To the exclusion of all things… Don’t know why I said that but it sounded important, and I feel like feeling important.
I had a moment of clarity. I heard the grinding, hissing sound of my own voice, begging for mercy, begging to be delivered from a life that depends so centrally on computers and the Internet. And I was actually feeling pretty good about all this for the first time in a while. I got some good coding in yesterday, to a point where it almost felt like I knew what I was doing. And as I was about the rebuild one of my epic web sites with hundreds upon thousands of pages I was rewarded for my efforts with an inexplicable grinding to a halt of everything on the computer. I did nothing weird or stupid to make this happen. Did not have 40 programs open, was not transcoding DVDs in the background. Just nothing. After a full half hour of trying to shut down properly I just said fuck it, and shut the power off.
By the time I got to that point I was saying, right out loud: “I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE.”
I’ve had that in the back of my mind for a long time but, really, what else am I going to do? I actually would probably like to be a trash collector. That’s not a joke. I mean, why would it be? It’s an honest living doing something of value to society. But I think I would enjoy seeing the unusual and unique things that appear in the trash. Or I could be a security guard, except that I have philosophical objections to what that profession has become since 9/11. And it looks like a job where one sits around doing nothing 99% of the time… which is not far off what I’ve been doing for the last year anyway so hey, why not get paid for it?
I am back at the Windmill Garden, which today is populated by a shirtless old man lying on a bench, sunning himself. Also present are 3 women smoking cigarettes, down from maybe 7 or 8 people who were here minutes ago. It’s a beautiful day so I expected there to be humans out here. I slept until 1. I tend to sleep long hours after a day spent exercising my body’s biggest muscle, the brain. Yesterday saw the most coding I have done in a long time, which is not to say it was an epic expanse of time. Or maybe it was. Probably 4 or 5 hours solid, no real breaks. For me that’s epic.
Thinking I could march down here to the Windmill Garden and say something meaningful, something to edify and positively embellish the world. My wit last night was especially sharp, if the guffaws and chortles of laughter coming from the company I kept was any indication. Someone who saw the CBS spot, but who I had not seen since it aired, said he watched and was positively impressed. I still have not watched it. But last night I did watch some footage from another piece I contributed to, this with a documentary film maker from Philadelphia. We filmed that around the same time I did the CBS spot, using one of my favorite payphones as a backdrop. I think that was in December. I looked a little weird but then I usually feel that way about myself on screen.
I think people who do face-first interviews should really film from forehead level, not from below the chin. That’s derived from my rule about bar photography, which is you always hold the camera up at forehead level. It actually encourages the red eye reduction thing to work better, but it also prevents people’s neck flab from being exaggerated. That’s why celebrities’ tell them that if they ever get arrested and they take your mugshot then try to look down. You will probably never look radiant in a mugshot but by looking down you can at least keep your unsightly neck flab from being a laughing stock, or an image ruiner.
That documentary is going to be… different. She said she showed her rough footage to some friends and colleagues and they all said the same thing, that they wanted to see more of me. It uses payphones as a springboard for existential observations and insights into reality and one’s self. I have to watch it again to see what she used of my comments, but when we were filming I remember welling up when she asked if I had learned anything about myself recently, “recently” being a perhaps intentionally open-ended interrogatory. Sometimes the things you learn about yourself don’t crystallize until years after the events which led to your eureka moment. In this case, though, I think my clarity was very much in the moment.
I responded that I learned, once again, that I am vulnerable to abusive relationships. At the time I was full-bore ambitiously thinking that L. and I had a future, but in the course of this interview I started to hear myself screaming inside that this was a bad, bad idea. If we do follow up interviews (and it looks like we will) I might try and add details of my masochistic pursuit of L., who incidentally reentered my life a few weeks ago. By the end of that night I honestly felt like she wanted to murder me. For several days I had an unsettling, cold feeling of the seeming inevitability that that might have come to pass if I did not get the hell out of that room we were in. A portent of death hung over everything I did. She has such a damaged heart that I know (and knew from the get go) would be no good for me, nor would I be good for her. Hers is not the only skirt I’ve been chasing but she has made the most impact on my heart.
Things did not go very far that night a few weeks ago. After the way things fizzled out last time, and after I reached more of a point of clarity on just what a huge mistake getting involved with her would be, well after all that I was not ready to take her very seriously. Now I am decided that I am not ready to take her seriously at all. It’s amazing how wrong you can be about someone while recognizing in the end that all the warning signs were there. I just chose to ignore those warning signs under the misguided logic that being with anybody had to be better than spending the rest of my life alone. But then maybe I should spend the duration on my own. I should sit here at the Windmill Garden for the rest of my life, listening to Spotify, watching the pretty girls smoke cigarettes and the shirtless old dudes sun themselves until I become one of them.
Speaking of smoking cigarettes I was once looking for videos which contained phone booths. I found one video of a woman standing in a phone booth, smoking a cigarette. That was all. 20 minutes or so of a woman smoking a cigarette in a phone booth. She was not wearing any shoes but other than that she was just standing there, not especially provocative.
It was after I found the comments on this video that I figured it out. Some dudes have a fetish for watching women smoke cigarettes. I guess I can understand, up to a point, that anything involving the mouth could turn someone on. It doesn’t do anything for me. Nice phone booth, though.
Which reminds me of a horrible yet can’t-help-but-laugh comment I found on a YouTube video. The video was made by someone demonstrating how to print directly onto CDs or DVDs using a home printer. The person who did this demo was black. I watched some of the video, which was perfectly innocuous, then looked down to the comments. 5 years after this guy posted the video there was one comment: “Fucking Nigger.” At first it made me wince but after a second all I could do was laugh at how wrong and coarse that comment was.
Which gets back to my earlier point about laughter versus happiness. You don’t laugh at things that make you happy. You laugh at things that make you nervous, uneasy, or even angry. I said this to a comedian friend once. At first he disagreed, but then realized that the day before he had gone to the T-Mobile store to get a new phone. He had assumed, reasonably enough, that transferring contacts and text messages and all that would be a breeze. When they told him no, we actually can’t do that with your particular phone, well all he could do was laugh. This was not a laughter of happiness but of disgust and unease. I think laughter has been equated with happiness because it hijacks a gesture that does express happiness: the smile.
I need a sammich.
Tax refund will be decent, but I need more. Having cashed out all of an IRA (and having no real compunctions about it) I might have another windfall coming. I thought sure I did but now I’m not so sure. Oh who cares.
I should go back home and resume the coding detail, assuming the computer will even start.
All these woman at this space smoke, and they cough like it. I might wait around here long enough to hear the churchbells go off, although come to think of it it seems like I should have heard them earlier.
I feel like me. This is me. This is all there is, and it isn’t much, but it is real.
