Suddenly I say good-bye to a host of things. A whirlwind of a day, all for
the best interests of all involved.

To start, I ended a 5 or 6 month relationship-type-thingie with someone
who i know will be a friend for a long time to come. We had a good thing,
at times, but our lives, our lifestyles, our personalities, and our wants
& needs were simply too far apart to ever mesh. she seemed unhappy at
first, but later admitted that this was the right thing, and that there
were just too many differences. I will never talk shit about her, as I
never talk shit about any of my exes, and I hope she returns the courtesy.

I later learend that my hottie ex who I dated for about a year and a half,
ending in May of last year, is presently engaged, as of 2 weeks ago. I
am only happy for her, for she deserves only the best things,
and I only hope her man treats her with honor and respect. i am sad as
well, not because I had any fantasies about rekindling our romance but
because I imagine that the cultural climate in which she lives will make
it impossible for us to maintain a friendship. In fact, tonight may have
been the last time we ever speak. I honestly believe that may be true. now
our chats include reference to things we can’t do or talk about because
“he wouldn’t like that” and such allusions to the man in her life. i had
no delusions about maintaining anything more than quirky friendship
things, but it looks like those all have to end now.

she will always be special to me for so many reasons. she is, was, and
always will be the first truly nice girl i ever dated. nice girls, they
are not so common. she will also always be special to me because of our
connection to sorabji.com, this web site, and my mess of other web
sites that have evolved from my first web pages in 1994. she was 13 years
old when she first discovered these pages. we had no meaningful
communication whatsoever until about 12 years later, and when i was 40 i
dated that beautiful girl who was 25 and who knew more things about my web
sites than i did. it was the connection to my past, and to her youth and
dare i say her years of growing up with these web pages that made our time
so interesting and quirky to us both.

in time the cultural divide made things impossible, and in later times i
had some existential moments of emptiness concerning race, creeds,
nationalities, and cultures which abut each other in this town.

but that’s another story. i guess i note her engagement more than my own
ending of a brief episode, and again, not for any notions of romance, but
because the friendship must end.

another thing to which i say goodbye this night is this laptop computer on
which i type these words. it has been a trusty conduit since late 2008,
though i bought the thing at great expense in late 2005. repeated calls to
Dell, and numerous visits to this apartment by Dell techs and repair
people failed to fix the problem of this piece of shit sounding like a
fucking vacuum cleaner any time i turned it on, and i don’t know when or
how or what happened exactly to convince Dell that this thing was a piece
of shit but 3 years later, at the tail end of the warranty period, they
shipped the machine to the repair center and replaced pretty much
everything, mother board, hard drive, whatever those other cheap blobs of
plastic are called… and the thing worked great from then on, until
lately, when things are weird.

but you see, part of the reason i ended it with the girl in the first
paragraph of this screed was that we decided to go to Vegas for a few
nights, on the occasion of her zero-ending birthday. everything
seemed go, we were talking about it with friends, when the next day she
decided against it. she said it was too extravagant, it would be too hot
in the desert in August, and that only the infinitely wealthy just up and
go to Vegas.

basically, she didn’t want to go, which signalled to me that she just
was not that much into me after all, but i had already taken a chunk of
money out of a mutual fund to have as a cushion for the excursion. we had
said we’d stay at the Aria but i was going to surprise her with the
Bellagio, though evidently she thinks my money is bad, or thin, or that i
live on food stamps, or something, because she just wouldn’t accept this
gift from me.

the point being, not that this is interesting to anyone but myself, but
that i had to do something with the chunk of money i got from the sale of
that mutual fund (which was last Monday, by the way, the biggest trading
day of the year, whence i almost certainly took a sizable loss on the
sale, but that’s my problem, not anyone else’s). so i played the old shell
game and moved the money around, waking up this morning to hit the buy
button on a phat new laptop, an ipod, some bose noise cancelling
headphones, and some other shit, all of it 100% tax-deductible, possibly
but probably not making up for the loss on the sale of that stupid mutual
fund.

and so with a phat new laptop in the mail i bid farewell to this spindly,
crinkly, wrinkly old Dell Inspiron 9300, sending it off to storage or at
least to the closet. it still works, but it’s been twitchy, and the thing
with its wrist indentations and coffee stains looks like a prop from
a low-budget indie flick.

the new laptop has a bigger screen, backlit keyboard, 1080p HD, and
obscure sexual favors. it seems strange to care about saying goodbye to a
piece of disposable technology like this Dell, but it has maintained a
connection to my sentiments. i bought this Dell soon after my father died,
as a willful extravagance which i intended to bill to his estate, but
which i ended up paying for myself out of the money made from a completely
bogus web site development job.

anyway, after the girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend, and the laptop i also say
goodbye to AIM, which is kind of hard to believe, but evidently i am about
the last person i know still using the dedicated, unintegrated AIM desktop
client. time to move on, i suppose, or time to move out, but whatever the
case on a day such as this i feel a little nostalgia for that feature-free
piece of once-ubiquitous software. i still use IRC at times, but AIM is
looking like a dinosaur, even to me.

and today i bade a vague farewell to my anonymity. a gentleman struck up a
perfectly legitimate conversation with me this afternoon, asking what i do
for a living and why i use a netbook whilst sitting at a bar. conversation
spun this way and that and it turns out he tries to turn some coin
spitting out autoblogs, which i don’t really understand, but the principle
seems easy enough to fathom just from the name of the genre. sort of like
the “automated content” option in PowerPoint, there are any number of ways
to spit out garbage content. with web sites the tactic is different
from PowerPoint in that drones hosted by hostnoc and amazonaws and any
number of other bad-bot-friendly hosting companies automagically
scrape nouns and nodes from legitimate web sites and coagulate them into
incomprehensible hematomata of keyword-frenzied text.

in a nutshell, the guy i was talking to is the enemy of people like
myself, whose livelihood is constanly being picked at by content scrapers
and harvesters.

on the other hand, this fellow’s interest in my work started first from
curiosity, then from the admission that he was making no money at the
content scam shell game. so i told him to look for one or the other of my
web sites, trying to make it clear that there is nothing to be learned
from gazing on my properties, and everything to be learned by developing
your own ideas and your own content, then monetizing it as appropriate. i
saw his eyes light up a little bit when he saw that i had legitimate
content, and not scraped gobbledygook.

it was a strange and naked encounter for me, who mostly imagines himself
invisible, but who also always wondered what these content scraping
linkfarmers look like. he wore a 70s-style “nyc” t-shirt.

i said goodbye to other things this day. it all seemed like a
flummoxed parade. stomping through midtown manhattan delivering the
follow-up break-up text messages, ignoring the stream of responses
from the new ex, and then retiring to these dismally familiar
quarters to find that i might be forcibly on a path to new places, new
things, and new news.