i walked around midtown today, looking into the eyes of strangers, looking
for some glimmer of concern, some unity of interest in the warnings about
the incoming weather, some sense of … something. I think I detected a
shared sense of unity this time. It was faint, but I saw it.

I made a 181 run, to get a stack of copies of old magazines from the 1880s
and 1890s. I made a special effort to get them today, imagining that the
basement location of that post office might flood over the weekend,
destroying my precious magazines.

It turned out there was about 20 pounds of crap at my 181, including a
$140 book that I forgot I ordered, and which weighed far, far more than I
would have anticipated.

The book is an Index of all music published in those old magazines between
1883 and 1957. It never used to be so expensive, but I guess it went out
of print, and the gouging began. For that much money i at least feel like
I gto something of physical substance.

The last time I blew that much coin on a book was a couple of years ago,
when I bought a copy of a tiny book which was an atlas of Calvary
Cemetery, published in 1880-something. I never thought twice about or
regretted paying $150 for that little book, and the money expended on this
Index is not money wasted, since it complements my project so nicely.

i perpetrated my little payphone project further today, remembering almost
word for word things i had thought while falling asleep last night. i
talked about the patterns i see in my eyelids when i close my eyes. last
night i saw letters, brackets, ampersands and dashes, along with morphy
blobs of white and yellowish nondescription, like lava lamp globs or
outsized amoebas from a 1970s light show.

i remember reading about how the 70s light show was an under-rated genre,
one whose merits were subsumed in the critical mind by the associations
with drugs and sex that tended to writhe and wriggle on the floors of the
theaters where the light shows were put on.

i am at a pub, swilling beers, playing video games, typing into this box,
whiling away the triumph of my days in a way unimanigable in the Parc
Lincoln era. it was at the Parc Lincoln that i came up with the phrase
“triumph of your days” whence i saw a homeless guy living outside the
hotel. he had made friends with the owners of a corner convenience store,
who let him sit on one of their chairs and, well, do nothing. maybe he
did some work for them, but i knew from what i overheard that he was
living in shelters, and not ashamed of it.

i would see him walk around the block, repeatedly, dozens of times a day,
almost marching, then taking his seat at the chair near Amsterdam and 75th
Street. there he would sit, and stare ahead, his ass hanging close to the
sidewalk and his arms resting comfortably.

he may have looked sullen, or satisfied, or glowering. i don’t know. he
impressed me, though. he seemed content, and satisfied with his days, the
triumph of his days, as these are mine.

at my first real job in New York I used to get up from my desk and walk
around the floor, indulging in an afternoon siesta whence i took a stroll,
burning corporate dollars for no possible value except the thriving of my
laziness.

that, i thought at the time, was the triumph of my days.

years later i felt the same about the time i spent playing video games at
a pizza place on 21st Street in Astoria. long hours dancing from the butt
while playing Ms. Pac Man at a nondescript pizza dive as I coasted on my
savings and coasted on the serenity of my life outside of corporate.

that was 2002, or maybe 2003.

today i feel a sense of peace and surety. the money comes in, i think
little of it, and i spend my days at the bar playing video games, trying
to raise the spark of creativity with which i was born, but mostly i bury
that spark in alcohol soft middle age (to quote Pink Floyd).