Up. Down. Up. Down.

There was nowhere to go but down. I had not felt glorious the last several days but I felt optimistic about my future, with no concrete reason for this to be so.

Today felt like I was drowning again. Drowning in the air. All it took was my inability to find my Costco membership card to remind me of  the futility of existence and to fuel my gluttonous hunger for sadness in all things.

Alas, as the Italian woman said to me in a recent e-mail: “I still prefer to suffer than give way to unfeelingness.” Those words moved me.

I must be doing something better than I had in the past. I walked over a bridge today for the first time in about a year… a rickety, wobbly drawbridge connecting Queens and Brooklyn. The last time I crossed that bridge I lifted the camera to my face to take a picture. In so doing I nearly lost balance and could easily have fallen directly into oncoming vehicular traffic if I did not have one last sparkle of self-awareness about me. My knees were weak and my body felt like it was falling apart like a stickman made of toothpicks.

Today, on that same bridge, I lifted the camera and took shot after shot, feeling no vulnerability like I did that last time. The bridge itself is shaky, and none could fail to acknowledge its frailty.

But if it is a signal that I have come somewhere since I crossed that bridge last year then I will take that as a positive.

I took out my negative morning energies on a long walk to Williamsburg, via Greenpoint. My goal going forward is to make every one of these long rambles include passage through some part of New York I’ve never seen before, even if that undiscovered country comprises just a single street or intersection. I also think I should stop giving each outing a feeling of brinksmanship wherein I have to go for a personal record in miles walked or hours spent. Today I ended up in new parts of Williamsburg and a few new-to-me side streets of Greenpoint, but a bulk of the day was spent in familiar territory. I took a dump at my old standby, Calvary Cemetery.

I have not taken the DSLR out in a long while, except for a handful of negligible outings. For  some reason everything I posted to 500px the last week went popular, if barely. I know as well as anyone that these designations mean absolutely nothing, and I emphatically do not want to give 500px credit for motivating me to shoot photos again. It’s just a thing to do… But posting photos there is fun, and I think I could just give in to it and make 500px my “Official” portfolio link.

I did not touch the DSLR for months after a local arts festival completely ignored my application. I only picked up the DSLR once to take out the battery, in case it leaked… as one does with electronics they do not expect to use for a while.

Today felt good. The Sony a77 was ready to rip after a long nap.

The stuff probably won’t look as good as it felt to shoot.

This felt mighty good… Here is me, reflected in a random piece of Greenpoint trash:

…

A video game I downloaded yesterday centers on building a fishtank. The game makes me wish I had a reef tank, or any kind of aquarium. I had a beauty of a 35-gallon freshwater tank when i lived on the upper east side, and really loved it, at least until a certain channel catfish got too fucking big for the tank and threatened to bust it apart. I got rid of that monster and gave up the hobby. The timing was fortuitous, as it coincided with my move to Atlanta. I couldn’t take it so I just left the aquarium behind, along with a beautiful giant desk and the black and white television my mother sent me when I lived at the Parc Lincoln. She sent it after the first Gulf War commenced.

I always wanted a saltwater tank, though. No pets allowed in my domicile, but I could probably get away with an aquarium if I bribed the owner of the building. I was also thinking about setting up an antfarm. That would make for a good live webcam. There has been a live antfarm webcam on the Internet since the beginning of the WWW but I checked in on it yesterday and it seemed to be not working. It looked like a Java applet wanted to start but the web browser wouldn’t let it.

blahblahblah……

At the ghetto coffee shop, where I have taken to studying the activities of the customers here by watching them in the reflection of the window looking out onto the street. I have noticed that almost every single person who passes by spends a fraction of a second looking at the back of my head.

Had a few stray thoughts today. There should be an Office of Apostrophes (OoA), or rather an Office o’ Apostrophes (Oo’A). The Oo’A would be staffed by people whose only job is to go around town finding signs that are missing letters. These people would determine what font faces were used on these signs and return to them armed with a bag full of as many fontularly consistent apostrophes as necessary to fill in the blank spaces of each sign. They would fill the space left by each missing letter with an apostrophe, making the words more pronouncable, if not grammatically more accurate. I thought of this today after spotting a sign missing about half its letters… or rather: h”f it’ le”’rs.

I guess it’s chapter 2 of an idea I had a long time ago: The Department of Light. I actually executed this plan, which involved sending letters via USPS to “The Department of Light” at businesses where neon or otherwise electrically-lit signage was missing letters. I thought of this while working at the Time & Life Building. My 42nd floor office looked toward the Sheraton Hotel on 7th Avenue, and for what seemed like centuries their S was not working. As far as I could tell the place was called the Heraton. I printed up a stack of Post-It-sized papers from the Department Of Light, with a multiple-choice checklist that said something like “Your Lights Are: A.) Working Properly B.) Unsatisfactory C.) Missing these letters: ____

I don’t think that’s exactly what the notes said but it was something like that. I mailed a few these to the Heraton but never saw them fix the letter S. I sent similar notes to other businesses, addressed both to and from the Department of Light.

Now that I think of it I think this initiative was inspired by a Ben Katchor strip.

I used to use Pear’s soap (pronounced ‘peers’, Pear’s is the world’s first registered brand name). I was enchanted once by the appearance of the word ANSPER. It seemed to appear from within the innards of the bar of soap, as if Pear’s was somehow able to carve this strange word into the very middle of the soap. I never understood how they could have done this. The lack of mention anywhere on the Internet about this miniature miracle should have clued me in to the fact that it was not what I thought, but I nevertheless held on to ANSPER as my private mystery.

Alas, years passed before it became obvious. Each bar of Pear’s soap had the word TRANSPERANT carved into its surface. The surface of the bar of soap is concave, so the outer letters of the word would wear away first, at least in the way I used the soap. Thus, the TR that started the word and the ANT which ended it dissolved first, leaving only ANSPER as it was always present in the valley of the bar of soap, on its surface and not miraculously carved within its body.

I wanted ANSPER.

Damn, I’ve been sitting here typing a long time.