Add to the ever-lengthening list of coincidences of late. First there was the Calvary/Ray Liotta connection… then the other stuff. 2 days ago I saw a tall bald annoying guy at Panera. I mentioned that I last saw him at a funeral. Next day I woke up to find I’d received a blast of 4am text messages from someone who was also at that funeral. The texts were from M, the best friend of Sandra, the woman who died. M was texting to say she was looking at a set of pictures I had sent her before the funeral. The pictures from a party at M’s house in Massachusetts that happened maybe 9 or 10 years earlier. She had looked at the pictures when I sent them back in August but she hadn’t noticed that there were a few videos, too. She was watching the videos and, more importantly, hearing them. M said that she sometimes could hear Sandra’s voice in her head but that now she doesn’t have to imagine it any more. She was writing to say thank you. Sandra’s voice, for what it’s worth, was a fucking force of nature. Deep but raspy, almost masculine sounding. If only she could sing. I texted M back and, as our back-and-forth ended I looked at the computer screen. The name “Sandra” appeared. “Dr. Sandra” to be exact. The name was not there before I looked. It appeared right as I looked at the screen. What happened was I had the radio plugged in to the computer with the Dragon voice recognition transcription software running. I do this for reasons I’ll explain some other time, if I haven’t already. Dragon attempts to transcribe what the radio announcers and commercial voices are saying but it misses a lot of things. I don’t know what was actually said but Dragon transcribed: “Dr. Sandra. A better nights sleep may be unlocking a better memory of the subject.” Whatever that fortune cookie-like message might mean would be lost on me even if I believed in quasi-paranormal significance of these kind of coincidences. It was a little weird, though.
At a Starbucks now. Yesterday I walked to the Met Museum and the Museum of the City of New York to get free memberships with my idNYC card. It looks like a lot of people are doing this before the end of the year, when the freebie offer expires. I overheard someone say that the program had been extended but I find nothing to that effect on the intertubes.
As I headed back from 100th Street and 5th Avenue my phone blew up with a blizzard of text messages. All I saw at first was the number 7, indicating I had just received 7 messages within a few seconds. Couldn’t tell who they were from. I thought it might be my new payphonista oboe playing friend, who has sent occasional text blasts of late. No, it was Yahoo texting with an order to change my password, this on account of suspicious account activity. Something like this happened about a year ago. I still had the text messages from that incident. I don’t know if I believe there genuinely was suspicious activity. If they send these warnings out automatically just to force people to change their passwords as a routine security thing then that would not surprise me. My friend C used to work at Yahoo, I’ll ask him if he has any insight on this next time I see him. C told me once that he was still in contact with people at Yahoo, and that one of them was telling him how much info they have on people who do not even have Yahoo accounts. To prove the claim C registered a new account from a computer he’d never used, using what he described as only the vaguest information, but which I assume included his real name. He has a fairly distinctive name sot hat might have helped put pieces together, but he claimed that in providing as little information as possible they put together a dossier on him that got pretty much everything: wife’s name, employment history, past and present places of residence.
“We smelled each other’s socks.” I swear that is what I just overheard someone say as part of an account of how difficult acting school was for him.
The Starbucks is suddenly filled with kids from the Frank Sinatra School a couple of blocks down. This one girl looks exactly like one of the characters from “Fame”. The one who faked her suicide attempt to jump in front of a subway.
I shot a lot of video yesterday en route to the Met. Short videos. I have laughed outloud at the last video I posted. It looks and sounds ridiculous but I think some people would find it effective. The opening bit specifically is comical. The people look like the zombies of the Port Authority. “WE ARE THE PORT AUTHORITY ZOMBIES. SAVE US.” I intend to camp out for a half hour at a 2nd floor dining establishment to get video of people walking by downstairs. That area around Herald Square is such a fucking quagmire of humanity. Going now to get video of people’s feet and legs passing me by on Steinway Street.
