An uncharacteristic decision to get breakfast at the Bel Aire Diner led to a chance meeting with Don. This in turn led to about 5 hours driving around Queens. It was fun. It made me want to drive. I’ve been thinking of doing that anyway. Go2Car, or whatever it’s called. Or Zipcar. Just to get from point A to point B. I was specifically thinking I could use a Go2Car to get to and from Calvary, as the once-invigorating walk there has gotten kind of tedious now that I am doing stuff there more frequently.

We went to Forest Park, and I saw for the first time the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. I had seen posters for concerts occuring there but somehow the stadium’s stature as a distinct and notable structure never quite registered with me. We stopped and looked at the house he lived in back in the 1980s. There is a part of Forest Hills where people routinely trot around on horseback. Sounds interesting but I don’t think I’d be a fan of all the horse shit on the streets. We went in to Forest Park. I have been there a few times, but never from the Jackie Robinson side. Somewhere along this journey I spotted a new-to-me telephone exchange name number. It was not especially obvious to any but the eagle-eyed seeker of such things. It looked to Don like 801-9500. But I noticed a hyphen before the 1. In fact it was BO-1-9500, where BO seems to stand for BOulevard. Never seen or heard of that one. And no phone numbers had zero in the first three digits until relatively recently. So 801 didn’t make sense.

We stopped at Queens Blvd. and Ascan to look at a LinkNYC device outside Portofino. Portofino is the restaurant where I attended a meeting of the independent Payphone Association of New York. He just laughed at the Link. Glad to see he agrees that making phone calls on that thing is fucking ridiculous. All he knew about Links before now was that people used them to watch porn.

It was a nice, impromptu day driving all over the place and just talking. I peed in the forest. I don’t think I’ve done that since grade school.

Now I am at the ghetto coffee shop, hungry as hell, in receipt of a lengthy e-mail from the woman who wrote a few days ago asking how I was doing.

…

Next day. Barely left the apartment on this gloomy sunless Sunday. No sun Sunday, no Moon Monday, No Tooth Tuesdays, no wedding Wednesday… I remember a poet who advocated an unusual cause: Weeks should have names. Days months and years have names and assignments but weeks are just, well, weeks. I forget what her theme was for the week naming but I can’t remember any of the names. They were exotic sounding. I can’t remember the poet’s name, either.

I probably wasted a big portion of this day chasing after something i have never been able to accomplish. I want my own damn geocoder. I did in fact have one on an old web server, based on the Geocoder.US perl module. That worked reasonably well but getting it to go was so fucking laborious. As I write I forget why I was never able to make that solution work on my new web server, but I did put in nthe hours of futility necessary to accomoplish absolutely nothing useful. Other credible options exist now, including Nominatim, which I attempted to get going today. I might be much of the way there but I just don’t know. I don’t know postgres well enough for this, it seems. But getting the prerequisites installed was a piece of cake, comparitavely speaking. blahblahblah.

I slept well last night. Going for a walk, I think.