Last night I was walking past the McDonald’s on 31st Street. I stopped in my tracks. The place was surrounded by a makeshift wood fence and the roof of the building was mostly gone. In the dark it looked like there had been a huge fire. Someone standing nearby saw me looking at it and said “Yeah, what the hell happened?” I said I had no idea, and he said it looked like the place burned down. Certainly that would have been written up in one of the hyperlocal Astoria news sites. No such mention of McDonald’s was found anywhere on the Intertubes.
I passed by again today and a passer by saw my interest in the mess. He said that the Department of Buildings had busted them for having too much exposure to fiberglass. I had never heard of that as being a problem but evidently it is. It can fuck with your breathing. I wonder if it’s always been that way at that location, and if lawsuits await. That location has been there a long time. Now they have to gut out and basically rebuild the whole fucking place — although it looks like the PLAYLAND part has been spared.
It reminded me of the anecdote a friend from CNN related: No McDonald’s location had ever closed. Some had been relocated on account of construction — the McDonald’s at the CNN Center was one such example — but none had ever officially closed. That story was true in 1997 but it did not remain so. I posted it to my web site and someone wrote to say that the first McDonald’s closure ever had occurred recently somewhere in North Carolina.
Yes, this matters.
I tweeted a bunch today. I called a woman who called me yesterday. She did not call back. The immediacy of things today seem to make a 24-hour response time the same as not happening at all.
Tomorrow could be the day I finally get my blogging shit in order. I want to close this .MOBI as a separate, semi-private site. I might just nuke it altogether. Taking .MOBI to a subcategory of Sorabji.COM would mean surcease of posting the confessional, too-revealing stuff, such as my cock size or pictures of blood flowing from my head. I don’t need the general Internet lapping that shit up. I have nothing to hide from the world but I also do not need controversy or unintended consequences.
On the other hand self-censoring myself on my own fucking web site is just completely against my instincts. If I could make the .MOBI category hidden from the searchies that would be aces but I don’t see how that is possible. Aah, there is probably a plugin for that. In fact I am sure there is. I think it’s called Advanced Category Exclusion. I’ll dick around with it.
Tonight a friend stops by for our ritual Degenerate Night. I can summarize my intriguing week of amazing conversation and anticipation. Or we can just talk football. I miss good conversation.
I took an Italian leather bag to a shop on Broadway. Holy crap she did a good job. The inner fabric was torn on both sides, and only getting worse. She yanked out the fabric and replaced it with a solid brown pattern… Kind of hard to explain, actually, but it’s really good work. I paid ~$275 for this bag years ago, and it is a damn fine bag, so I guess it was worth the $45 to get it fixed.
Damn, a woman I used to work with at Avon just walked past. She walked past yesterday at about this same time, maybe even the same minute. She was a horrible worker at Avon. I kicked all ass at that company. I remember the day I got hired as a “permanent” (what the fuck that means) employee. The manager could barely contain herself, saying over and over that “THIS IS A GOOD COMPANY. IT’S A GOOD COMPANY!”
To my way of thinking at the time any place that would give me a job was a “good” company. But that’s not what she meant. She meant that Avon was a company where the management does not screw you over or take advantage of you. If a salaried worker put in long hours they would be compensated somehow or other. I remember Donna — the best boss I ever had — giving me a couple of days off after I put in some epic 15-hour days. And another boss (who will remain unnamed because she was just about the worst boss I ever had) threw a surprise party for me to say thanks for doing something similar — putting in epic hours. I used to love doing that. Long, long hours. It’s the only thing I have in common with Travis Bickle.
