At the ghetto coffee shop later than is my usual routine. This is a disruption to my pattern, but it’s fine. Usually I arrive here as close to 5:00 on the dot as I can. Now it’s almost 7:30. I was cleaning up some web site crap. I find that certain pages, I don’t know how many, are a complete and total mess now that I unplugged one web site altogether. That site was an ugly eyesore that had to go, but it is intertwined with other web sites in ways that I knew all along would some day come back to bite me. At least I’m cleaning things up, as I should have done long ago.

I walked to Williamsburg. Tracker app says it was 6.22 miles from here to there but it seems like it had to be longer than that. I got to Metropolitan Avenue and Kent. I don’t know Williamsburg much but I knew enough to remember that there is a G train stop somewhere along there. But I took the B24 bus instead, connecting in Sunnyside to the Q104 to Astoria. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the B24 over the Kosciuszko Bridge. It’s not exactly a bucket list thing but I have always wanted to see that bird’s eye view of Calvary Cemetery. So, unless I did this and just forgot about it then today was the day I finally got to do it. It was a fun enough day out but Kent Avenue was actually pretty boring. I made this walk years ago, before gentrification, and the stretch of road was more interesting back then, or at least my memory allows for that to be. That time I walked all the way to Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge. I discovered Bushwick Inlet Park, and a state park next to it, can’t remember the name now. Have not looked at the pictures yet but I am certain to have captured ample Pulitzer-worthy images that will change the world.

I woke up feeling free. I woke up feeling pretty good, too, especially compared to yesterday’s miseryguts. I finally ate a decent amount of food for dinner. Ordered a gyro platter from Aliada and ate everything. Typically I can not get through much more than half. I mostly get into trouble with drinking when I neglect to eat, as is part and parcel of my metabolism. Hunger makes me high. But the food last night absorbed the booze somewhat, and I slept long.

I woke up feeling free because I know that today is my day to stop drinking. Will it be forever? Probably not but this time around it will be longer than a week. It is like ending a relationship. My main reason for drinking last night was to finish off the beer and booze that I had, so I would not have any in the house. I could have just chucked it or given it away but the former seems wasteful and the latter I don’t want to incorporate physical traces of my alcoholic tendencies into the lives of others, even as my drinking is no secret among any who would have been the recipients of my beer and booze. It just looks cheesy, I think, and puts a somewhat moribund burden on the recipient should I relapse and drink myself to death.

It is only coincidental that I’m quitting at New Years. It’s not a resolution type of thing. Just my body and mind telling me that this is how I should be.

Going through some of that old payphone content is kind of tedious in ways, and distressing in others. I barely recognize the voice of the author in some of those stories, and much of it seems like an utter waste of industry, like I’m running on the fumes of past publicity. My decision to “analyze” the phone booth game from “Dirty Harry” seems gratuitous and earnest in its pointlessness. I could have done just as well or even better doing nothing more than the screengrabs. And the “Man in the High Castle” story is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.

But it’s like the fake news dilemma. Can I unplug it if it gets traffic and potentially makes me a few bucks?

I should do more web site writing here, or anywhere but at home. I can’t focus or free my mind in that place. I’ve been there too damn long. And, of course, there is nobody there but me.

Don’t know what a plan for tomorrow is but I should get out again like today.