Noxious

Ambitious start toward making this a day for an epic walk somewhere, anywhere, has turned to a lower key putzing around midtown kind of thing. Now I am at the Trump Tower, where a relative mob scene of tourists just descended on the Public Garden space I so cherish. It is starting to look like Trump really will get the nomination. Statistical analysis says that if he faces Clinton he will have a 100% chance of winning. That made me laugh. I don’t remember what the analysis said his chances were if he faced Sanders.

Any time I enter this building I feel like I see its grubbiness. The swirly design elements of the building’s walls are the visual equivalent of frosting on a turd. All casinos are like this to me. This is not a casino but Trump owns several and the decor here feels similar to me in its mawkishly artless flourish. A Trump presidency might feel the same way. I remember how filthy the presidency felt when Ken Starr released his pornographic acount of what went on with Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Knowing that details of the president’s sexual organs were in the public domain made everything about the investigation, both its prosecution and its reason for existing, seem filthy. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman…” “sexual relations” being a Clintonianism, meaning that he never penetrated her. She only blew him. There was a cigar. You can feel his legally agile mind thinking these things while the sexual acts were being performed, should he ever have to explain himself. It seems the remonstrance he actually faced was pretty much exactly what his thinking had prepared him for.

Chelsea Clinton may be an astonighly vapid individual but it’s kind of amazing how normal she turned out. The only grinch in the offing of her public life seems to be that she married a Jewish guy, to the displeasure of a certain segment of the population that thinks The Tribe should marry within itself. Her television gigs have been a joke and on balance the woman seems to have absolutely nothing to say. If she remains a compelling figure in any way I do not think it comes from the merits of her character but on the opaque mystique of being a Clinton.

The Trump kids seem OK, too. I know their dad raised them never to drink or smoke or any of that shit. I don’t remember who commented that the Trumps have “no conventional vices”. I saw an interview with Ivanka Trump, I think it was part of a film called “Born Rich”, in which people such as her were profiled. She seemed entirely down to earth and aware of her privilege. I wonder what she has done since entering fully into adulthood to make the world a better place. I heard she forgot to vote in the NY Primary. I think she is astonishingly beautiful. I used to think Chelsea Clinton was cute but now I think she looks like a horse.

Speed Levitch was in the New York Times today, in the same column where a bartender from my neighborhood of Astoria was featured a few weeks ago. The writer of the piece was one of the people who did the WBAI spot I was a part of last week. I wonder if they will come for me some time, or if they have had enough of me already. The NYT column finds “characters” in town and writes sympathetic profiles of them. For Speed they somehow neglected to mention his appearance in “The Cruise”, which I am starting to see has quite a good reputation. I wonder if he should worry about being profiled in the NYT for being a tour guide in NYC while not being officially licensed to be one.

I almost forgot the the Huffington Post is coming to profile me in their “characters” column. What the hell am I going to say?

I made a somewhat weird and almost horrifying discovery. A mass of poems and near-poems I wrote in 2011 at the Rose Main Reading Room, most of which I have absolutely no memory of writing. Some of them sound so unlike me that I had to look them up to see if I for some reason transcribed the works of other poets. That is something I would do. But I found nothing that resembles any of these pieces and I have to assume that I actually wrote them. It’s like hearing myself talking in my sleep, or experiencing dementia. That wasn’t me.

…

That was yesterday. Today is today. Sunday. At the ghetto coffee shop, whence I have not been for a while.

I am thinking of doing a standup comedy set somewhere. The therapist has me thinking I could make ’em laugh. For any set would be a story from this AM:

I woke up around 5am to the sound of something beeping. A most irritating sound. From the fog of deep sleep I could not make up my slumbering mind about what device was beeping or why. Turns out it was the CO2 detector, and I’m happy to say it was not beeping to alert me to the presence of that deadly gas but to tell me that the battery needed replacement. I can’t believe I was able to do this while just barely awake but I found a ladder, climbed up on it a couple of steps, and took the CO2 detector down. I was too fucking tired for this bullshit. I could not figure out how to open the thing so I could remove the battery. Just wanted to go back to sleep sans beeping. So I took it into the bathroom, closed the door, closed the bedroom door, and that was enough buffer that I no longer heard the beeping. Hours later I woke up and went into the bathroom. (cover your ears/eyes if this is TMI) I took a dump. The CO2 detector was right next to me. As I performed my bowel movement the CO2 detector went off. I thought “Man, I must have put out a toxic, noxious turd for it to set off that thing!” (This is where people are supposed to laugh) I quickly realized that it couldn’t have been that. I was trying to figure out how to open the thing, and so I was looking at the device closely, because I was not wearing my glasses yet. It was my breath that set it off. not my turd. Your breath contains enough Carbon Monoxide to set off these devices at close range. I don’t know if a turd does but I don’t intend to take a dump on my CO2 alarm to find out. So let that be a lesson to you: Don’t breath on those things.

Speaking of turds (laughter) I was at Prospect Park last week when I saw what could only be described as a bucket of shit… here I would repeat the bit from earlier this week about the foul sighting from the park portolet.

My other two jokes I have ready are the story of when I went to a dentist and then a urologist, and my Xerox joke: I saw a headline a few weeks ago that the Xerox Corporation, they make the copiers, I saw that the Xerox Corporation is going to be split into two separate companies. it’s true. Wouldn’t it be perfect if both those comopanies were exactly the same? Bahaha, he crowd goes wild.

…

I have a new gadget for my go bag. It is a portable scanner wand thingy that one uses to scan individual pages or documents by slowly dragging the device over the page(s). I had to get this thing because the scanners at the NYPL Main branch are quite bad, and somewhat onerous to use. There is a technique to using the wand scanner and I think I got it.

Was thinking today about what I should plan to say to the Huffington Post nterviewer. I forget when she is coming but it’s this month, on a Saturday. I’m hoping to avoid the subject of payphones. I don’t know what, if anything, she knows about me but I was referred to her by a musician so maybe she comes into this with that as her focus. She seems very curt and even a little rude in the emails. The plan is that I tell her my life story. My life story begins October 20, 1990. That’s the day I left Tampa for New York.