Hoping for sleep tonight. Lack of sleep is killing me.causing heart palpitations, weird innardal sores and jumpy nightmares. My eyes are glomming themselves shut of their gravitational empathy. I spastically embarked on a 9+ mile ramble today, partly out of nervous/sleepless anxiety but also out of the notion that the physical exertion would force me into a good night’s sleep. Who can know what will happen in that recessed realm of vulnerable unconsciousness?

I just heard my voice speak and my head quivers like a warm bowl of jiggly vomit.

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I noticed another rogue payphone today. These things are interesting. I don’t know their backstory but something seems sketchy. The placards on the phones are obviously old, claiming that Bell Atlantic handles all local calls made through these phones. Caller ID from these phones shows “Unknkown.” All ownership infroamtion for the phone is obfuscated by masking tape, making it impossible to determine who is responsible for placing and/or removing the device. Determining ownersip of these things is not just a curiosity. Improperly installed devices can be problematic and dangerous, leading to injury and lawsuits. I further imagine that other nefarious work is afoot. I deposited a quarter and made a call, but my voice was inaudible on the other end. This happens often enough in payphoneland but as I looked at the placard again I noticed the heavy promotion of credit cards for calls. I suspect that in addition to collecting $30-$40 worth of coins a month

these rogue payphones are used to skim credit card numbers and even listen in on calls or monitor calling activity. If a credit card number were intercepted by a phone like this it would be impossible to track down a responsible party, since the phone itself would likely be gone by the time anyone suspected it, and whatever ownership information is obfuscated by the masking tape is probably inaccurate anyway.

I have seen these phones before. They appear, stay for a while, then disappear guerilla-style. These used to be one across from a jail on Van Dam Street, and another phone stood for years outside a shop on 34th Avenue in Astoria. The jail payphone was removed in short order, and I actually think that this device I saw today in Greenpoint was the exact same phone transplanted from Long Island City.

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“Looking For Mr. Goodbar” is entirely unavailable, out of print and out of stock virtually everywhere. I managed to score a $20 copy off Ebay but Amazon’s sellers had it priced at $200 for a DVD and $45-$50 for a freakin’ VHS. I think the ludicrous Amazon prices are probably a result of algorithms pricing rarer items into the stratosphere until someone notices and asks WTF.

It’s surprising because that’s a famous, non-obscure film with a great cast, but today it’s not available from publishers, nor can you even rent it digitally through legitimate streaming sources. Seems odd but my guess is that the studio is planning a re-release anniversary edition. In the meantime I needed a screengrab of a rotary dial payphone scene from that film, so i have the only DVD I could find on its way through Unites States Postal Service to my 181.

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Dissolve like reminder rubber bands into holiday-fattened wrists.

Flow through abandoned histories under violent covetousness.

Boil the collected flourishes of undercomfortable politicians in steep stew.

Have yourself rancid cider from some day’s flavorless heroics.

Incisively remember one-hit-wonders and call the singers on the phone, on the phone.

Glass breaking into ice is virtually impossible to see but brutal on the gums.

Porcelain dolls cower under historic violence of blustering infants.

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I was thinking about an Op-Ed video on the NY Times web site, regarding the Kennedy Assassination. The speaker referred to a John Updike story in the New Yorker about the so-called Umbrella Man who stood in Dealey Plaza holding an umbrella that some theorized contained gunpowder and weaponized cylinders that launched bullets into Kennedy’s throat. In fact the Umbrella Man was holding the umbrellas as a protest, invoking the umbrella of Neville Chamberlain, hoping to make a statement to the president not even about his or the U.S.’ policies but about …. well, about something else, I lost track of the story after that, but it was amusing to hear.

I was thinking of this and the quantum universe of alternate reality that exists under common sense, and under the facade of predictability that characterizes virtually all affairs, from the diurnal and the mundane to the catastrophic and epochal. All things follow rules of nature and rules of law, whether they make political or religious sense.

Should I ever be at an event where something big happens I am certain that the Reddit lynch mobs that singled out innocent people as terrorist bombers would find me equally curious, equally sinister. I sit in subway stations just to sit there. I don’t board trains or follow the herds. I just sit. Should I be in a station when a bomb goes off the Reddit lynch mob will see me and ask “What’s he doing just sitting there? He’s not boarding a train? Let’s get him!” Today it was 70 degrees and positively summerlike (for about 10 minutes… in the direct sunlight). I was wearing a jacket and puttering about with napkins (snotrags) peeking out of my pant spockets, a flat blunt object in my back pocket (the foldable keyboard I am using to type these words) and I was wearing sunglasses in the shade. IN THE SHADE! I was wearing SUNGLASSES! IN THE SHADE! LET’S GET HIM! If a bomb had exploded while I was within surveillance’s contextless grasp the Reddit lynch mobs

would have singled me out, circled me, highlighted me, ridiculed my poor running posture, waymarked and geo-fucked me until they formed a spontaneous riot outside my apartment, demanding that their villain be torched at the stake of crowdsourced police work.

Yet i would have had nothing to do with it. I just happen to be one of those pegs whose flaneur-esque squarities do not align with the rat race of so-called predictable movements of the crowd. I am exactly the sort of person whose life could be mercurially or even permanently ruined by the Reddit lynch mobs should my movements ever align with a genuine horrorshow.

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