I am sitting at an outdoor bench/table, and  feeling a little conspicuous for it. I am not terribly paranoid, I don’t think, but the possibility of someone swooping by and stealing my tablet is not lost on me. That won’t happen, though, right? This is the outdoor bench at the ghetto coffee shop.

The doctor visit today was quite brief. There was no talk of the EFT quackery I patiently sat through last time. I have to wonder if that clap trap is even legal, or what insurors would have to say about it. If I had heard him say “Emotional Freedom Techniques” I would have thought he was full of it. All I caught from his was “EFT”, which sounded a little more distinguished. As it was my alarm bells of quackery had to wait until he said that depression “hangs out here” in a certain part of the brain, and that anxiety “hangs out” in some other particular segment.  And I thought later of how he urged me not to look for this stuff on YouTube. He said to avoid YouTube because they did it incorrectly. I think he wants me to stay away so I won’t see the comments from people saying what a crock of shit this all is.

Still ruminating on yesterday’s therapist meeting. My vulnerabilities to abusiveness. My almost cowardly capacity for empathy. It is cowardly, isn’t it, to be so charitable to people who are just mean? I could never be a police officer. I would want to ask kids why they did this, and what better things they could do with their lives. Cops don’t really do that. They just enforce laws and arrest people. It’s not their duty to intellectualize and ask a a lot of questions any more than it is an emergency room employee’s job to lecture the alcoholic who gets admitted for alcohol abuse.

I remember a police department somewhere in this general part of the country that made headlines for refusing to hire PhDs and highly educated applicants. “Overqualified” was not the exact term they used, I don’t think, but their explanation for rejecting academians was vague. This is probably so as not to offend the people they did hire by implying they were a bunch of fucking idiots. I think it is fair to say that you don’t want your ground troops thinking too deeply about the bigger scheme of things. That police department I believe said that they didn’t want ultra smart types getting bored on the job.

…

It’s later. I’m at the millennial bar. PALC APARTMENT and WALBON HALL are today’s new Astoria named apartment buildings of intrigue. I have no idea what either name means. PALC is little more than CLAP backwards. Or is it some obscure acronym? Public Access Library Consortium? People Against Lingering Constipation?

WALBON spells NOBLAW in reverse but that’s immaterial, as is the CLAP.

I read an NYTimes bit about some Manhattan building names, and how it is generally pretty arbitrary. I mean you can name your building whatever you want, but the decision in the NYT piece was described as sometimes arduous, other times whimsical. A recent building named FRANK is in honor of the architect’s 2-1/2 year old son. I concur with the person quoted in the article’s denoument. It sounds like you live at a hot dog stand.

I looked through the NYC’s Department of Buildings site for evidence of these building names. I found none for the Astoria buildings I looked up, though there is a field for a building’s “Special Name” or something like that. The DALMAC building has no trace of the word DALMAC in its DOB records, at least as far as I could tell, nor do any other Astoria buildings with names on their facades.

It looks like a lot of the building names derive from the old Astoria street names. 30th Ave and 23rd Street is the site of two buildings named Ely Court and Grand Court. Clever! The intersection of 30th and 23rd used to be known as the corner of Ely and Grand. I thought yesterday that buildings were named for presidents, and that turns out to be true but only by degrees of separation. They are really named for the streets. Washington Court on 29th Street and 36th Avenue: 36th Ave. used to known as Washington. Today I spotted a BUCHANAN COURT on the span of 29th Street that used to be known as Buchanan Street. I can’t decide how to spell Buchanon/Buchanan… The name needs a chanonical spelling.

There is an ELM building on the street that used to be ELM Avenue.

And so on. It’s good flaneur fun. But what of PALC and WALBON? Time to mine my newspapers.com subscription for clues. Finding “PALC” in the OCR world of newspapers.com will be like finding “Buddah” in a high school religion essay.

…

Ah, something I wanted to document for my future memory hole, not that I ever re-read this stuff. I was reminded today that I actually got paid for that payphone guided tour I did a month or three ago. I had thought it was a promotional no-money-in-or-out thing, and I was more than fine with that.

Before the tour started I met Alex, who handed me a Ziploc bag full of quarters. This was meant to be a prop for the tour, or so I thought. I did produce the bag of quarters at some point, to comedic effect. People laughed at the idea that anyone would think to carry a stash of quarters in case they had to  make payphone calls.

Fast forward a couple of months. I had kept the bag of quarters in my bag, which I carry almost everywhere. I was at the Starbucks in the Empire State Building when the most deliciously cute woman I had seen in 181 years tapped me on the knuckle of my right index finger and asked if I had quarters to make change for 2 dollars. She said she needed change to pay for the bus, which acepts no bills.

I was like “Pfffft, you need quarters? I am the quartermeister. I carry a pack of quarters everywhere. You never know when you might need them…” She was Asian, looked to be half my age, and she was looking me straight in the space between my two eyes as I said all this. She was stone-faced as one of Murakami’s sociopathic harlots.  

Then I said “I make a lot of payphone calls.”

At that she laughed, and laughed, and laughed. It was nice. This was not a tension laughter but a calm, relaxed, conspiratorial recognition of the lunacy of things. She was after me, I could tell.

I found the bag of quarters and prepared the transaction of her two dollar bills for my 8 quarters. I remembered an SNL skit, one of their fake commercials purporting to advertise a company that makes change. “If you need 8 nickels and 13 pennies for your 2 quarters and 3 pennies, we can do that.”

This is when I made a surprising discovery. That bag of quarters Alex had handed me was actually a bag of dollars. 50 of them, I think. The number of dollar coins matters not. What mattered was the “Surprise Birthday” moment of walking in to something that had been planted for me months earlier. All I saw was Alex’s face, and all I could do was chuckle at the well-played mastery of it all.

“Well played, Kliment”, I thought. “Well played.” For no damn reason I appended that sentiment with “Bastard!”

The critical matter at hand was delivering the promised 8 quarters for the beautiful woman’s 2 dollar bills, which she held toward me. I could see those two dollar bills pulsate in her hand, extensions of her heartbeat. I reached into my right pants pocket and found the familiar stash of quarters, which I genuinely do keep on hand for payphone calls. We exchanged currencies (huh huh). I had to get going to my appointment across the street, so I let her get away. It was a beautiful New York moment, mostly on account of her calm radiance, but also because of how Alex Kliment’s clandestine generosity revealed itself to me.

GOING HOME.