at the walgreens, looking at baby oil, when a woman pushing a baby stroller rushes up behind me. not at 40mph but way more rapidly than you might expect someone to approach you from behind in an anotherwise empty shopping aisle. she almost bummmpps into me as i maneuver out of her way. then i notice that a man is behind her. she is probably hispanic with an infant, he is a tall black man, unkempt and unshaven. she gets out of his way and he passes her, stopping at me to ask if i had 75 cents. i said no. i was starting to wonder if she was not part of a setup, or somehow working with the guy, but then she seemed unnerved by his actions, too. i mumbled “that was weird” and she smiled and said somehting in response but i couldn’t hear it.
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looks like i have someone to go to the opera with next week. i bought 2 tickets as a christmas gift for the now-ex-gf, but i determined rather quickly that i should either never have bought them in the first place, or at least i should have askd her first if she’d be able to go on a weeknight. i am an asshole for that, and i imagine that even if we did not end the relationship first then this opera thing would have been problematic anyway…
i am glad not to waste the tickets. i might have tried selling them if nothing else came along. i would not object to going alone, except that i would have that empty seat next to me, and i would expect that standing-room-ticket freeloader would grab that seat. and that would annoy me to no end.
last time i was at the Met i was surprised at how i enjoyed the dressed-up-edness of it all. i was not extravagently fancified in the sartorial realm but i fit in well enough. when i saw another opera at the Ziegfeld (the Met simulcasts operas around the world to HD-capable movie theaters) and the camera panned around the orchestra level, where it seeme dlliike everyone was dressed to the nines. i am far from a glamorous dresser but that time i imagined it would be pretty fun to get all gussied up. in fact, i had planned to impress my now-ex-gf by doing just that for this event, polishing off the old Bostonian dress shoes and maybe re-using the fancy Charlie Brown tie i wores to a friend’s wedding last year. i was going to go all in on that front, mostly to impress her and try to summon some happiness from her, but i guess it wasn’t to be. i’m in no way sad over the end of that relationship, but i was looking forward to getting dressed up for the opera.
now, i’m going with an old friend, and with no disrepect of any kind, i just don’t think the cufflinks are appropriate for a non-romantic outing. haha…
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today was good news. the dial tone returned to the cemetery payphone. i was somewhat astonished that it was done so quickly, and that it was done at all.
i filed an online 311 complaint about another payphone. that was over a month ago, and nothing has been done to fix it. i guess this one might actually be profitable, or something, while the one i inquired about is not profitable. no other reason to fix a public phone, right?
the cemetery payphone sounds about as bad as before, but i think i can work with it. i thought the upside to the phone being fixed might be that its tinny soundin gcall quality would be improved. i don’t think it was improved, but that’s ok. now to see if another payphone i need is fixed…
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i read some Kenneth Koch poetry this morning. i didn’t know he had such an interest in memory. maybe it was just a passing thing in the pages that i read, but his ideas of what constitutes and who is responsible for memory interested me.
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one by one, step by step, i am learning more technique in photography. the manual focus thing, in which one can focus on virtually any region of the frame, is an interesting breakthrough for me, though at first it was tinged with that form of regret that accompanies the discovery of some time-saving or otherwise game-changing device or skill. it is good to make these discoveries but sobering to remember how much time was wasted before.
i thought of that as i moved through the old magazines project, dutifully scanning an issue or 2 each night. the scanner worked well, but it was slower than most other scanners i’ve used.
when i discovered there was a newer version available i bought it, but out of skepticism and/or laziness i waited a few months before setting it up. i didn’t think it would be that much of an improvement, and the drivers for the old one were problematic, leading me to assume that the same would be true for the new one.
when i finally set it up i was happy to find that the scanner was exponentially faster than the old one, and the software was no problem — but it was a bummer to think of all the time i’d wasted working with the old scanner.
as far as the local area focus technique goes, it has thus far not proven to be a game-changer, and i don’t have much of that same feeling of faint regret at having not used this technique before. but it’s a nice new technique to add to the repertoire.
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everything seemed beautiful to me today. crossing queens plaza via the new and to me even more dangerous and bewildering than before crosswalk maze, i spotted a woman in a red coat, black boots, and a look of movement on her face. her big lips glowed and her mouth was firm but not clenched. the sun felt good, too. there is a payphone outside a pizzeria that i check into once and again. last time it smelled like pizza dough. raw, uncooked pizza dough. today it smelled like the kiss of a cigarette. sharp nicotine.
on skillman avenue i saw an awesome visual effect: the shadow cast by a sign for capital one bank laid itself out across a white fence. at firs ti thought it was some enormous graffiti, but it was only the graffiti of a passing shadow. the words CAPITAL ONE BANK were in obverse, since the sign faces the opposite direction. it was a cool thing to see, hard to describe, but a strange discovery. i plan to re=capture the image of that on a day when no cars are parked in front of the fence.
every building looked beautiful to me today. every window sparkled. even that strange dude at the Walgreens, panhandling for 75 cents, even he had a rugged elegance about him.i still think that was a setup gone awry, but no harm done.
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that endless dream from the other night, in which i lecture and sermonize on the grist and grizzle from the most unspeakably mundane decision making processes, reminded me of something, but as i stopped and sought out those words “grist and grizzle” i forgot what it was i was reminded of. dang.
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