sometimes i think that this neighborhood is going to hell, and maybe i
just get lucky by not getting into any of it myself.

i just saw a fistfight outside, between a teenage kid and amna who looked
to be in his 40s. evidently the kid said or did something to insult the
older guy, who evidently wanted to either just teach him a lesson or fully
kick his scrawny ass. it was a pretty ugly scene, with lots of onlookers
yelling at the older guy to lay off the kid. “you can’t beat up a little
boy.” but others saw it differently, screaming at the kid with “YOU
DISRESPECTED HIM! YOU SHOULD GET YOUR ASS WHOOPED!” The kid did not look
helpless, but he looked outmatched. The older guy got him in a nasty
headlock and punched him hard in the chest, shoving him against a car and
pounding him. onlookers couldn’t seem to decide what to do. i don’t know
if the cops showed. i heard sirens a little later, but i don’t know where
they went. i did not have a cell phone on me, but even if i did it
appeared that others had already made the calls to 911, so i doubt i would
have contributed to the inundation of calls reporting the same incident.

and on top of that, in the spirit of thinking that the neighborhood is
going to hell, i saw that the squeegie guy is back. that’s a relic of the
pre-Giuliani days, and by some standards is considered a measure of a
community’s fundamental ability to deter petty crime. petty crimes lead to
major crimes, as the logic goes in the “broken windows” theories of crime
fighting. i was surprised to see the squeegie guy, though. this particular
one was pretty aggressive, too.

is it all going to hell?

that reminds of what i thought would make a funny satire story. “Locals
Remember When It All Went To Hell.” I thought of this years ago, when
someone at a restaurant was sharing reminiscences about the place with
others, and she shouted “I remember when they fired Juan. That’s what it
all went to hell.” Juan was a chef who had a loyal following but who was
fired for reasons never made clear, and according to this woman his firing
was “when it all went to hell.” I had other ideas for this conceit, with a
series of one-line zingers from people on the street who are approached by
journalists asking “When did it all go to hell?”

“When they got rid of the payphone on 36th Street and 36th Avenue. That’s
what it all went to hell.”

“When they started charging $2.50 for bagel. It was all downhill from
there.”

“When McDonald’s started making bagels.”

“The bike lanes on Columbus Avenue ruined my life.”

“When they took away the blue mailbox at 41st Street and Broadway.”

“When AOL bought Time-Warner.”

“When they stopped making Postum.”

…

aha, real satirists could have a better time with this than I… I think,
though, that the resurgance of the squeegie guy, and the fistfights in the
streets, could signal that it’s all going to hell, if it isn’t there
already. It. Hell. What is “it” that goes to hell?

…..

I wrote a short story today, intended for my payphone-related project. The
story came quickly, and completely. I haven’t done much fiction of late,
but I find it’s a suitable creative outlet. I mean, anything goes in
fiction, right?

As I said earlier, writing is where I feel in control, and happy. Why not
do it more? Because it requires interaction with computers? and
because that is never a good recipe for success?

Last night commenced two new levels of software- and hardware-inspired
aggravation. I purchase an upgrade to the OCR software I use for the old
magazines project. I didn’t see any compelling reason to get it but hey,
why not, right? Well, I’ll tell you why not. I have hundreds of documents
that were scanned into the earlier version of this software. The new
version demands that I convert all of them to the new format, or else I
can’t use them. Conversion takes about 15 minutes for each document.
Converting all my previous scans would take weeks. That’s fucking
bullshit. And there are other “enhancements” that take away features and
functionality that I got used to in the earlier version.

The same thing happened with the identity theft service I use. Much
ballyhooed “enhancements” to the service amounted to elimination of
numerous useful features that make the “enhanced” service primitive by
comparison, though prettier to look at. Blahblah.

The other aggravation came from the phat new laptop, which is a mixed bag
for me at this point. Graphics and such are awesome, but it’s too heavy
and the device itself is buggy in ways that are incredibly irritating.
Most recently I discovered that you can put a Sony Memory Stick into the
card reader but you can’t take it out. Unbelievably aggravating.

….

I am at a bar where my newest ex is down the aisle. She came over here,
apologized for the text messages, and said we’ll always be friends. She
looked nervous and fake, but hey, what do you want? I don’t have any
feelings of squeamishness or regret or anything else about the affair. It
ended, for good reason, and that’s that. In my more tired moments I feel
some sourness about it, regarding some of the needlessly rude things she
said and did, but that’s just relationshipiana, is it not?

(I don’t remember the text messages.)

…..