The first night after taking the benzos is always the worst. I get this weird feeling of twitchiness that wakes me up throughout the night. They feel like electrical hiccups. They hit everywhere in my body. Arms, legs, middle, head. But when the sun finally comes up I find I got better sleep than I thought I was getting. As the night seems to wear on endlessly I worry that I won’t get any sleep at all. But this line of thinking is deceptive. I am getting sleep in, it just gets disrupted time after time by my body adjusting to the lack of booze, not to mention the fact that I went to bed way earlier than usual. I imagine those electrical hiccup twitches occur while I am sleeping drunk, too. If so they do not wake me up like they did last night, and other nights I take the benzo.
Today, despite eating little more than a couple of pieces of leftover chicken and a few fistfuls of Oreos, I feel surprisingly normal, with an appetite, even. I gorged on plain yogurt, which I had started craving last night but I didn’t have any. Now I am a little wired on those Oreos as I sit down for my daily ghetto coffee shop visit, topping the sugar and caffeine of the cookies with a large nuclear-strength coffee.
With the CBS spot airing one of these days I thought I’d find some scholarly phone booth related insights, should this appearance result in any page views whatsoever. I learned a few things that the CBS guys don’t seem to have known. They are not doing hard news or anything so their lack of deep study of the subject is not surprising. But they are relying way too much on me for their facts and figures. They may not use too much of the facts and figures, though, since that is not their style or format.
Today I learned that the rise in outdoor phone booths really commenced after World War II. Well, wait. This is not news to me. The first concentrated increase in phone booths and payphones came during WWII, when itinerant soldiers traveling cross country camped out at phone booths in post offices and train stations across the land, calling home and calling their commanders for marching orders.
But a follow up boomlet in outdoor booths came after the war, when the phone companies could not provide families with personal home telephone service fast enough to keep up with the housing boom. So they set up phone booths at spots strategic to how central they were to the underserved areas, and home phone installations filled in over time.
After that development the Bell companies slowly rolled out phone booth installations everywhere they could get permits. The stated reasons were that they wanted to provide access to payphones 24 hours a day. At the time outdoor booths were not unknown but not especially common. Most phone booths were located indoors, at businesses such as grocery stores and barber shops. These phones were mostly inaccessible in the wee hours, when these businesses were closed.
The increase in outdoor phone booth installations proved to be a huge hit among customers. The iconic Airlight 1 aluminum phone booth enclosure became something of a calming presence on the open highway and among transients. Newspapers ran stories describing how lives were saved or at least made much easier by the presence of a working public telephone at remote highway locations where drivers might have been stranded.
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All this — well, most of this — I did not have in my pocket for the CBSSM segment. But it probably does not matter. It’s light news and no one watching is going to fucking know the facts from the conventional wisdom floating around the Intertubes. I also do not feel like this is my problem, since I made it clear from the get go that I was a payphone guy, and a New York City payphone guy at that, not specifically a PHONE BOOTH guy. They also seem to have ignored my alert that what has really driven the payphone companies out of business is not just cell phones but the so called Obamaphone. I don’t like calling it that for a variety of reasons but that aside, I was surprised that the CBS guy had never even heard of the Obamaphone, nor did he seem to comprehend what I was talking about in saying that it poached the payphone industry’s last reliable customer base: the poor. Lifeline (aka Obamaphone) is a telco-subsidized program that gives free or no-cost phone to low-income Americans. There is no direct tax levied on Americans for this service, but you could say that the money collected by telcom companies for the Universal Service Fund is akin to a tax. Whatever the case, the program was started under the Reagan administration, giving limited landline service at little or no cost to the poorest Americans. It was expanded somewhat under Clinton (can’t remember offhand how), but it really grew under George W. Bush, who expanded it to include cell phones. Lifeline continued under Obama as well but the administration has done, as far as I can remember off the top of my head, nothing to extend the basic terms of the program. It simply became more popular under Obama, for whatever reason (I should look that up).
The term “Obamaphone” originated from a woman seen on the Drudge Report saying she was going to vote Obama because he gave her her “Obamaphone”. True, she was receiving the phone during the Obama administration, but it came to her at no direct taxpayer expense. That last point seems to be the number one gripe among the ignorant about the program — that it is essentially a welfare phone. The woman’s “Obamaphone” made waves on conservative talk radio and the like, and the rest is history.
Anyway, I gotta take a dump. Maybe that’s what I just did here. Hah!
