I took a crack at the Links that now line a portion of 3rd Avenue starting at 15th Street. Hate to say but I am not wholly impressed. Many of them are not yet functional, and for now at least I don’t have a problem with that. The rollout is expected to be gradual, and not-yet-working Links are clearly labeled with “coming soon” type language. It is the quantity of Links which appeared to be functional but that failed to work that bothers me. Meh, I’ll rant about it elsewhere. It was a nice long walk down and back up Third Avenue.

The more thought-provoking development in my always stimulating existence is that I reactivated Facebook Friday, and am just about certain I will turn right around and deactivate again, maybe forever. I just need to sort a few things out. I would need to create a separate account from which I could manage the Payphone Project and My Receipts fan pages, and I might even dust off the stillborn Sorabji.com fan page for all 3 people who still remember this site exists. I also wante to contact a handful of people for whom I have no other means of contact. i already did that, and will give them a few days to either respond to or ignore me.

I should not be surprised that virtually no one seems to have noticed I had exited Facebook. The first person to notice was an ex-gf who sent word out to a bunch of people from our mutual circle of friends — from whom a flurry of e-mails came to me several months ago.

Facebook just looks and feels like a wasteland to me now. Some of this reflects circumstances that a polite gentleman such as myself does not discuss publicly. But really it’s just the fundamental idea of connecting with and staying connected with people in a way that is unique to our generation, and to which I’ve never fully adapted. I messaged a college roommate to say that I’d happened across sheet music for a trombone/piano piece we played back in school. His 3-word reply indicated he had no idea I’d been away from Facebook, and would have made me feel a bit miffed save for the fact that I’m at a point in my life where the people I knew 25 years ago should be just that: the people I knew 25 years ago. This always-on pipeline of communication that makes reaching out to long-ago friends or even not so long-ago friends seem trivial has become more and more contrary to my basic human nature. it doesn’t even make sense, and while I admit to falling into the trap of exploiting these too-easy channels of communication, sometime to the detriment of healthy and normal relationships, I don’t think my failure to conform to my own ideals of communication mean that I cannot or should not do so going forward.

I also think I might have reactivated without realizing it. That happened accidentally a couple of times, because they make it way too easy to reactivate without intending to. Twice this happened and I re-deactivated within a minute. If it happened a third time then I have no idea when or how. All I know is I had a shit ton of Notifications that should not have come through while deactivated.

I’m not going to lose sleep over it. Just a curiosity.

Slept righteously last night, suddenly waking up these days way before noon, which is kind of disorienting. The extra hour or so of daylight is also a disarming, if welcome development.

It looked like somebody across the street died yesterday. There was a phalanx of police cars, an ambulance, a fire engine, and a small army of EMT personnel standing around doing nothing. I’ve seen this dance of death after people in the building where I live died. The firefighters solemnly climb the stairs to verify and/or at least say that they attempted resuscitation. Traffic gets backed up, as there is no easy way around the oversized ambulance on a one-lane street. Horns start honking, usually from far enough back that the people doing so are ignorant to the circumstances. The drivers who are closest at hand politely complain, saying “I understand what’s going on but I just… bah!”

One would think the EMT folks would factor in backed-up traffic into their response deployment planning but it does not seem like they do. In a way it doesn’t bother me. If I ever die I’d like to go out knowing that a small, impromptu parade of people driving vehicles gathered in my honor, blasting their car horns in a way that posterity would interpret as a celebration of my life.