Trying this new thing, not so new really. Cloud document storage and retrieval. My set up until now has been a bare bones text editor on the tablet, with its dangerous penchant for deleting entire documents with a single keystroke. That happened a few times, never to any great loss. It came close as hell to happening a few times under circumstances that would have been painfully annoying. Who is to say this cloud buzzword arrangement is any better?
I thought the library opened at 11. No, it opened at 12 noon. So I was left puttering around for 20 minutes, looking for a banana. Someone screaming into his phone was making direct eye contact with me. He was yelling “I wouldn’t waste one dime on you. I would not waste one fucking phone call on you.” Don’t know how he could have had any beef with me, except that my search for that banana sent me into and out of the store outside of which he was standing. If he was the owner or an employee of that shop he might have noticed that I left empty-handed and was seen minutes later with a banana purchased at a rival establishment a few doors down.
Yeah, that must be what happened. Turf wars and sleeping-with-one-eye-opened, that all starts with the purchase of a banana.
Outside the library was a crowd of semi-rowdy teenagers. It being 12 noon I thought their presence meant that today was a school holiday but it does not seem to be. They were singing and dancing. I saw two younger girls trying to hide from the noisy reveries by sharing a conversation on the surprise of having bumped into each other at this place and time. …
Thinking about change. A 3 or 4 bedroom house in Detroit rents for $500 a month. Dozens, even hundreds of such properties are available. But there would be strings attached, such that rents could be increased with impunity once the still-bankrupt city turns the financial corner.
I could even buy, with a loan out against my 401(k). Dad once clarified to me that the notion that it is easier to rent than to buy is a myth. If you buy and default then the bank can just take back the house and sell it at a markup. So they actually prefer to sell, especially to those with less than stellar credit. Renters are harder to kick out (depending on the locality) and property owners have little practical redress in most circumstances should a renter trash the place. So renters are actually chosen more selectively. There are procedures to follow to reclaim losses such as those I had to clean up after when John moved out of my dad’s old building. But those are not cheap and generally would cost more than it would be worth the time to pursue.
My life feels crowded around by itself. I was out walking last night for maybe 40 minutes. Nowhere to go, no one left to talk to, no desire to sit at a bar or pollute my earthly vessel with the toxins of alcohol. I’ve been feeling the stain of that more and more, the stain of alcohol and what it has done to my body. I don’t know if I’d be alive today without the benzos. I mean, that is the reputation they have, for pulling you back from the brink of the drink. But maybe a sleeping pill would accomplish the same calming of my blood pressure and pounding of my heart. I slept barely at all but I feel surprisingly non-tired because of it. I swear I hear music now, on the nights I do not drink. Music from the interaction of the air filters and the box fan, and the various rustling noises caused by the breezes these objects conspire to stir up. It is a music of the silence, the music that has always been there but inaudible to me through the squall of booze — and its accompanying righteous sleep, lest I forget that it hasn’t been all bad with the booze up until now.
If not change then what? Maybe that is too loaded a question. But if not change then there is more of the same. And what is the same that I look forward to? Not much, really. I don’t need New York any more than I needed corporate after it served its purpose. I stayed at corporate as long as I did for one reason: to get out of debt. I paid off student loans and credit cards and maybe stuck around a little longer than I might have according to my original charter. That ended up being worth the wait, since I got a fat severance package to boot.
I never felt so wealthy as the day I was absolved of all my financial debts. I hate to quote this guy but Donald Trump made comments to that effect when he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. He saw a homeless dude sleeping outside his Trump Tower and said (paraphrasing) “I envy that guy. He has nothing. I have less than nothing.”
I am not sure where I stand on the nothingness plateau. New York has less for me now than when I got here. I said I would play piano in an orchestra concert conducted by a friend but I backed out for lack of desire. Those type of engagements, which were never especially satisfying or even fun, had long ago become a “possibility” or a potential for something to connect to something or someone else. But it never works like that. It’s a dead end engagement that pays what amounts to $7 or $8 an hour. Most of the performances I was involved in were crap.
But it’s not just that. I don’t want to re-create the music of others any more. I want to be the creator. Hah, that sounds a little God-like but I don’t mean it as such.
Houses in Austin, too, are crazy cheap. Almost anywhere seems crazy cheap compared to here, where I suspect my youthful ignorance 15 years ago allowed the angry landlord to jack up my rent by percentage points he should not have been allowed to do. I thought of challenging him on this matter during our last unbelievable phone call which left me shaking and sleepless for nights afterward. But as I don’t have evidence I’m not going to lob speculative accusations about.
I hate to say but the angry landlord and his illegal requests that I move out have me thinking that I could do better in life, at least where the comforts of having a roof over my head are concerned.
I am a free person, after all. I don’t know why I let myself forget that, or why I neglect to take advantage of the opportunities allowed by a disencumbered financial and personal life.
I just have so much crap. Moving would be expensive and laborious, assuming I keep even half my stuff. I could continue digitizing the old music magazines and just dispose of them. I would probably not feel I was losing a part of my soul if I just dumped all my lightly-read poetry and photography books. But the music scores would have to stay, even with my fabulous sheet music tablet that effectively replaces a huge portion of that printed matter. I would probably leave the big beautiful Jasper desk for the angry landlord to deal with, with the $350 price tag still on it. I like that desk but don’t love it enough to force movers to deal with it. The poor guys who moved it in sounded like they were pigs being castrated.
It is all a lot to think about, but what else am I going to do? I’ve known so many people with so few possessions that they can easily move whenever an angry landlord torments them. Do I really need all this stuff? I do not but I guess it’s a bargaining chip of sorts, bargaining against myself about the fact that it would cost thousands to move all that shit, and I don’t have thousands to spend on a move. And forget about selling off stuff. Nothing I have is worth anything, or worth enough to bother with the traditional fire sale. Most of my shit would end up at the Hour Children store.
I remember seeing a guy selling off the contents of his house because, he emphasized over and over, he was moving to Nevada. “Nevada!” he repeatedly added, as if this geographical clarification that distinguished his destination from where we were standing would inspire excitement among potential purchasers of his LP records and his filthy coffee maker.
…
Page 181 today comes from The Last Song, a novel by Nicholas Sparks. The page seems to comprise
sentences from a conversation between a woman and her father. The last three years of their relationship have not been good, it seems, but for some reason dad is being extremely nice to her. She feels that an incident involving a cup of coffee is like something from The Twilight Zone. That’s kind of a cliché analogy (dang, can’t do special characters in this fancy cloud editor).
Well, that brief passage does little to make me want to turn to page 182, not that I commonly go beyond the 181 with this little random-excerpt conceit.
…
So much else to say, yet nothing really to say. I have a desire to go back to St. Joseph’s Mausoleum today, just to sit around in it. Should go soon if that is truly my intention.
…
Reading through Vachel Lindsay’s introduction to his poetry you would think it (his poetry) was the most influential body of writing since the King James Bible.
…
Yesterday’s walk up to the northern AsLIC was interesting. Things got a bit jagged up around 19th Avenue, which is usually dead quiet when I make it up there on the weekends. Lots of cranes swinging about and jackhammers raging.
My goal was to see if any trace of a certain payphone advertising company remained at its former corporate headquarters on 42nd Street between 18th and 19th Avenues. Indeed, while the office space is now fully occupied by another concern I was amused to find they had left a payphone outside, in front of their old HQ. Those guys just closed up shop and skedaddled, not even cleaning up after themselves the non-working payphone left on city property. This would have been among the last fresh payphone installations before the LinkNYC/CityBridg
