Sitting in a space which I think is called Windmill Community Garden, on 29th Street betwixt and between 39th and 40th Avenues. One other person is here, a woman who asked me if I was with some group. I said no, though I did not fully hear her question. I think she asked if I was with a church group. St. Patrick’s Church (not that St. Patrick’s) is nearby. I’ve been to a few services there. That church is kind of a dump, unlike the more famous and better-endowed St. Patrick’s in midtown, across from the 181.

As will happen when typing onto a tablet screen in direct sunlight I can barely see what I am typing. I am sure it is golden, every last word.

Aw, that woman who asked if I was with a group, and who I assumed to be waiting for the arrival of some people, just left. I guess she got stood up.

I was going to stay indoors again today but here I am, basking in the glorious afternoon sunshine ahead of what is said to be a day of rain. Is this going to be a summer of rain?

This is a not-uninteresting spot on which to sit. A Holiday Inn rises to the northeast, a Four Points Hotel to the northwest, and to my immediate left is a small basketball court in back of a school. In front of me is a metal shed adorned with artwork signed by one Sarah Ole. In keeping with the windmill theme the artwork contains some windmill imagery. I do not see an actual physical windmill on these premises, unless the space is so plagued by millions of tiny windmills that I just can’t see them in their abundance.

I remember driving through Nebraska, hung over as hell, when the song “Windmills Of Your Mind” came across the radio. It was the perfect song at the perfect moment, as I was regarding the countless quantity of windmills that mark the pasture of the Cornhusker State. And that day I was headed to some venue which was particularly clustered with windmills. Can’t think of the name now but it was a place where they did concerts and had several dozen particularly artistic windmills installed.

There is a bar a few doors north of here that was originally called The Windmill, but for some reason they were forced to change their name to… I think it’s Dutch Kills Centraal. It is not an interesting place to me but it seems to do alright.

Another particularly perfect soundtrack for that Nebraska trip was Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” which at the time I thought was just about his best album ever. On that trip I also listened to a lot of Sorabji and Aulis Sallinen, I think his 13th Symphony, which will forever be my soundtrack for the barren roads that led to Toadstool Geologic Park. It was suffocatingly hot as hell out there.

I am also near the Flux Factory, which moved here some years ago after Amtrak evicted them from their space over in that no-man’s land between what is now the Food Bazaar and an enormous Korean church. I seem to remember the Flux Factory people had occupied that space illegally.

I got into a somewhat epic Twitter conversation with someone last night, talking about (what else?) payphones. It made me want to travel more, and go payphone hunting nationwide. He made a comment I’ve made to myself many times, that no one ever follows up with people who use payphones that get taken away. He said something about supermarket near him that had 2 very actively used payphones up front, and one day they were just gone, leaving an unknown number of people without a phone. I don’t know this particular store, of course, but I suggested that a lot of businesses regard having a payphone as something of a stigma. It didn’t used to be like that but nowadays, well… He commented that yeah, that’s actually probably exactly what happened. The store asked that they be removed, because the people who used those phones tended to just sit around outside the place, loitering like they do now at the LinkNYC kiosks.

This is one of those days where it is cold as butt sitting in the shade and hot as butt standing in the sun.

As has been my wont of late, I am finding it hard to string together meaningful words. A ramble on the Nebraska trip felt tempting but really it just would serve to remind me how little I’ve actually traveled. For the most part I’m fine with that little void in my life. I don’t really gain much from being in another place, though I am happy to have gone to the places I’ve gone.

It’s getting cold out here. Lots of flies, too. Going for ghetto coffee, I think.

…

It is the next day. Rain day. I was up a little earlier than usual but then went back into the kiss of sleep. I am not honoring the .MOBI thing for now but it’s OK. I’m at home.

Was reminiscing last night and today with someone about the place in Daytona Beach, my dad’s old place which I sold at a break-even price. Dad had said it was worth a half million, and at some point that might have been remotely possible — which is to say, it might have been worth half that. But he had some weird REIT equity against it which sucked up most of its value. He also happened to pass just as the housing bubble blew up. In the end I was happy just to get rid of the fucking thing. I might have even taken a loss on it just to get it out of my way.

We did not know it at the time, of course, but we had a brief a window of time during which we probably could have sold the place at a hefty profit. We knew nothing of the impending housing crash, but more to the point we had in mind to keep one of the apartments in the building reserved for us, as a permanent vacation spot.

But it was such an awful town at the time. Maybe it still is, I wouldn’t know. But even a free place to stay was no incentive to spend any time there.

StreetView has such weirdnesses about it. Images of dad’s old property show a mysterious batch of tree that appears to be hovering in mid air over the sidewalk. That shrub was never there but for some reason every single time StreetView cameras passed (except for 2007) they made it look like it was. And the house in Tampa has a modest sized tree out front which, on StreetView, looks like a sprawling rainforest.

I was up early, sleepless, doing slow vodka shots and washing the dishes. That’s productive use of stranded anxiety. I feel a whirlwind of anxiety and indecision these days. I don’t know what I want to do. It’s been this way for a long time. I have had some fun with the dictation software, which has way more features than I thought and more than I could ever use. But should I upgrade something that I might just be using as a brief fascination? It’s $150 for the newer version (half price discount until September), but the newer version does not sound significantly improved over the current one. And I got such heartburn using the Nuance.com web site to purchase their software. Mind bendingly annoying.

It’s a melancholy kind of day. It is raining outside and it is raining inside. I am filled with rain, which falls silently on my ocean. It disappoints me that my outlook on things is so influenced by the weather. Gloomy weather, gloomy me. Scary weather, scary me. By extension it always troubled me how profoundly influenced my mother was by weather reports and warnings. Ahead of some hurricane I called to see how she was doing, if she had made preparations of any kind. All she could says was she was absolutely terrified. She was having trouble being coherent, saying this was it, this was the end for her. She called later to say she was sorry for all that. It was a disturbing incident, one which said a lot about how she and her generation believed everything that came out of the television. She would in full voice and all honesty repeat the most ludicrous and far-flung stories she heard on TV as if they were gospel. There was something on 60 Minutes about some part of the country that was having problems with its water supply. I think it was California or Oregon. In a panic she e-mailed to tell me not to drink any more water, ever, even though I am nowhere near whichever west coast state was said to be affected by those water problems. She also became enamored with Savannah, the porn star, after seeing a documentary about her. She encouraged me to find Savannah’s porns and see what I thought. Mother could be weird like that.

While thinking of this just now I downloaded Private Lessons from Usenet. That was the semi-scandalous 1981 coming of age film in which a teenage boy gets educated by an older woman on how to have sex. I wonder if it is as racy today as it seemed back then. Mother took me to see that movie, to the blank astonishment of some teachers and other kids I knew. But when we went to see Kramer vs. Kramer there was, if I remember correctly, a scene in which photos of a fully nude woman are seen. Was that Kramer vs. Kramer or something else? Doesn’t matter, whatever movie it was when the naked woman’s crotch appeared my mother reached over and tried to cover my eyes so I would not see the fully nude woman. The scene ended before she could fully cover my eyes, and she backed off. But it was just random of her to pick and choose the subject matter and content of porn that I should or should not see.

She never did mention the magazine (was it Penthouse?) I had stashed under the mattress, and which I assume she found and discarded. In a way, though, I think she was relieved. She had floated indications over the years that she did not want me to turn out gay. I don’t know where this concern came from, maybe from the fact that I attended nothing but all-boys schools and summer camps from the 3rd grade until high school. She made a comment once that sending me to all-boys schools and summer camps was her way of making sure I liked girls, a statement which had some twisted logic behind it yet for whatever reason was instantly unmemorable. Maybe it’s just a generational thing but I think she might have had that lingering concern about my sexuality all the way to the end, at which time I think she died a little happier than she would have, knowing then that I had a steady girlfriend.

We never talked about those things. Women. Porn? Sure. Relationships? Nope. I think the closest we might have come to such topics was when she was in the hospital for her shattered knee. Under the influence of some drugs or other she made some rambling comments about how you cannot get married too late in life, because you don’t know how to share.

Without coming right out and saying it she did express suspicions about dad’s sexuality, and I guess those thoughts had some substance. She described him as talking like a woman, or like an “old maid”, but never said outright that she thought he was gay. She must have known, or at least strongly suspected. Yet she also complained when he divulged certain intimate details about a woman who came over and gave him massages.

I never told her about the gay porn videos I found in his apartment. It’s not going to bother me, because it does not matter. But I sort of wish I had told her.

…

Rain, rain, and rain. I’ve been at the piano some, feeling as if I’ve never touched the instrument in my entire life. There is a particular measure in the 6th French Suite of Bach that always makes my hand feel like a brittle tangle of toothpicks and balsa wood. I just cannot play it with full physical confidence. I feel the weakness every single time I play it, no matter how many times. And my fingerings for the D-Major passage are so bad it’s laughable, proving for sure that unlearning something you learned badly is harder than getting it right the first time.

I remember my college piano professor seeming to take offense when I suggested that Alicia de Larrocha’s recording of this Bach Suite was the closest thing to perfect I had heard up until that time. Why would he take offense? I don’t know, but at the time I thought it might have been a bit of chagrin, which makes no sense given the professor’s personality. He was having hard times those days. His daughter was sick in the hospital and I seem to remember he had to do an unusual number of solo concerts.

Last I heard of him he had moved to Temple Terrace, is a suburb of Tampa, where he had married one of his much younger students.

I think sometimes about the earnestness and interpersonal discomfort of piano teaching, a situation which brings together two people who are essentially strangers and unites them in a form of combat. Most manner of work is a union of strangers. I think of the cast of characters I worked with at Tower Records all those years ago and think, what a strange combination of people. Mostly people with classical music backgrounds but really such a random range of personalities and dispositions. I was one of the ones who really wanted to work, and security guards anxious to close the store for the night frequently suggested I could finish whatever I was doing the next day.

It still impresses me that the therapist I saw for 6 months admitted in what turned out to be our last meeting that she recognized me from the moment I walked through her door. Suddenly she felt like a ghost from the past, as did I. She knew me from Tower Records, where I had worked for about 9 or 10 months.

Another friend made the point that people who work jobs in the city (any city) become recognized for it. You are like a character in a play, you working there at that insurance adjuster’s office where everyone passing by sees your beautiful face.