I wake up these days feeling not like the day is beginning but that it is an end. I have felt myself to be in a steady, inexorable period of my life in which something is ending. But I am not sure what it is. I feel naked, as if anyone with 2 eyes can see me for what I really am, but I myself do not know what that is. I do not know what I am, or maybe I do and I just don’t like it.
There is something about this spot, this table I have to myself here at the Windmill, that makes me feel my conspicuousness, the obviousness of myself. At the same time I feel like I am not really even here. Invisible, save for these two hands I see in front of me, my two feet on the mulchy ground, and the shadowy reflection of my face in the tablet screen. Oh and the words that slowly fill that screen. Those words, barely visible, creep across like insects.
I can already tell I am going to need a panic pill later. I should have taken one last night but a couple of beers put the anxiety away. That’s not the proper approach to dealing with things, but I needed the company of another human. So I went to the bar and made good conversation, mostly about the mentally exhausting prospect of moving across the hall.
The bartender has made this point before but he does not seem to want to let it go. If I’d moved from an east facing place to a west facing one the difference would be profound. It would just be dark as hell. Even though I keep it as dark as can be in the bedroom I do appreciate the natural, sanitizing light that blankets the living room and desk space. That would not be so abundant in 4B. And really, the more I think about it, that apartment is surprisingly not good compared to mine. Just awkwardly laid out and short on storage space.
But, back to the existential reality of things, there is something I cannot quite put a finger on, something that is in an almost perpetual state of ending. But in that ending is a clear and undoubtable beginning. My native awkwardness makes forward movement in life harder than it might be for others. As Bukowski once said, it’s smart people like me who are filled with self doubt while the dumbasses of the world have all the confidence to get ahead.
The fact that I am probably going down to Tampa soon enhances this feeling of beginnings and endings. I will probably stay in the bedroom where I grew up, where I first masturbated and first discovered the magic and endless entertainment of toll-free phone numbers. That last bit might sound strange but I burned a lot of hours in my youth dialing 1-800- followed by whatever 7-letter word or phrase I could think of. I and others got into a shitstorm of trouble in the years to come. It’s not something I think about as much as it might seem for having mentioned it here so many times. But if I do think about it there’s a sense of a horrible vacuum opening up in the years that have passed, a vacuum that could itself have inhaled 25 years of my life. All we had to have done was hack into a bank phone system. Rules for that kind of trespass are vastly different from the non-financial businesses we did break into.
Last night I revisited Flaneur.NYC, which I set up a couple of months ago. I had come to hate the look but I’m OK with it now, just as long as I can get certain little twitches out of the top page’s CSS. I like the tiled design, and there must be better themes of that sort than this, but I don’t want to worry so much about style. Substance, you know. Content used to be king… or did it? I always doubted that given the sea of shit that washes up in the searchies. I guess I’ve become a bit cynical about the state of content on the WWW.
Flaneur.NYC could prove to be another of my epic wastes of time. I should clean up some of the old stuff, which I typed on a tiny screen and offered up with the caveat that it would contain typos. I could barely see what I was typing, and used a bare bones text editor with no spellcheck. I actually liked the “on the fly” vibe this gave things. That was the spirit of .MOBI, being mobile and too much on the move to spend time cleaning up imperfections. So maybe I will not clean that stuff, just leave it as is, with prettier things to come in the form of a cloud document approach that includes 20th century amenities like spell check. Nobody’s going to read that old shit anyway, unless I become famous (or infamous) for something unrelated. At this point I do not know what that unrelated something would be.
I would like for someone to read this stuff and tell me who I am. But who wouldn’t want that?
…
Had a very disturbing dream that took me a while to snap out of after waking up. Someone emailed me a video in which a performer at some sort of circus or rodeo was spraying water onto an animal. The water accidentally sprayed into a kerosene heater, and somehow the kerosene burst out of the heater and covered the performer who’d been spraying the water. Nobody seemed to realize at first that he was burning. Within moments his body went up in a black, sweet-smelling cloud of smoke and flame. It was nasty.
I guess I know the origin of this dream. I read a story from an early 20th century newspaper about a woman who, on account of a cooking accident, was covered with burning alcohol. She freaked out and ran into a phone booth, and shut the door. She was trapped when the door locked, and horrified observers could do nothing but watch her burn. In those days it was impossible to open a phone booth door from the outside, or at least that was the case in this particular incident. She was extracted after the glass on the phone booth doors was shattered but she died later at Mercy Hospital.
What a horrible story. And what a horrible dream to boot.
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At Least You’re Trying
That’s been the verdict from anyone to whom I’ve described my futile attempts to find the company of a woman. Things don’t exactly fall to shit, and I have no problems with any of the people with whom things did not work out. If things don’t work they don’t work, and as grownups we just move on.
But I think I’m going to stop trying. Nobody needs me. I don’t even need me. At present the only possible prospect is a very quirky looking girl who has minor cerebral palsy, so minor that most people don’t even notice it. She’s a total brainiac writer with a mind even more active than mine. Also pretty down to earth, independent, but busy as hell. Always busy. I like that in a woman but this might be a little too busy.
I saw a headline somewhere: Busy Is The New Stupid. I wouldn’t go that far but I do believe in a fundamental philosophy of lack of responsibility — or rather limiting one’s amount of responsibility in life. That is not to be confused with irresponsibility. That’s a different and unsavory character trait that I do not embrace. My belief is that most people take on far more responsibility than they should, and that this accumulation of things to do is rarely a matter of necessity but that of solipsistic aggrandizement. (I borrowed those last two words from “Penny Dreadful”.)
…
Ah, so I think I finally solved the matter of some postings here being intercepted and tagged as spam in the title. Almost everything I post to .MOBI comes through via e-mail. Since setting up the new web server in December it seems the SpamAsssassin setup is a little more strict about things, especially dirty words and, for whatever reason, e-mails which are quite lengthy. I was motivated to solve this problem not just on account of the .MOBI annoyance of having my own postings flagged as spam. I also wanted to be sure mail from others did not get rejected, as happened a few nights ago. A lengthy e-mail from a longtime friend was rejected and, in a somewhat humorous affair, she got around the spam software by REDACTING words like “fuck” and “sex”. To avoid that irritation I finally figured out where the whitelist option is, even though I found it in a place where I swear I had already looked for it more than once. I thought it would be at the root level of cPanel but it was on that of the individual sorabji.com domain. Duh. And even if it goes against my instincts I am trying to do as much server-side stuff as possible through cPanel without futzing with config files on the box. cPanel has a somewhat rude way of taking over those files, as it did with my crontab.
So here’s hoping the spam in the title bug is gone for good.
And in other server detail I found that one of my .htaccess files had something like 2000 lines of 301 redirects that I forgot I put there. I meant to leave them there just for a while as a brute force way of telling the searchies that a bunch of 404 Not Found pages were gone. In which case, why did I use 301 redirects and not 410, the http status code for “GONE”? I don’t know. I always assumed that monster-sized .htaccess files can slow a site down but I don’t see any evidence of that here. Did not do any benchmarks, though.
If I ever hosted a radio show that talked at all about web technology and such I would intermix the time of day with jokes about the minute’s http status code. “It’s 4:10pm. Just like that, the moment is gone… I cannot find what time it is, so that must mean it is 4:04pm… “It’s 2:06, but this moment is only partially extant… “ And when the 5:00 hour struck the show would spend a minute just blasting some kind of noise, signaling an internal server error.
I guess the show would have to air from 1:00-5:11, since http status codes start at 100 and end at 511: “Network Authentication Required”. I don’t even know what that last one means.
In earlier Facebook days it was a common thing for people to post results of quizzes they took, quizzes which purported to be able to tell you what kind of ___ you are. What kind of tree are you? What famous movie star are you closest in character to? What kind of fresh fruit are you? It got annoying, these quiz results being posted by everyone I knew, and not always making a lot of sense in terms of the results.
I wanted to do “What is your HTTP status code?” Mine would have been “500 Internal Server Error.” Hah.
