Damn, I’ve at times been unable to see the screen on which the words I am typing appear. Today it’s like I’m looking at a mirror and not a tablet screen. Well, typos away…

Made a rather sour discovery. Almost anybody who has landed on one of my web sites since December or January has been sent directly to a very rude 404 File NFt found error. Watching the access_log I felt a small amount of throwup in realizing how bad that was. I seem to have fixed things up but who knows what other annoyances await.

Cleaning up stuff like this seems like a fine use of my endless quantities of spare time. I discovered this week that I still get pretty boss quantities of traffic to my sites. Thousands of hits a day, and that’s nothing to do with the CBS spot, which sent mad traffic for a few days, and which so far has sent small spikes of traffic on the Sundays since it first aired. I guess people go to the web site on Sundays and catch up on the shows they missed. I wonder if they broadcast any of that segment on the radio… I have heard CBSSM spots on the radio. Still have not watched it…

Trying to get shit together for other parts of the site. For whatever reason the photos section shows up far more actively in the searchies than the blog stuff, even though the photos have in some cases not been updated in 15 years.

I opened the crontab for the first time in a couple of months. It was differently formatted, which was a bit of a surprise. Some entity (probably cPanel) added a bunch of line breaks and bash environmental variables before each command. That was quite weird to see. At first seemed like some human had stepped in and added a bunch of who-knows-what commands to the cron. It also made me remember, once again, that I have no idea where the actual crontab file sits on the file system. If I did I would have checked the timestamp for last edit. But I didn’t think of that before making edits myself. Not important, since the changes seem to have merit and the culprit here has to be cPanel.

I added two new lines to the cron, spitting out payphone RSS feeds for use as txt includes in Piwigo and everywhere else. Now to finally grasp the workings of Piwigo, which has remained to me an elusive and even puzzling suite. But, as it is suddenly the most popular part of the site, I guess I’ll do what I have to do. I really could have monetized the site a lot better ahead of the CBSSM thing but it just felt cheesy, and I was too goddam nervous about the spot to think code. I remember feeling on fire inside, a steady albeit dim panic.

Welcome to my world.

At the Windmill again, thinking there would be people out on this weekend afternoon but no, it’s all mine.

I’ve been lightly pondering an incident that happened a few days ago. It was the second such encounter with a particular cashier at a grocery store. Months ago, in what seemed like a mistake, she charged me for everything I had presented except for the beers. A few months later it happened again. She had the same blank, nonplussed expression on her face as I only ever so slightly searched her face for a clue as to whether she did this on purpose. I wasn’t going to complain or point out the error. Not my fault. But I wonder if she has some moral issues with the store making money from selling alcohol. Maybe she does this as often as she can without making it too obvious. Or maybe she’s trying to trap customers in some way. I doubt the latter, since I would have likely had some encounter with store personnel already.

She looks like she could be Muslim… and there you go, I just looked up her name and it is indeed a common Muslim name. Well, I’ll look for her at the register next time I buy Resins. Hah. I would think that if she really is doing this on purpose that she doesn’t try when someone is buying just the beers. But who knows…

Long time ago there was allegedly a cashier at an upper west side Walgreen’s who routinely gave out an extra $20 bill in change. That can’t really be true, can it? It was Joe B. who swore to his gods that it was true.

Joe was a Tower Records  colleague… hah, “colleague” sounds so important. Oh but jeez I remember a time I heard that word in an argument and it just made me want to cry. Back to that in a minute.

Joe  was a good guy. A drunk, unlike me in those days, but a fun guy to be around. Bald on the top of his head but with a pony tale. As others would ask in those days: “Who does that?”

Ah, let’s forget about Joe for now.

The time “colleague” surfaced as a painful sounding word to me was around this same time, the early 1990s. I was walking on Amsterdam Avenue. A man and woman, probably in their 20s, were screaming at each other. The matter seemed to be that she had just humiliated him in front of a bunch of people. He said “You said all those things about me in front of my… colleagues.” He sounded like he wanted to cry. He also sounded like he had never yelled at anybody before. She, on the other hand, took his comments like they were some kind of bait. I could tell from her stuttering and from her body language that she knew she had done something wrong. Her anger increased in what I perceived to be direct proportion to her realizing that she had, indeed, said something to his colleagues that made him look like an asshole, or stupid, or like something that obviously did not work for him.

His use of the word “colleagues” and the way he paused a moment before using it, revealed that he formerly had some pride in having established good rapport with a professional circle of people among which he could build his own career. It really mattered to him, these relationships he was building. “I’ve worked so hard,” he said.

This was not like she had said what she said in front of friends or family, who would likely be forgiving of whatever embarrassing thing she said. She had apparently said something that could have jeopardized his career.

She, again, would not allow that he was right, instead going after some lame excuse that I can’t remember. To her I think winning the argument was more important than the possibility of losing him. In that insecurity of being wrong — and knowing it — her anger increased. She, too, sounded unskilled in yelling at someone. Her delivery of whatever mean words she lobbed at him sounded feeble, and the volume of her voice only made that weakness more apparent. The sound of her voice had devolved into a soupy, aural version of utterly unreadable cursive. I did not forget what she said so much as I could not understand her through the guttural, throaty confusion of her voice struggling to deliver arguments she knew had no merit and trying without luck to make him look like the asshole in this situation.

But then who knows, maybe she was right. It could be the dude’s career deserved to be sabotaged.

He stomped away from her, appearing to expect that she would not follow. But she stayed behind him, waving her arm, screaming, jumping up and down. He tried to push her away. That’s how I remember them, disappearing into the night up Amsterdam Avenue, dancing to the movements of a majorly dysfunctional choreography.