My innards feel as if I have been throwing up, but I have not been throwing up. Strange few days of sickness and ritual self-abuse. Yesterday was misery. Today is better but still off.
Notational chocolate confections are used in cryptic communicades, communiques, untold flowings of hobo drama.
I’ve been scoping out “You Are Being Recorded” signs, those warnings that alert you, the pedestrian public minding your own business as you stroll about in the public domain, that your movements outside of certain apartment buildings and corporate compounds are being recorded and/or monitored. I don’t know if these signs intend strictly to repel ne’r-do-wells or loiterers, or if the warnings are partly intended to inform a sign-reading public that you are, simply, a piece of content in a security apparatus that scoops up anything it pleases from the streets outside. I would think that a mapping project might be appropriate, a map showing which segments of NYC Streets are surveilled by public and private entities, and which segments of the streets are free from such supervision. I imagine drastically different populations inhabiting the non-surveilled and surveilled spaces. The former population would be tourists and exhibitionists, the latter crowd the so-called “real” New Yorkers who eschew making themselves available in the public domain to city planners and the random monetization of others. Boundaries and chalk=lined drawings could delineate the actively surveilled from the occasionally and/or non-surveilled streets and alleys until drones buzz in and relegate the public toilet to the only private space outside of your own home, until even the public shitter will be surveilled and documented for possible future use in prosecuting crimes committed therein.
I remember now a toilet stall in Tennessee on which the words “JESUS IS WATCHING YOU” were scrawled.
Nothing sticks to me any more. A song that used to kill me with associations and memories of the context in which I first heard it now passes me by like a faintly roaring subway train. That song used to make my stomach turn into a black hole, tonight it just blew past like any other oft-heard Beatles tune.
Jesus is not watching me. Jesus does not care what I do with my night.
Is it impossible to get lost in an empty parking lot?
Shouldn’t you call Chuck Norris? Right now?
I might have a chance to meet a hero this week. I might take a pass, but if he’s there I should see no reason to be a stranger. Or should I? Hero meetups in my time have never amounted to much.
I will not pray tonight. I have not prayed since college.
