While the interviewer puzzled me with her loquacious, sometimes inaudible talking, I think the interview itself went well, and was interesting. It veered far from payphones to matters of happiness, regrets, the meaning of life. A parade of obnoxious high school kids kept interrupting, asking if we were with the news. She said “No it’s an artsy fartsy project.” That turned them away. One kid hurled his body at the payphone enclosure. He could have knocked it over. Someone yelled “FUCK YOUR CAMERA!” I managed to tune most of it out but it felt like something really stupid was about to happen. They were being so stupid that it reminded me of the guy I encountered a few months ago, who spewed nothing but unintelligible gibberish for several minutes. It felt like the two sides of his brain had stopped talking to each other. I wanted to ask someone else sitting there “You know what the corpus callosum is?” If the person knew I would say “I don’t think that guy had one. Two sides of his brain were not talking to each other.” That’s how these kids made me feel. Like their decision making engines were not very finely tuned.
She said she is using photos and payphone listings from my site and travelling the country documenting where some of them used to be, or potentially still exist, even as shells of their former selves. I might go over to Jersey City this week to track down a rotary dial payphone said to exist at a bar. And from the tiny news department comes word that the payphone worked again, after being out of service for a couple of weeks. I guess John still maintains that thing. I gotta wonder why at this point… well, I dial a set of toll free numbers any time I pass it by. He makes 50 cents for each of those calls. Maybe I am keeping him in business.
In the meantime a quest is on for a suitably characterful container for someone of tremendous character to carry vinegar in. It’s a funny Char-ACT-er kind of thing. I think I can do this.
At the ghetto coffee shop, going home to do some work.
