Ennui

I just noticed that the ghetto coffee shop has a sign saying they now sell HOGGIES. I am going to suggest that they meant HOAGIES, and that “hoggies” is not an acceptable alternative spelling. I noticed as well the other day that the signs for Break on Broadway say “BAR AND BILLARDS”. I thought that was spelled wrong but, if general usage is a reliable indicator, it seems BILLARDS is an acceptable alternative to BILLIARDS.

I do not feel good today. My life feels like it does not exist, does not matter. I read a Stephen King story in Playboy that has bothered me. It reminds me why I never read any of his stuff. The story is about a married couple that lure traveling salespeople into their apartment, coaxing them with booze and good company. Before inviting them over they determine if the person is single, unattached, and devoid of family. Basically they seek out people who would not be missed should they go missing. Then they tie the person up, stuff him in a closet, and wait for 3 or 4 days as the person starves to death. Of course they steal all his money and watches and whatnot. The story interweaves the husband and wife having pleasant conversation, their chitchat punctuated by the sound of the man in the closet kicking at the door and muttering “For the love of God,” among other things.

What bothers me most is not the manner of the man’s death (he dies by the end of the story). It is that I fear I am that person, one who would not be noticed should I go missing or die unexpectedly. It’s like I do not exist anymore. A life unseen is a life unremembered.

I remember being at an old cemetery in Providence, RI. The North Burial Ground. Parts of that cemetery were newer but the oldest sections filled me with a coldness. I did not crystallize those thoughts until later. These burials were for people whose memory itself had evaporated. The silence that filled that section was more than just the silence of death. This was the silence of being forgotten. I don’t want ever to be forgotten.

Not feeling positive about my life these days. Maybe it’s just end of year blahs, or the futility I start to feel in resuscitating my web world when it matters less now then it ever has. So much industry goes into that world, and so much of that sits unseen, even unknown.

Strangely, I feel better now for having typed these sentences. That is often true. My brain is my strongest muscle. Working it should exhaust me, and it usually does.

I was up again around 4am, talking to stuffed animals and resisting (this time) the urge to do vodka shots. That’s a positive on today’s feelings of physical health, but seems to have the rest of me feeling that ennui toward life that has me puttering around Astoria, walking purposefully as if there is so much for me to do and so many places for me to go but really I am doing nothing and going nowhere.

I took a bag of receipts to my storage room. I doubled up the purpose of that trip. I thought the storage place might have some of those old watchclock stations. In fact I thought that storage place might be where I used to see them, years ago. But I did not see any. I hate that place, I really do. It used to be Shurgard, now it is Public Storage. I rented the room in the days after I got mugged at knifepoint outside my apartment. Any time I go there I feel the discomfort of being in that space involuntarily, as a backup of some sort should my apartment get robbed or I lose everything.

I spent much of yesterday engaged in the deliberate, painstaking process of establishing a truly reliable backup plan on-site at the data center in Montreal. This to complement my local backup on my RAID. That process insinuates so much anticipation of failure, as with the renting of the storage locker. The backup plan is a very dry, strict, failure-prone pursuit.

I have a rather pedantic conversation going with a woman I contacted through a dating site. It seems to be going nowhere, as do most things that start through those sites. The only thing that floats in modern online dating is absolute perfection, I guess because there are so many people doing it now. When I last looked at that world, probably 10+ years ago, the population was relatively thin. You could actually contact people and reasonably expect a response. It’s not like that any more. There is always someone better just a click away, someone with a better tan, bigger muscles, a better job. In my case you could do a lot better on a whole host of grounds besides physical qualities. Unlike when I was younger I took this sort of rejection personally. Now I do not even care, however positive I might have felt about the possibilities of connecting with someone. I mean if it’s not gonna work it’s not gonna work, right? So why bother trying… As such I greet the new year with absolutely no prospects for romance. If I am to spend the rest of my life alone I will not be happy about it.

Not sure I want to drink again tonight. It’s not a new years resolution as such but I do want to try and stick to sobriety for longer than a week, and what better time to start than the boozey days of new years. I made it several weeks this summer. But this time around I was surprised to find that I had trouble being around someone with a beer in his hand when I did not have one myself. It was actually the smell of it that got me, and sent me almost running to the liquor store at 8:55pm. Well, I hurried because I didn’t know when the store closed, I couldn’t find that info online, and my friend thought it might close at 9pm. So that’s why I basically ran to get there. But by appearances it looked like I was freaking out over the smell of alcohol, and maybe I was.

I used to hate the smell of beer.

It is snowing.