I am trying something a little different tonight. I did not make it far outside today. For no bad reason, except that the angry landlord was out across the hall, clearing out the apartment of someone who I guess just moved out. Or maybe they died after the angry landlord butchered him. I think those guys had lived here almost as long as I have. A gay Asian male couple, if I remember right, though I cannot remember the last time I saw either one of them. I don’t think I ever spoke anything of any substance to them but one of them always gave me kind of chagrined looks when he saw me in the hall. I got the impression he wanted to say something about the piano music he hears coming out of here, but I might be getting that assumption from the things some other people in this building say to me about that.
I did not leave the building much because the angry landlord was around and I do not like crossing paths with him. This might sound pathetic but angry people really need to understand how their words hurt.
What made today kind of sad for me and poignantly depressing was that when I heard the activity out in the hallway, the activity of the angry landlord and I don’t know who else moving stuff out of that apartment, I felt motivated to work. I was more inspired than I have been in a long time. It was the activity. Even though it was unrelated to anything I was doing it made me feel like I should be busy, just like they were. I remembered how much I liked being in a position where I could work while other people around me had their own little things going on. Everybody keeps busy. I guess the CNN newsroom was the ultimate in that, but that’s a high-minded way of saying that the place was a fucking grind.
But I remembered one particular day in college when I had something to do, some paper to write, or maybe it was something to do with the radio station. Whatever it was I was most inspired to do it because the apartment on Main Street was full of a bunch of people who were either working on things themselves or just hanging out. It felt like family. Nobody minded that I was working hard and not paying attention to them. Nobody had to give each other attention. There was no pressure to interact in any deep or attention-fulfilling ways. It was all very secure. That was when I felt I worked the best, whenever I find myself in those situations. Not in solitary like I am now. All the time I was working I was free to step out once in a while and make some amusing comment to everybody else in the apartment. They might do the same while they took breaks from whatever they were working on. But the rule was we didn’t interrupt each other for more than a few seconds. We could interrupt longer than that of it was actually important to what we were doing. For the most part though these little chit chat conversations occurred in the living room, sitting on the couch or the other seats.
What made me sad in remembering all this is that I don’t have that anymore. I try to fake it by going to the library or the ghetto coffee shop or wherever, but really I’m completely on my own in those places. Nobody cares what I’m doing, though I for one do find myself curious what others are up to. Maybe somebody will return that interest. It would be awesome to feel like I was part of that kind of a team again, where I could work again.
So the new thing I am doing tonight is dictating this posting. Wait, what am I saying? I have done this before, just not here at the desktop. I’ve used the Android speech to text and it’s not bad, but this seems to be quite a bit stronger. I am considering upgrading this dictation software because the newer version has the deep learning stuff that is supposed to make it get better with more usage. But you know I thought that this software had that ability all along.
I am getting ready to go to the chapel (not right this moment of course, it is after 10 PM after all) but now I find I have so many stories to tell that I need to just get a handful of them together, because each one can take a long time to record even if the story is quite short.
That is, tangentially, something I happened to notice mention of recently, mention of how many hours can go into recording a short audio piece. People who do audiobooks and record stories for audible.com and that sort of thing, they only get paid per finished hour, and the rates are not terribly high. So they might spend seven or eight hours recording a two hour piece and get paid 70 or 80 bucks. But then again most people I’ve seen who comment on this say they are happy doing it and are not in it for the money.
I am trying for a second night without booze. Ha ha, give myself some credit, I guess it’s a third night. It looks like I will make it. I was afraid I was having some kind of heart attack the other night, but I looked up symptoms and stuff and did not find anything related that really matched what was going on. My chest was tight, my eyes were watering, my skin looked kinda yellow in the face (might have just been tired), and I guess my hands were probably shaking. Who knows what else was going on… Maybe my liver was yelling at me. The panic pill worked but it took a little longer than usual, and I took another ½ of a pill later. I kept going outside to walk around. I must have come and gone through the front door of this building a dozen times. I guess if I was in really bad shape I would have had trouble with all that walking around, with all the snow on the ground. But I never came close to slipping and falling.
It was a strange night of sleep. I have almost come to embrace the routine of getting through a night’s sleep without booze. It is like a little adventure.
I just went out walking again. I checked in at the payphone on 21st St. outside the Dunkin’ Donuts. I called something in to post here but have not downloaded it yet.
It’s amazing how much the anxiety gets me. It squeezes me inside. People in my family never really had heart attacks. My grandmother did but she was obese, over 300 pounds, and entirely unhealthy. I don’t know anyone else who had heart attacks on either side of family, but I am somewhat willfully ignorant of such things. A genealogical sociopath. As I’ve said in other contexts many deaths among my forebears were known to be suicides or else occurred under suspicious circumstances, especially on my dad’s side.
My father once recorded the family tree. He made a big deal about it, hyping it up to us for weeks. He had a prepared document from which he read. I should find the recording. He started out sounding fairly high-minded about it but the more he spoke and commented on his forebears and the circumstances of their deaths the more sorrowful and depressed he became. Pretty much everyone on his side was a suicide or what today we would call drunk driving. Or alcohol poison. Those guys drank full bottles of hooch every fucking day. Coming from that background my dad once told me that he had seen my drinking and that I didn’t have anything to worry about. His exact words were “you don’t let alcohol rule your life.” He hasn’t seen me lately, of course. I had never heard that expression before. People from his side of the family, East Tennessee, a lot of them let alcohol rule their lives, and that’s what got them. But a lot of them never drank at all, and they of course became immortal.
My mother often complained about how our father was taking over the role of the patriarch of the family tree when he had been so absent for so long. When they were still living together he never once mentioned any of his relatives except for his most direct, meaning his parents and grandparents. But later in life he came into contact with all kinds of second and third cousins twice removed, prompting my mother to ask out loud what that was all about. She kept saying it was some kind of classic behavior, compensating for all those years of absence. But she never fully explained it. I was waiting for her to define what this so-called classic behavior was. Did it have a name? Was it a syndrome? She was well-educated enough that she might know these kind of specifics. But she never pinpointed it.
I still have that printed family tree that my dad read off of. I think it was expanded after his reading by one of his distant cousins. I have never looked at it. My disinterest in all that seems strange since I spend so much time in cemeteries, or at least I used to. People used to pay me to come out there in my role as a Forensic Genealogist, which is nothing more than a highfalutin term for Cemetery Photographer. I would come out there and get pictures of tombstones for people who contacted me, usually from far away. More times than not they would tell me that there was information on that tombstone that they had no idea was out there. Which made it something of a satisfying livelihood.
But for all that I’ve had no active interest in my own family tree, or my own genealogy. This is not true out of any bad attitude about family, or that I am trying to put forward or statement about what I think of my forebears. I just honestly don’t care. I am a genealogical sociopath.
Note to self, definitely get that family tree recording out, could make good material. It is probably not as morbid as I seem to remember, but it would be interesting to hear again. At the time my sister and I were a little buzzed on Bid Lites. So when dad started reading I don’t think we were in the appropriate mode or exuding the suitable decorum for the anticipated grandeur of the moment. But I don’t think he cared about our behavior. We settled down.
Dad’s reading of the family tree was something that did not strike me for its morbidity until I listened to the tape later. Dad was clearly speaking for the record. But after a while he just gave up. I interpreted it as giving up because he found the discussion to be more depressing than he expected. But maybe it’s because my sister and I were just laughing all the time.
I wonder what record he thought he was speaking into?
Might go out for another walk. It’s a quarter till 11. But that means putting on my pants again. That’s bullshit.
Hah, speech-to-text has certainly been a rapid way to generate a shit ton of text… Yeesh.
