Strange things sometimes happen all at once. Or so it seems. As I was getting ready to leave I realized I could not find my phone. I looked everywhere. Well, obviously not or I would have found it. But scenarios started coming to mind. Had the angry landlord let himself in to steal my phone? Had I gone out on a drunken rampage? I did start thinking that my drunkenness was to blame for this misplaced phone, which had to be somewhere. I drank for the first time in 4 days. Even after just a few days my tolerance really does decrease quite quickly.
But I don’t do that. I don’t go out roaming the streets with a flask of vodka in my butt pocket. To the contrary, that is exactly what I do when I am sober, sans flask. I go for my 11 p.m. Rite Aid runs to check my blood pressure and check in on civilization.
The phone turned up in one of the only places I do not put it, which is in my bed. My bed has about 400 pillows, and even though I did look there I did not find it one the first pass.
But the other weird thing was that my little message board, which is essentially known only to a few people, got a couple of spam postings from Russian IP addresses. That board has not seen any spam get through since I set it up, that might be almost a year ago already. So with that in mind it was unnerving to try to log into my server and find that the root password did not seem to work. That would be a big deal if somehow the root password got reset by someone other than myself, since the web hosting company in Montreal has no access to the box. They must have a procedure for that, probably through credit card verification, but I’m happy to say it doesn’t matter. Without getting too detailed with the boring technical shit I had to ask myself how I have been able to log in all this time. The SSH login script just doesn’t look like it should ever have worked, but it has worked for many many months.
So I found the phone and all was well, I guess, but I do have blame the drunkenness for that. Or maybe not. Shit happens. It was sort of scary to imagine that I’d gotten so loaded that I went outside with my phone and threw it into the East River, and with no memory of such an incident. But that sort of behavior, suffice it to say, just is not in my arsenal.
Now I am walking around, talking these words into the big fat tablet. I’m using it for its camera today, which I don’t do very often. Which is too bad because it’s a good camera. It’s just an awkward device to use for pictures.
I’m almost at Woodside now. En route I paid a visit to the mighty Rogue Payphone. It took my quarters but did not connect the call. Such as the life of a rogue Payphone user. I wonder why this cloud document server speech recognition thing always capitalizes “Payphone”. It’s not exactly a proper noun. Maybe it thinks it is the title of a song?
I was just standing in a thrift shop in Woodside, maybe my favorite one, even though I go there with no intention of actually buying anything and I could count on one hand the number of purchases I have made. But it was a little weird today because the ceiling was leaking, and not just in a couple of spots. It was leaking all throughout the store. So much so that it started to feel like the ceiling was going to collapse. So I left, making a mental note to check the Woodside hyperlocal news web site headlines for word of a thrift shop catastrophe.
The thrift shop had on one of its highest shelves an absolutely enormous Pooh Bear stuffed animal. I am anticipating delivery of a Marvin Martian stuffed animal this week. I had a good chat with the King Pig today. He is very funny when he wants to be.
I just had a couple of misophonia moments. First a traffic cop blew a whistle. It was so fucking loud, and even though I have heard the sound of a whistle in the last 40 years it came through like a horrifying noise from my grade school years. A little later a fucking dog started barking at me. Just as I was speaking those words a big fat pigeon almost flew right into my face. Woodside is dangerous!
Unassociated stream of consciousness brought me to the memory of a gastroenterologist bragging about his speech-to-text software. He was saying that it was designed for medical dictation, and it nailed all the 15-letter complicated medical terms but it was not getting the normal words like “this”, “what”, or “today”. He started doing it, to demonstrate, since we obviously had plenty of time to chat. I did not comment on it but it seemed like he was articulating the medical terms quite rigidly but not really doing the same for the filler words. But I was not ready to critique the guy on his dictation. It did make me think that my sister’s job as a medical transcriptionist could be swallowed by software like this.
Prior to that this stream of consciousness that came before was with regard to a poem I found and posted to my little Message Board last night. I attempted to dictate that poem using Dragon speech recognition but it was a total pain in the ass. Dictation software such as I am using right now would seem to have a long long way to go before it is able to capture the weird wordplay of poetry.
I read a story a while back where one of the big tech companies was hiring poets for just that purpose. They needed wordsmiths who could push speech-to-text software to its limits. Aside from teaching this job sounded to me like just about the only paying job a poet could expect to find. As a poet, that is.
On Barnett Avenue right now. A pretty uninspiring strip of road. I just saw something I don’t think I’ve seen lately: Public display of breasts. A woman was adjusting her shirt, which appeared to be not a very good fit for her body, and they just fell out. She immediately put them back in. She was with two other women. The moment they happened (the breasts) the women all turned and looked at me, as if I was some villain in this little incident. I held up both my hands and smiled, saying “I didn’t see anything.” They did not respond at all except to turn their accusatory stares away from me. I started to wonder if it was some kind of setup, but why would that be? I’ll have to think about that, and those. They were inordinately huge, especially considering she was pretty thin.
Other than BOOBIES the stuff I am seeing on the road beneath me includes dead birds, and gnarly ones at that. Just saw three pair of underpants. This whole sidewalk next to the community garden is still completely covered in snow. There goes a train on the overpass. I guess that’s an Amtrak.
At the corner of 48th Street I confront the decision: which way to go? To the right is that big mall with the Stop & Shop. I think I will persevere ahead, committed to my journey, past the abandoned Paradise pool hall and video arcade. I liked that place. They had pinball machines, although I think they had gotten rid of them by the time they closed.
This piece of road is one of the few places I ever felt a little scared. It was after dark and I would swear that I was hearing people running up from behind me. By scared I don’t mean like I just was when that dog barked or when that dude blew the whistle. It was a fear stirred by portent, of feeling like something bad was going to happen.
I got mugged once years ago. It seemed traumatizing at the time but I don’t think I would freak out about it now like I did then. The fear and perceived anticipation of such an encounter is worse than I imagine an actual confrontation. On the other hand getting mugged today would be a bigger deal than last time, since I carry a lot more gadgets and gear on me now than back then. I guess we all do.
I spent pretty much all of yesterday purging my apartment of John. Haha, I am going to leave that speech-to-text error right where it landed. What I said was JUNK, not John.
A forest fire worth of paper went into the recycling bin. I decided to dump all those hundreds of pages of sheet music that I scanned. No way would I ever pick through those pages to find something that I had scanned badly or neglected to scan.
There is this long row of parking garages here. Single car garages. It always seemed strange to me to find single-story structures in New York, even in Sunnyside. And by the way this is a pretty scary stretch of road to be scared. There are sections where there’s just absolutely nothing around, nobody to see you, only the dogs to find your body.
Apropo to nothing I found myself watching part of a documentary on Dolly Parton yesterday. Her music never appealed to me much but she seems like a genuine person, whatever that means. They spent a bit of time on the subject of her marriage. She and her husband have been married 45 years but they are almost never seen in public together. He is said to only have gone to one of her live performances in all those years, and listened to her music here or there. But basically they were independent people. They loved and respected each other and came home to each other. I cannot decide if I think that is divine or extreme. I mean it obviously works for them so what the hell does of my curiosity about it matter… There has to be more to it than what they said, seeing as they summarized a 45-year marriage in a couple of minutes.
Something else I never knew, or never would have thought to know, is that she is from the same part of Tennessee as my dad.
I am passing by the former site of the Flux Factory. That was a very strange place. A commune and an art space. Artists actually lived there, and slept in bunk beds that looked like something out of a prison or the steerage of a very space-efficient passenger ship. Flux got evicted by Amtrak (a process which took years) and moved to a new place right on my street. As far as I can tell there are no living quarters at their newer space.
Long time ago I saw a car crash on this street, right in front of where I’m standing right now. My instinct was to call 911 because it was a hit and run. But nobody was injured and what business of mine was it?
Oh joy there is a pay phone ahead.
I keep meaning to look into this. One of the things I do when I find a payphone is call a toll-free number. The Payphone owner gets $0.50 per call and it costs me nothing. The fifty cent fee is paid by the owner of the toll-free number. One of the numbers I have dialed was 1-800-BANANAS. I make numbers up from whatever seven letter word or phrase comes off the top of my head. 1-800-BANANAS happens to go to a sex chat line, or at least it did when it used to work. I actually think the owners of that number wised up and started blocking calls from pay phones. Because now if you call that number you get the rapid busy signal. I keep meaning to try that number from Skype to see if it works from non-payphones. It would be hilarious if my little pestering of 1-800 BANANAS caused them to block payphone usage.
But words for the wise, never call a toll-free number from your own phone unless you know you are calling a legitimate entity. If you get a random call from a bill collector or any type of solicitor that asks you to call them back at a toll-free number either don’t do it or do it from a payphone or a VOIP phone like Skype. You cannot hide your Caller ID from a toll-free number. No matter what you do. I mean you could go all ISIS-like with CallerID obfuscation and such but for most normal circumstances when you call a toll-free line your number cannot be blocked from a typical cell phone or landline. If someone calls claiming to be a debt collector and you call them back then it could be interpreted as having established a business relationship, at which point they can call and harass you all they please.
The owner of that toll free number has to pay the $0.50 to the Payphone owner. These days that has got to be nothing but a pain in the ass for both toll-free number owner and payphone owner who receives the payment, considering how few calls come from payphones anymore.
A Joe Frank show last night was both the work of a master and the work of a loon. It also had an unfortunate error, or what I assume to be an error. If there was some point being made then it is lost on me. It’s called Three Shingles and opens with a scene where Joe walks into a bar which is hosting a Halloween costume party. Sitting at the end of the bar is a woman dressed as Jesus. She has the outfit down even to the stigmata on her hands. He asks her something about the costume, and she replies that it is not a costume. She always dresses like this because she really is Jesus. Conversation ensues, some of it witty other of it jejune, but all in all it’s a memorable scene to imagine taking place.
The editing snafu that I assume to be in error came when a good half of the script was repeated, seemingly verbatim, and hopefully it was a straight repeat of the same recording and not Joe Frank actually redelivering the script. That made an already borderline tedious script become positively irritating. But I let it go, thinking there’d be some explanation for this, some sort of artistic reason for the unexplained repetition of things. Maybe there is such an explanation forthcoming. I stopped listening at about the point where the conversation with Lady Jesus ends and Joe goes into a segment in which the title of the show might have been explained.
If the script itself was a little long you could excuse it on account of the music, a sort of Godspell sounding guitar or maybe lute strumming which set the tone of that era perfectly. Well, to me it did. Come to think of it, though, some of the dialogue between him and this Woman Jesus seemed a shade uninformed of what I know to be contemporary New Testament interpretations. I can’t remember the exact turns of phrase but essentially Joe was saying that Jesus was a divine creature, not human like the rest of us. Jesus, in the Gospels, would disagree, responding “I am who am” or something to say that he was a man like any other. Or in this case, a woman like any other. Jesus never said he was the son of God. But then we don’t expect Joe Frank to be good for much more than entertainment. Right? Well, I don’t know.
Oh wow, Jimmy Breslin died. Was I just talking about him recently? I think I was. His post-9/11 columns were for the ages. Well, one of them, at least, with its reference to St. Michael’s. The Times obit is a class piece of work. Love the paragraph about his father.
I always forget that there is a music studio downstairs from this Bakeway. I wonder what goes on down there. I’d heard from a barber that Bono’s drummer does some stuff there. That was years ago.
…
OK, that walking and talking thing sure does produce a lot of text, not all of it notable but then that could be said the same for my typewritten prattle. Now I am at the Bakeway on Broadway, a little later than is my wont but I slept 10 glorious hours last night so I can cope. I intend to go back to purging and/or streamlining. I had a space-saving stroke of genius. I stood the cable box up vertically. Score.
