just saw an old friend, more of an acquaintaancee, standing outside his apartment building. i’ve walked past that building countless times, never paying it much mind. our conversation raised neither of us to new spiritual heights but it was cordial enough. we talked about a mutual friend who died recently, and he talked in vague ways about cutting off a friendship of 9 years with a woman who he did not identify but who i think i remember, based only on his description of her as weighing 95 pounds and being a nasty drunk who mixed liquor with zoloft and other psychologically toxic cocktails. i think i know who he was referring to but it seemed poky to just come out and ask. sometimes this neighborhood and the familiar faces feels like home, other times it feels like a hole out of which some of us must one day climb. his street address is 34-27, hence the title of this message. i saw a young woman wearing a t-shirt with the numbers 19-32, the hyphen making me think that 19-32 was an astoria address, or that the queens style of hyphenating addresses had become chic. maybe 19-32 was a specifically cool address. i do not know. trying to remember how to do this. how to write, write freely, even at the expense of contributing to the flooding the world with needless text matter. i am at a coffee shop, using yet another of these portable keyboards the likes of which i have gone through in large numbers. this one, a lumsing branded backlit device, might be yet another non-keeper. it’s cheap and flimsy and the backlighting (the main reason i got it) is ineffectual. my goal of late is to combine most of my sites into a smaller number, linking the .MOBI stuff in with everything else under sorabji.nyc. my goals are dreary and monotonous. today i started in with Premiere Pro, which i’ve paid for for a couple of years now but never used. it seems easier than i thought, though i have always had conceptual problems with the concept of the timeline. it just seems so twitchy and inexact, but it is obviously a standard. i was recording myself at the piano using a Tascam device to funnel the sound directly into a DSLR camera. it sounds like butt, but it has potential to sound amazing, if only i knew what i was doing. i have mountains of video i recorded a few years ago, using a spy camera type of thing. a cheap but functional video camera embedded into a keychain. i used it for a while, feeling like i was gathering culturally relevant forensic research by gathering the routine movements of strangers unawares. one day, though, on a subway, i was chagrined to find that 2 of the people i was recording were friends of mine. they did not know each other but they were sitting next to each other on the subway. it was a strange encounter, or non-encounter, as i never said a word to either of them about this potentially amusing situation. one of these 2 folks was present on a boat ride i went on last weekend. i see the other guy around once in a while. i should travel but funds are low, and my desire to deal with trains and buses and planes is not strong. buses to certain destination in new england are cheap, though, and a couple of nights in an unfamiliar place would do me well. there is only one hotel on coney island. yesterday, walking about midtown, i felt sick. dizzy. it was 92 degrees and i think the heat, along with the earlier walk from here to woodside, set me up for feeling ill. i took a huge dump at rockefeller center and then just sat in the air conditioned concourse for about an hour. i don’t know the last time i sat in one spot without getting up for even one full hour. probably it has happened at the piano but that is active. this was just sitting, waiting for the heat-induced feelings to go away. it felt good to let time pass in its inexorable silence. my thoughts keep turning back to the carnage that is afoot at queensboro plaza. jackhammers and cranes, noise everywhere, with buildings going up seemingly faster than it would be possible to tear them down. if one is inclined to think that our society is unsustainable then this blizzard of luxury residential skyscrapers rising up with such frenzy must seem apocalyptic. i’m told that historically there is a global recession within a year of the world’s tallest building being opened for business. that sounds like superstition but i like the sound of it. sometimes i see these monstrosities rise up like nuclear mushrooms and i feel threatened. other times it inspires a flash of ambition and optimism. i have everything i need to succeed in life. time to re-succeed. people around me are talking, gesticulating, mispronouncing words. a paratransit bus is backing up. school is about to let out across the street. public school starts next week but this private school already started. labor day is late this year. i met a sign language translator and her husband, who teaches autistic kids. is it tasteless to call an autistic person an autist? a woman sitting nearby is twirling her hair. one of the first lessons of the barfly that i learned is that a woman twirling her hair is thinking about sex, usually with the person she is talking to. this woman is alone but staring into a laptop computer screen, so if the theory if the twirling hair holds up then she should be looking at someone’s online presence. i cannot see what is on her screen, it seems to have one of those things that blocks people next to you from seeing the contents of the screen. my doctor has that on his laptop. i might need to see the doctor again about getting another skin tag burned off. last time he burned off two of them, one of which was big as a fucking mushroom. they took weeks to fall off, and in the meantime i had 2 magnificently black pustules of grossness dangling from my armpits. once in a while another “THIS IS NOT A BILL” letter arrives from Mt. Sinai. i have a fear that one of these is leading to an actual bill, though it’s been almost 4 months since that memorable incident occurred and one would think the billing is over already.