therapist and I had a moment of mutual admiration for each other. She said she rarely gets positive feedback on her work. She said this after I offered her exactly that. She makes me see what happiness could feel like. True and contented happiness. I know it is possible. She has also been letting on some personal details of herself. Nothing extraordinarily revealing but enough beyond the expectation of virtual anonymity for me to have noticed. She seems to forget this, at least at first. One week she mentioned that she grew up in a certain Alabama town. Next session I mentioned that I had once driven through “your hometown”. At this she looked at me like the proverbial deer in the headlights. She must have remembered offering up that detail but she must also have thought for a moment that I had been “researching” her online or something. I have not looked her up online even once, I don’t think. If I did I do not remember it now. It seems like combing Yelp for a doctor of any specialty is a lost cause, since Yelp pretty exclusively the realm of assholes.
So for all that today I had one of the worst panic attacks I’ve had in months. I don’t know what exactly brought it on but I think the summertime heat and the fact that I actually ran to catch an N train might have contributed. I don’t run much. I walk epic distances but rarely move beyond a rapid gait. I don’t think that would contribute to this, though, not entirely. I do not remember most of the train ride home or much of anything that I did in midtown.
…
Later in the day a somewhat hurried, spasticated interview with a reporter at a Denver NBC News affiliate turned up uncertainty of a fact that is thrown about as unassailable, even though no one seems to have a bulltproof source to vouch for it. Today is allegedly the birthday of the payphone. June 1, 1880. But it’s not really the birth of the payphone as we know it today. Today is the anniversary of the pay station, which was an ordinary telephone that people paid to use. Payment went to either a human attendant or was on the honor system. Th coin-fed payphone as we know it now was introduced in its earliest form in 1889, or so the conventional wisdom purports. The patent for this phone was approvied in August, 1889, but it is not clear to me (yet, at least) from primary sources that the actual first-ever working pay telephone was also put into service that same year or on what day.
Saying today is the birth of the payphone when it really is not is kind of a harmless myth. The birth of the pay station is about as significant as the birth of the rental car. And it’s also kind of a fluid scenario to memorialize. Who is to say that businesses with house phones didn’t charge customers to use them. They almost certainly did but no record would exist of such transactions or practices. “When is the first time someone paid to use someone else’s phone?” Who the hell cares? The turning point of the payphone as we have known it for over a century is tied far more significantly to William Gray’s 1889 patent and subsequent production of coin-operated devices.
I also turned up evidence which suggests pay stations had existed as early as 1878, 2 years earlier than today’s “anniversary”. The name of Thomas Doolittle attached to those rumors gives them some credibility but I couldn’t summon any credible sources from the open Internet to verify them. Like a lot of researchers I have to train myself to remember that just because commercial ssearch engines haven’t gobbled up and indexed some event or piece of information that doesn’t mean it never happened or does not exist. It would be interesting to simultaneously outline a book of research based entirely on information from the public Internet with a book of the same subject matter which used only information from research libraries and printed matter. Obviously the subject matter would have to be relatively old but I suspect that the dead-tree research would turn up more depth, if not better facts.
I’e been gorging on my paid subscription to newspapers.com. So much interesting ephemera in there, and moreso since they added the more recent papers from the 1980s to present day. Other night revealed that Richard Nixon once considered moving into the Trump Tower. The Tower seems so patently un-Nixonian that it is hard to believe he considered it. But it was, by the standards of 1983, perhaps not so tacky as it is fashionable to call it today.
