things end for a reason. exes are exes for a reason. we appear to have a capacity for enduring friendship, and that’s all good, but i get sad thinking about the happiness that transpired for those nights and days. eating dinner in my kitchen, sex in the hallway, boat rides and calm afternoons sharing crossword puzzles at the bar. she said that co-workers had remarked that she had “a spring in her step”… is that gone already? is it my problem is if it is gone? it is not my problem… the relationship ain’t working right now, it had sparks of potential for some months, but it’s just gotten too strange.
…..
someone just told me a funny story. in response to my account of a dream i had a year or so ago, that dream was this: i am on a boat, where the adults are having a boat party, and the children are playing in the back room. i go into the back room to find the bathroom. a bunch of little girls are playing on the floor when one of them says to me “Mark, go look at the toilet, go look at what we did.” i go in there and find that the toilet is filled to the brim with turds. big, long, righteous brown turds, turds so thick and firm that all i could ask was, “how did such little girls crank out such huge turds?” i flushed the toilet and the turds all went down the drain, but a second later they were back. i flushed again, the turds went down, but quickly rose back up. i repeated this several times, and as i flushed and the turds kept popping back up i noticed they were slowly turning into sausages. by the time i stopped flushing the turds had turned into beautiful sausages of every variety. the dream ends with me saying: “Oh, so that’s how they make sausages.”
i just told this dream story to a friend, and he responded with a true story:
a friend of his (Mike) was at a picnic/party type of thing. the bathrooms were unisex. Mike had to use the restroom, so he steps in to the unisex bathroom. a little 6-year-old girl is just exiting the toilet stall. Mike knows her name, says hi to her, and he thinks she’s real cute as she sings a song and sort of half-dances her way across the bathroom to the sink, where she washes her hands. Mike’s all smiling at how cute the little girl is when he steps into the stall that she had just left, and he looks at the toilet. “It was the biggest turd I ever seen in me life!” he exclaimed through his Irish accent. “2 feet long? That little girl put out the biggest turd I ever seen! I don’t even think she wiped her ass!”
that was a funny story. ha ha. girly turds.
i associate Colon Cleanse with Sarah Jessica Parker, and i am not sure why, except that i think she played a character once where she was pitching a Colon Cleanse-esque product. i seem to remember her boasting of her big, huge logs, which were not her usual little squirrly girly turds, but big, thick, and golden brown.
i tried those things once, the Colon Cleanse and psyllium husk variants. they really did help me crank out monstrous fucking turds, but it was obvious to me that i had expelled the good with the bad. i should have had some probiotic drinks on hand to replenish my innards. i assume the stuff helped rid my innards of ball bearings and marbles ingested as a youth, and i assume as well that it ridded my digestive tracts of the rancid spackle and glue that stuck to my rectal wall like an insidious mold.
but i also felt like i’d shit my brain out. and that can’t be good.
…..
there was a bit of a scare regarding the property down in Florida. a company there inspects the building annually for termites, and in 2006 they recommended a tenting of the building. tenting is expensive, but it is not uncommonly done in that part of Florida. in 2006 i spent a week in Daytona, i voluntarily found motel accommodations for the residents of the building (I was under no obligation to do so), and the building was summarily wrapped in a green-and-white tent, whence the termite genocide began. 2 days and about $3000 later the tent came off, everyone returned to their apartments, and all was well. the company that did the tenting offered a 4-year bond, which i paid for annually, which included an inspection of the property for termite infestation.
so last week i got a letter from the other termite inspection company (the one which recommended the tenting in 2006), in which they again noted “DWT damage” and they again recommended a “TENTING”. (DWT=Drywall Termites).
in Florida real estate the word “termites” is akin to a man feeling pain in his balls. there are some things you just don’t mess around with, and you consult the nearest expert as soon as possible.
nevertheless i was a little skeptical. it didn’t seem realistic that one should tent their building every 5 years, although i know that a tenting is no vaccination, or some sort of immunity. termites come flying in off the ocean, and there is not a damn thing that human beings can do about that. an infestation can commence anew the moment a tent is removed.
still, that’s not common…
a few phone calls today seemed to confirm my suspicions that this “infestation” is a phantom. the damage reported by the recent inspection is old, from 5 years ago, and there is no need for a tenting. there is no recent evidence of wings and ephemeral detritus from the termites themselves, and no residents of the building have reported a single bug. evidently these sightings of real termites would be immediately reported.
i am at such a disadvantage here, for not knowing the nuances of this stuff, and for not being there on site to deal with thing. i see “termites” and “tenting” on a scrap of paper and my gut clenches. i actually lost some sleep over this, suggesting that maybe i should just keep the property. it has been on the market for years, with nary a whiff of interest from buyers. but that lack of activity in the Florida real estate world is not what makes me think i should just keep the property. it is the fact that i seem to give a shit about it, and that i care.
the realtor in charge of selling the property sent me a list of properties that have actually sold in the last 12 months. one property on the market for $120,000 sold for $40,000. others sold for similarly deflated values, probably because the owners just gave up, or were losing money and walked away as best they could, or maybe everyone died and the building was forcibly sold to a bank. i don’t know what is happening but i might just want to keep the property around for a while, since it doesn’t look like it is going anywhere on its own, and i find that i actually kind of like being in charge of the place. i makes so little money, though… the beauty of the property was that my dad lived there for free, making virtually no money, but not intending to make money. he used spare change from rental income to maintain the property and make it look nice.
yesterday was Fathers Day, and i lit up the shrine, that lower Manhattan backlit thing that looks like something you’d find in a Chinese restaurant. dad sent me that as a Christmas gift in 2004, building up anticipation of the gift with repeated phone calls informing me that “you are going to love it.” when the box arrived i had no idea what was in it, but i thought it might have been a Pachinko machine. when i opened it my first reaction was “oh God, what the fuck am I gonna do with this?” i thought it was tacky and cliche, but i quickly changed my mind about it. it made perfect sense, coming from dad. we took a Circle Line cruise around lower Manhattan the summer before 9/11, and he was proud of the pictures i took of him standing on that boat with the Twin Towers behind him, and prints of those pictures were posted around his property.
i quickly made peace with the seemingly tacky wall ornament, and now i turn it on on dad-related occasions. maybe i will turn it on again tonight.
…..
little episodes of happiness make me sad. they want to spawn, to breed, to bludgeon forth with ceaseless and exponentially accumulating happiness. but most happiness dies on the vine.
