riding the subways seems alien to me. especially late afternoon rush hour. one train after another packed to the gills with human beings. do i live in this city? my 5pm is a relatively tranquil boombox of self-indulgence.

waiting for a train with a little bit of space i end up taking the local instead of the express, because what’s my damn hurry?

i got everything done today. i made a list, i checked it twice, and i stuck to it. it’s amazing what the tiniest bit of direction does for my focus.

i found that afore-photographed rotary dial payphone in Brooklyn. the amazing thing about that phone, besides the fact that it even exists, is that its phone number printed on the rotary dialer still shows the (212) area code. that’s kind of intense. i mean, it’s intense to a payphonista like me.

after that find i scoped out another location, and i was like a kid in a candy shop. an old building in Manhattan has a magical museum of the accidental art variety. a hallway filled with phone booths. old style, immaculate structures, all with payphones still inside, lights and fans up above. none of the payphones worked, but that’s no surprise. these phones emitted not even the dull electrical hum heard on some payphones, that hum suggesting a dial tone could one day rise from oblivion.

and then it was on to the bar & grill i visited a couple of years ago and which at that time had a nice old wood booth with the payphone still inside. that booth is still there, and so is the payphone, but it doesn’t work. still, pretty cool to see.

a trifecta of payphonery for this infinitely rotary-dialing soul.

i learned something about myself yesterday. i am a scaredycat. i already knew that but yesterday may be the first time i was fully self-aware of this personality trait as it unfolded and threatened to ruin my otherwise ambitious day.

i caught a signal that there were some old style metal phone booths at a place in Central Park. i made a day of it by seeking out all the payphones i could find in the Park, rambling about in a curmudgeonly way, feeling like a workerbee, because for any childhood interest i’ve maintained in these things the matter of payphones has become something of a job for me these days. JOB. Mine is, after all, the house that payphones built, so for all ambivalences and anxieties I might experience I must pay respects to the subject. And I do.

But the pursuit of these particular booths was classic me. Any time I get close to something I really want, something I have pursued and planned upon capturing — any time this threshold of encounter arises — I panic. My mouth goes dry, my throat closes, my vision goes berserk.

Yesterday, when I finally gained access to the vintage Manhattan phone booths, I was shaking. That is no exaggeration. I trembled at my extremities. I could barely hold the camera steady, and for that reason I just held down the button and let the DSLR fire away, grabbing a dozen shots per second — as if i was shooting a sporting event when I was only getting images of the most supremely stationary of objects: phone booths.

i kept assuming that the authorities would find me suspicious, that they would swoop in and seize my camera gear and seize my soul. i was shaking so hard. i dropped the lens cap 3 times and the hot dog that i purchased for the purpose of making the authorities think i was doing anything but photographing phone booths fell right out of my right hand as i hopelessly juggled a DSLR, a lens cap, and a hot dog (almost said “weiner” but thought better of it).

in this case the authorities were Parks employees and concession stand vendors. they have whatever primacy they have according to the Rules of the City of New York, but i don’t think these guys have promoted themselves to terrorist-seeking commandos who ambush and imprison their fellow citizens at the feeblest provocation.

holy crap, though, my head felt like a turgid swirl of garbage. i compare my psychology to a fly trap where clusters of organic entities gather and get zapped and stuck and are difficult but not impossible to shake off.

that simple little quest of getting some goddam pictures of some motherfucking phone booths nearly induced a heart attack in me.

i guess there is something about this particular pursuit that cuts to the bone of my days. the payphone thing has been an occasional source of embarrassment as the public thieved on it, but my heartfelt pre-adolescent interest in the matter has never waned. i just find the interest to be private, almost intimate, but it’s obviously become public for me at times.

…..

last night: intense phone conversation. i felt a tsunami of vulgar emotional backwash surfacing. nothing wrong with that, but for the emotional disruption.

too bad i hate talking on the phone so much. it’s a clatter of “WHAT?” and “HUH?” and waiting for the other party to resume to disrupted interruptus.

…..