I thought I would have come back down to earth by now. The anxiety is less but it still sears. Strange to think that thousands of people all over the world have entered me into their conversations over the past couple of days. Reminds me of my thoughts on people like Paul Newman who had to live knowing his visage and his work and his very existence were being discussed and looked at on a virtually continuous basis everywhere in the world, if not beyond. I am of course not comparing my one minute of face time to real or meaningful celebrity. But it makes me wonder if I could ever get used to it should I somehow become a household name. It seems to take a special type of mental constitution to live at peace with that.
There is a stretch of 37th Street that feels like death to me, especially on rainy days like this, and on weekends. It is so quiet, and something about the gathering gloom of the aural terrain feels like the echo of someone or something that had died there. New York is a lot quieter than I think most people realize, or would think. That silence is a heavy syrup.
There is, of course, a payphone connection. That stretch of road happens to house Telebeam, which was until recently the last independent payphone service provider in New York, with a heritage dating all the way back to 1984 when the FCC allowed anyone to get in on the business. They are out of payphones now, having finally given up to the CityBridge monopoly. And so I thought that would be the end of that until a friend from the business told me they were actually a pretty diversified company that HANDLED BUSINESS PHONES FOR A BUNCH OF COMPANIES. i DON’T THINK THAT FACTOID IS MENTIONED ANywhere on their web site. Sorry, folks, not going back to fix that all caps incident, I can barely see the keyboard here at this dark bar.
So that is what drew me to that stretch of 37th Street in the first place. But with time it has come to look like a strange sort of dessert, ladled with syrupy portent. I go there often.
Talking with a new acquaintance about the Apology Project, a subject on which I just sent a too-lengthy email. Something I don’t think has ever been publicized about Apology was the call from the person who by any reasonably unskeptical estimate was John Hinckley, calling to apologize in advance for killing Ronald Reagan. I only heard that call once but I remember it being level-headed, not ranting insane as would characterize most loons who say they’re going to do something like that. He said he felt bad about it because he thought Reagan was a good president, but that this was just something he had to do. I sometimes wonder if the Secret Service even today would want to add this anecdote to their record.
Hinckley is free today, proving what? I do not know. There seemed to be collective astonishment about this news, to which I ask: Why should it be impossible to heal the mind? A skin fungus almost swallowed my arm some years ago, but thanks to some magical cream there is absolutely no trace of that eruption today. With that reality why would the muscle of the mind be incapable of fully healing? I guess to some people the brain is a more mysterious muscle than most.
My connection to that assassination attempt is that it happened on the day our father left us. We didn’t care about Ronald Reagan on that day, no disrespect. In some ways the repeated replay of the footage from that moment seemed comical to us. What the hell did it matter now that our family was dead?
I just hope you are all Republicans. Wait, what? No no: Facts are stupid things.
Going home.
