no pparticular reason for that word as the title. i just dig the word. i spent the day with a lens i’ve hardly used since getting it earlier this year. a 60-300 Vivitar zoom lens, it’s of the pushpull variety. i don’t know how rare those are or if they were considered a fad, but i don’t have any preference between it and the usual style of zoom lens. this particular is useless at full zoom, though. strafing everywhere, the focus really doesn’t land… thus it’s not really an improvement over my usual 18-250mm zoom, and it’s even a lesser light considering the 60mm starting range. it’s hard sometimes to get far enough away from something to get a full shot of it. i was hoping the Vivitar would give that flat perspective that i never get from the curvy lenses, but it does not quite deliver. ah well, it was cheap, purchased in a lens-inventory building splurge this summer.
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yesterday was a righteous wander, righteousness itself. i was feeling very thorough for some reason, so i studiously and deliberately patrolled every road from 41st Street to 47th Street between 20th Avenue and 24th Avenue in Astoria. that’s a low-key, quiet area, where every word uttered in the streets carries and carries like at a library.
i heard one woman elocute that someone had “systematically destroyed the New York City school system.” i guess i know to whom she refers.
that part of Astoria feels like Maspeth, but without the cemeteries.
it is amazing how much land can be called Astoria. there is a banal and repetitive debate among the angry youthful transplants as to where Astoria ends and Long Island City (LIC) begins. no one really cares, but i think we should combine Astoria and LIC and call the whole area AsLIC.
by my estimate AsLIC includes everything from Northern Boulevard and Queens Plaza up to the ConEd plant north of Astoria Park, over to Hazen Street at the East.
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today, then, was a reasonably righteous ramble as well, though shorter. cloudy skies and uncertainty about the Vivitar lens brought me home by 2:30, whence i showered and shit and bought a Panini at the new sammich shop up the street.
my GF and i went to a place on Thursday that looked very authentic. it was a Smokehouse, with ribs and burnt ends and all that deep south gruel cooked like they cook it down south. the place felt like a deep south meat shack. and i got some beautiiful pictures of my beautiful girl. i never thought much of it before we got together the first time, but after we were together for a few months i was like, wtf, why is such a beautiful woman with me? such injustice. i felt the same way last week. i never stopped thinking otherwise about her while we were not together, but beauty isn’t much of a fixation of mine. ruggedness and reality are where it’s at for me, and she has some of that, too.
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i ordered a strange and amusing device last night. an Air Desk, designed to hoist laptop computers into the air and make them hover over your cock and balls so as to salvage them from being crushed. i’ve had a Toshiba Qosmio for a few months now. the beast weighs 10 pounds, maybe 12 with the metal rack and the cooling fans. it’s a fucking monster, and while i don’t love it, i don’t hate it either. i can’t wait to get the Air Desk so i can stop crushing my balls with the Qosmio.
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a woman across the bar from me is patrolling the “Perfect Match” personal ads web site. from her handheld computer she is browsing profiles, seeing pictures and reading paragraphs. she is acting like she does not know me, because she does not know me. she reminds me of the standards i maintain in my barfly existence: stay far way from a woman who sits alone at a bar. that’s a simple rule, but it is nevertheless tantalizing to interact with a lonely lady sitting by herself, twirling her hair, pecking at her smartphone and looking around the room, intrusively laughing at jokes shared between people she does not know.
i tend to assume that a woman sitting alone at a bar is waiting for someone. waiting for anyone. usually this proves to be true, but sometimes it does not, and a woman sits and sits and sits, inhaling glasses of wine and steadily increasing her extroversions.
this woman is browsing. she is not communicating, or talking. just depositing pre-formatted introductory messages to strangers with penises.
she looks 50.
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i am starting to look 50.
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