Things Don’t Go As Planned When You Don’t Plan For Them

As I try to sleep these nights I keep hearing music. Some nights it sounds like Cajun, last night it sounded like REM. But I know the music is not there. It materializes through a confluence of white noise from a Honeywell air filter, mumblings of a box fan, and the rattling of the curtains. It really does sound like music coming from the radio of a next door neighbor, but it is no such thing.

Sleep of late has been a Zen voyage, one in which I try to find a noise outside of me that is louder than what screams inside. The phantom music is so distinct and so clear that the first few times I heard it I got out of bed to see where it was coming from. It vanished.

In the past I have had moments of what they call exploding head syndrome. I thought that name was a joke. But I would hear what sounded like two sticks of wood being slapped together. I would look around to see where that noise came from. It was right here inside this head.

My minute of fame ended none too soon. This time around I knew it was coming, and I could have gotten organized enough to try and make that wave of 50 or 60,000 visitors stick around for a while. But I didn’t want another round of that. I’m okay with how my one little minute went but I never watched it because I think they painted me as someone with whom I do not identify. Nothing bad about it, just would hate to keep all those people around and disappoint them with the fact that have no patience for nostalgia, and that I actually don’t like phone booths. Phone booths, to be clear, not payphones. Booths are stuffy and uncomfortable and from the moment we used to step into them I think the only thing we wanted to do was get out.

I’ve disliked most strands of nostalgia for a long time, considering it to be a form of bitterness which assumes that only the past is golden and that the present and all things to come are garbage for those of unlucky enough to be living through this. I especially disrespect false nostalgia.

But it’s nothing to lose sleep over. I’m just glad it went well and I looked okay. I thought they would use one line that I had prepared. I said I did not like phone booths because stepping into one felt like I was entering a coffin. Especially if the door closed shut behind me. I added that when I die “maybe they should bury me in one of these things.” That got the longest laugh of the roughly 90 minute interview. But they didn’t use it.

In the spirit of responding to all this sudden attention I embarked on a far too lengthy correspondence with someone who rediscovered what he already knew: I used to have an association with the Apology Project, aka Apology Line. This correspondence got me thinking about Apology again, though I have to wonder how far Apology ever really is from my mind. The very name of my Payphone Project website is a shout out to how Apology called itself a project. At the time I chose that name, however, I was not aware that the term “project’ is just a generic term to describe something that is “in progress,” and it is used by artists and those from virtually any discipline That’s obvious to me now but it was not so much 20+ years ago.

Allan referred to Apology as a “project” with a subtle chagrin, implying that he had still not crystallized his inspiration for the endeavor into one single thing with which he could be satisfied.

As for my site I have long considered its name to be pretty stupid, but if Schulz could hate the name “Peanuts” and live with it then I can do the same with The Payphone Project.

There is an anecdote that I’m not sure anyone has ever told about Apology. At least not publicly. In one of my first meetings with Allan he played a tape for me and, rightly or wrongly, I thought I was the only other person who had ever heard it, except maybe for his wife. It was a call from 1981, early in the days of Apology. There had been an article about Apology in the Washington Post. In response to that story a cluster of calls came in from the Washington DC area. I think this is when the “Bernie” call which helped inspire HBO’s movie Apology movie came in. That guy might have sounded dangerous or crazy but to me Allan dismissed Bernie as an actor.

This other call was from somebody who sounded perfectly even-headed, perfectly at peace. He was calling to apologize in advance because he was going to be assassinating Ronald Reagan in the coming days. He expressed bad feelings about it because he thought Reagan was a pretty good president. He said it was just something he had to do. Allan was certain this call was from John Hinckley.

I do not know if mention of that recording is found anywhere online. I can barely find anything on the Internet anymore, not even myself. One way to know if that was really Hinckley who called would be to ask him. He is a free man after all. But I have to ask if the Secret Service or whoever documented the events of that day would be interested in adding that Apology call to their record.

For his part Allan said he never heard the tape until a couple of weeks after the attempted assassination. I don’t remember asking Allan what he would have done had he heard it earlier, in terms of reporting it to authorities.

There was a not-so-subtle undertone of outrage and shock at the news that Hinckley would be free. I was inspired to hear it. We can heal virtually every muscle in the body. Why is it outrageous to think we can heal the mind? It is our strongest muscle, which perhaps makes it the hardest of all to heal.

My connection to the day Ronald Reagan was shot has nothing much to do with that event, except that it served as something of an intrusion. That was the day our father left us. No disrespect to anybody but we didn’t care about the president. That was the day our family died.

I have been putting most of my writing output over on Sorabji.MOBI, a site that I have blocked from all the legitimate search engines and which I’ve made efforts over the years to make sure as few people as possible know it exists. There has been a lot of very personal stuff over on that site, and I wanted to be reasonably sure that the only people who found it were those who were truly interested. I am thinking of coming out of the cold, though, by combining most of the content from that site with everything on this site. My inspiration for this new site has been to not only block it from legitimate search engines (as with .MOBI) but to write a few lines of code to make it so that the searchies do not even know the site exists. I might change my mind about that, but it does have its nihilist appeal.

The name of the new site I think communicates a better representation of who I am. I can’t really use “Sorabji” as a name anymore. I mean I will keep the Sorabji.com website URL for the duration, since this is where so many people know where to find me. But as a primary outlet for my writing and stuff “Sorabji” doesn’t make sense anymore. Maybe it never really did. Then again I was just playing a Sorabji piano piece this afternoon, so hey there is that claim to legitimacy.

I’ve been working on the new site slowly, throwing most of the ideas out. But we will see how it goes. Today was a rain day and I had hoped to get more work done on that, but I’ve been restless and undisciplined such that nothing seems to get done around here anymore.

I face the unusual prospect of moving from this apartment to another one about 40 feet away, across the hall. My landlord says this apartment I am in at present is close to collapse. In particular the bathroom, which he says is about to fall to pieces. He raised the scary yet somehow amusing scenario of the bathtub from the bathroom upstairs falling through the floor, into my bathtub. That would be a hell of a way to go, wouldn’t it? Crushed in the bath by a Millennial’s bathtub.

I guess I believe him about the state of this building, though I’ve had a pretty tangled and at times bewildering relationship with him over the years. This might be our most bewildering interaction of all.

But he came up with an offer that I might not be able to refuse. He is renovating another apartment across the way that some people just moved out of. He says I could have that apartment and transfer my lease over there, keeping the same stabilized rent I pay now. My rent here is not supercheap, but it isn’t bad considering how crazy real estate has gotten around Astoria lately. I get a pretty good deal compared to whatever this place would go for at today’s rates. (It would have been nice at some point over the past years to have had a paying roommate but I guess you can’t have it all.)

I don’t know how common it is to transfer a rent-stabilized lease from one unit to another, but I don’t see why there should be anything wrong with it. A change of pace might do me well, even if it means simply facing the other direction. I would get a Manhattan view, and more windows.

I’ve been in this place for 18 years, and I would like to move on, to find out how the rest of America is doing. I know I don’t want to live in the same place forever, but shoving my stuff into the apartment across the hall isn’t really my idea of moving on. But moving on from New York is something that I should stop being so lazy about. I am a free person after all.