football and revelry rage all around but i am in my private space of mind.

quiet day, quiet week. i’ve been out recording sounds of payphones, or sounds of recorded messages more or less unique to payphones. a favorite of mine are the ones announcing “you can not make this call from a
payphone.”

ah, disenfranchisement.

the GF and i called it quits again. this time she wanted out, and i was happy to oblige. she stood me up for New Years Eve and i would have called it off the next day on account of that and other things, but i thought we’d at least try to make it a few more weeks until the performance of Tosca, for which i bought us 2 tickets. that was intended as a Christmas gift but i realize now i was wrong to buy those tickets without asking her first… asking if she could be available that night, for starters, but i should simply have thought that attempted bit of Christmas cheer through more thoroughly. there was no Christmas cheer this year, for either of us, and i was ready to — and actually i was planning to — call it off after that performance of Tosca. so it’s all good, if a little earlier than i might have imagined.

this only confirms my cardinal rule of dating, a rule i should have honored when this girl and I hooked up almost a year ago: never get involved with a woman who sits alone at a bar.

i do not enjoy being alone in life as much as i used to, but it’s no crisis. i mean, i’m 43 and all, but i’m a man. no ticking clocks in me, though there may be a time bomb or 2.

…..

last night i decided i needed a certain Radio Shack product, a telephone recording suction cup type of thing that lets you record conversations by placing a sucky mushroom type thing onto the receiver and plugging thhe other end of it in to a recording device. it is intended for recording conversations but i only endeavor to record pre-recorded messages directed at payphone users.

i eention this partly to impress you with my surveillance gear, but also to say that i first went out onto the WWW, the public Internet, to see if this item was in stock at the local Radio Shack. the web site indicated that, indeed, the item was in stock at the local shop.

but, of course, it was not. the sales person said that i could go up to the other Radio Shack where, she said, “the web site says they have this in stock.” to which i thought, but was too nice to utter, that the fucking web site said *you* had it in stock, too, so why should i believe it now?

after wasting a full hour getting there and back i was so annoyed with Radio Shack, their Web site, and the poor quality of Internet content in general, that i was ready to get out my Smith-Corona and a Sears catalogue so i could order items via postal mail.

then i did some time-management analysis, decided it was better to waste time then then to wait until the next day, when time would be shorter. so i headed up to Ditmars to see if the other Radio Shack had the item, as claimed on their web site, and to my surprise they had it. whoopee..

just saying, though, that in my experience web site content of the “in stock” variety seems to virtually never align with reality, lurching instead into a new version of bait and switch, as i discovered at a certain unnamed midtown electronics store. the web site said a certain USB-VGA adapter was in stock at $49.95. i got to the store and found that no, that item was out of stock, but that a similar, more expensive product was available.

in this case, though, i suspect that the sales clerk feared blogger reprisal, or something, because he changed the price and charged me the same for the other item as i had expected to pay for the one that was allegedly in stock.

i thought of these petty retail agravations when i saw that a nearby Staples office supply place is closing its location. i was dismayed at first, until i remembered that the place has never, ever, had anything in stock that its web site told me was in stock, and that even for everyday attempts at purchasing office-type supplies i virtually always leave the store with nothing, and buy whatever i had in mind online.

i am going to miss that Staples, though. it is on 21st Street, near Queensbridge, where nothing else of interest to me exists. Staples was my excuse to go over there and explore the projects’ payphones, among other things, and it was my safe haven for when things got sketchy, as they often did. now my best bet for retreat in that area is the public library…

…..

i had a crazy fellatio dream last night. a black woman and i were talking, loving each other, bonding like old lovers though we had just met, when she unexpectedly started performaing fellatio on me. i didn’t even noticed it at first, as it seemed to be such a logical continuation of the intimacy of our conversation.

but she started going too fast, going up and down like a jackhammer, scaring me quite a bit and making me ask where my cock fit into this barbaric dance (not to provide TMI, but this much of the dream had some reality to back it up).

i asked her to slow down, but she just stopped. i saw that her face was covered with blood. my cock had a tiny cut on it, but the blood was mostly coming from her mouth. some dental work she’d had done recently came undone, and the rapid fire movements of her fellatio caused the metallic parts of the work to dig repeated gashes into her mouth and gums. i told her we looked like something out of a horror film, and she responded with some nonchalant concern by going to look at herself in a mirror and cleaning up a bit, leaving the bulk of the bloodbath between my legs.

(this dream is inhabited by a lot of true stories from the last few years.)

…..

this is the beer hall where i hope to find a home away from home this winter. i gave up on this place when they started carding everybody on weeknights, even weeknights when the place was deserted. and it wasn’t so much that they carded everybody, but they recorded all customers’ personal information by swiping their drivers licenses and recording the information onto a Palm Pilot, which seems wildly insecure to me, and a virtual identity theft machine.

the place is big, though, and i can feel anonymous here, so i may be willing to compromise my identity for anonymity. wait, what?

…..

i am going out to the cemetery payphone tomorrow. God, i hope it is still there. my current project relies on payphones, and though i needed not the reminder, this reminds me in streaks and whistles that anything that relies on payphones is in a disenfranchised, precarious place.

…..

aha, just watched my namesake, a Mr. Thomas, win the game for the Broncos. i don’t even care, but that felt pretty exciting to be here among beery footballers, screaming.

…..

last night it was a similar sense of outsider looking in, or listening in. downstairs from me, though barely audible without the windows opened, it was girls night at the studio apartment on the first floor. it should have been annoying, but there was something charming to me about the irresponsible, collegiate drunkardry of an apartment full of 20-something women screaming (because they could not sing) along with songs like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and other chick tunes. so i stuck my phat microphone out the window and recorded the revelry as best i could, which was actually pretty good. i am going home now to listen to it.