I started writing this at almost 7:00 PM on Thursday, at which time I still did not know what I wanted to do with what was left of that precious gift of a day. Today I was up way earlier than usual, realizing during last night’s boozeless and pill-less sleeplessness that I really needed to do my taxes. Taxes are easy for one whose finances are as simple as mine, but I take them seriously anyway, going line by line over and over to get things right. I send them to an accountant in Arizona. We have never met but we feel like we’ve been best friends forever, except at those times when I cannot tell whether or not he takes me and my decade-plus of business for granted.

I’ve been sending lengthy email correspondences to an old friend. It’s been good to hear from her, though she tends to duck and weave in and out of or e-mail exchanges, being silent for months then chatty as hell for a few weeks.

She has me thinking about matters I thought I had put away, put to rest. I find myself thinking about them again.

There were some words that she said to me, the woman who was half of my last big relationship (I was the other half, just to clarify). We broke up about a year and a half ago, maybe longer. I lost track of the months and the years a long time ago. After we had been apart about six months I contacted her to see if we could still be friends, and bury the hatchet. We could not, unfortunately. Which made me sad and depressed but not surprised. I felt genuinely happy to have her back in my life as somebody to talk to but it did not last long and I guess I should not have expected it to.

In the failed email correspondence that followed I tried to bring back the good memories. There were plenty of those, all kinds of little things that we had. In response to my listing of some of what I thought were the good memories she commented that she missed a lot of those things about “our life together”. It was those words: “our life together” that have haunted me. So plain and yet so deep. We did have that, didn’t we? A life together, filled with dynamics and quirks that cannot be summoned through any other means than two people being together for years.

We had something very real and at times very good. But I never changed my mind that ending it was the best thing for both of us. She wanted more than I had to give, and my heart felt murdered. But ending it was so hard to do. Now I feel like mysteries still linger in the details of Our Life Together, even though I thought I had put all that away.

Today and yesterday those words came back into my mind and I cannot get them out. I guess it’s loneliness. Loneliness has me circling the abyss of online dating sites and chasing after barfly strippers and damaged hearts that I know would be bad for me.

I think I said before in this space that if I have to spend the rest of my life alone I am not going to be happy about it. That feels more and more true as each day passes. I’m a decent guy who deserves a decent relationship, one of mutual respect, admiration and pride.

Pride of the braggards

I was talking to a bartender a few weeks ago when he started talking about his current girlfriend and how she’s doing some high profile acting stuff over at Lincoln Center. I didn’t say anything to him (except that it all sounded pretty cool) but it made me feel happy to hear this guy just bragging about his girlfriend and all the things she does and how cool he thought it all was. It was not unlike hearing parents brag about their children except that they are pretty much expected to do that. This dude bragging about his girlfriend seemed more genuine to me.

It reminded me of the night someone stood up in a bar and pointed at me and yelled “You are in love with her!” He was kind of an annoying twad being a little bit drunk at all. But, you know, he was right. In that moment and in those days I was all into that girl I was with. She was doing stuff. She had a new job and other things going on. I think she got fired from that new job later that week but it didn’t matter. She was making me proud, and that made me happy.

O, the braggards are the lucky ones.

…

I started dictating a new piece for the other web site, but it was getting me down. I was talking about how I let myself down so much, but even that little monologue intending to express the futility of my futilities was letting me down. All my ideas for combining .MOBI with other sites and mountains of unpublished content seem to dry up as soon as I sit at the desk. I could blame the posture and the awkwardness of the desk itself. But really, it’s me. Last night I was marveling at how unsatisfying it felt to type words into that cheap-feeling plastic backlit keyboard that made an outsized impression on the interviewer from the Huffington Post. She thought it was positively delightful, and even important. Did I ever read that HuffPo piece? I probably did.

Sleep last night was like repeated attempts at meditation, interrupted by the hypnic jerks that had plagued me in my earlier attempts at unaided sleep. They were far fewer and farther between last night, and I wonder if my recent purchase of a couple of those fancy MyPillow.com things has anything to do with it. Or maybe I just was not so swilled up on caffeine.

Idea of late is to make a trimmed down, static version of my first web site, The Place of General Happiness, and copy it to blank CDs. I would distribute the discs to thrift shops and other such places, just to get that stuff out there. I even bought circular stickers for labeling of CDs and DVDs.

I fear, though, that if I start reading that old stuff again it might inspire me to rewrite and attempt to get some of it published. I’ve kept that idea in mind for a long time. Except that I don’t really care about being published. Maybe I should. I tried it briefly with a certain New York stories web site. But it was a dead end. I sent 3 or 4 stories. The first of them were published via the magic of copy and paste. The last one I sent was ignored. I guess it was naïve of me to expect but I was hoping for some kind of writer/editor relationship with the owner of that site. As a friend of mine who had a book published a few years back commented when I related this to him, that kind of thing just does not happen in the writing world anymore.

I wrote to my site sponsorship comrades with an invoice, and the news that I had been on CBS, as promised them months ago when we did the filming at the NYPL. I could have placed ads all over the place and made a lot more money off that firehose of web traffic from CBS. But I did not want to look like an opportunistic asshole, and I also did not want the robots at AdSense to see that spike in traffic and mobilize their automated resources to kick me out of the program… not that I give AdSense much attention these days.

I intend to write a further e-mail to the sponsorship guys next week, asking if they (or he, there’s really only person behind this) still has access to materials about the payphone industry during the 1980s. That stuff is out there but it’s pretty dispersed, and much of what I can find is AP or UPI or other national wires, not the more local sources I’d be more interested in. And the trade journals are nowhere to be found on the public Internet.

The truth about my so-called book project is that I change my mind daily about whether I want to even do it at all. Friends I know who’ve published books all say it was a waste of their time. But more importantly I have found that the people who are or were actually involved in the payphone business during the 1980s and 1990s either think I am a perfectly decent guy who they’d be happy to talk to, or they think I am some kind of deathly phreaker anarchist who wished death upon the payphone business back in the day. I may be neither of those two things but I know for certain I am not the latter.

The most influential people from those days want nothing to do with me, which makes me both sad and a little proud. I’ve heard that it is not the friends you make in life but the enemies who define you.