June 9 2014 Have not typed at a public space such as this in a while. Listening to things. Overloading on notifications. I get notified on every computer and device I own for every Facebook message, every 500px notice, everything. Notifications go to every device regardless if they’ve been seen and acknowledged.
Sat here for 10 minutes waiting for bluetooth to wake up and recognize this keyboard. BT sucks but it’s one of those low roads that remains mainstream for some reason. Continuing to imagine a world without the Internet, or one in which it suddenly explodes for the United states. It would fulfill my belief that the Internet is a giant plague in disguise. Millions of livelihoods and countless lives will be wrenched asunder. This scenario is virtually guaranteed, or inevitable. I don’t know the details. No one does. An asteroid or a well coordinated nihilist assault on the not-so-secret backbones of the Network Of Networks will heave a massive gust of bad breath into the winds that pass among countries. Its status as a plague will only be recognized upon its absence, when the societal diseases it has allegedly quelled and the problems it presumably solved would rise again (not that they ever left), and turn the planet to rotgut.
The climate in this Starbucks is just right for me to sweat profusely. It is humid and unairconditioned, I was eating a hot sammich and drinking hot coffee, and sweat just poured from my head. Very attractive. Now the place is filling up with customers whose body heat is making it happen again. No one else in here seems to be sweating like me. That sounds like Kafka. I weighed 164 this morning. I’m down from 178 a few months ago, and I am not even trying to lose weight. Probably pancreatic cancer. I had a goal of reaching 181 as a magic weight but I never got there. I guess the weight all went from the gut. Since that’s where most of the excess sits there blubbering.
Someone is up on a ladder replacing a light bulb.
Someone else stands at the base of the ladder, watching, possibly holding the ladder steady.
Barista shouts “JULIO!” Then she shouts “MARK!” But she is not looking for me.
No one is looking at me.
The music is pedestrian.
I get dizzy spells on occasion, most frequently while walking on a sidewalk or crossing a street. Other times I am squeezed by existential ennui of other peoples’ lives. Talk about your job like a religion, or a righteous contribution to the fucking universe when all you do is feed spreadsheets and busy yourself with the air of being busy. Useful. Valued. Sometimes it true, most times it is false. I am still thinking about the documentary i was in last week. The more I think about it the more of a sense of finality I get, that the world of pay-as-you-go telephones is truly at its end. I am still in contact with the director, and I hope we will be in touch for times to come.
I cannot understand what anyone here is saying. They are speaking English next to me but it sounds like gibberish. The barista’s shoutouts of names are all that make sense to me. Even the music sounds like garbled nonsense, the vocalists and music alike.
I never knew your mother. According to house rules she filled churches with garbled tantrums of political candy. Sometimes chocolate, other times yeasty, she cancelled without violence restless boils found fidgeting in the pews. No one knew of her until saint-driven Cadillacs appeared to glory her away, high in the sky but low to the road. Today her heartbeat pounds with barbaric thunder, exporting its delusions into priests’ homilies and criminals’ excuses. You never knew her either.
New day for the old music magazines I amassed. Flipbook time:
http://etudemagazine.com/1899_02/
I settled on FlexPaper as the flipbook-making software, after wading through a surprising quantity of products that can produce such things. This one Chinese company has released about a dozen distinct products, all under different names and all with different characteristics. It seemed odd at first that one company would produce so many different but similar products, but I guess they intend to saturate the market with seemingly different products so as to take attention away from more well-heeled competitors like FlexPaper. I wrote to them and asked why they do this but they ignored that question while addressing other inquiries I had. Their web sites are filled with user reviews that look pretty fake (or at least unverifiable), and the one product they made that I might have actually purchased was DOA. I could not get it to do anything.
A dog is yelping outside and all but one customer here stopped what they were doing to turn and observe the animal. Apparently it is not being tortured, since no one seemed to find the dog remarkable or worth a sustained consideration.
My sweating seems to have stopped.
