That last story, started yesterday and finished today, had me feeling like my arms were coming off. All felt heavy. Not emotionally or spiritually heavy. Just heavy lifting of getting down words I’ve already put down, though maybe not in public. Too much stuff I put out. Going to repackage it and maybe take the dates off some of it, for the Flaneur.NYC project. That’s a shit ton of work, which does not intimidate me as far as simply being work. But the potential waste of time it could amount to is enough to give one pause. Or paws. Can’t type with paws.
Setting up a new site search engine today I used the old Sorabji.com message boards as a test. The pages themselves are not specifically SEO ready, meaning the search results for that content on this open source search suite look kind of jagged. Those pages came into being when getting picked up by searchies was relatively easy. These days I cannot even be bothered to try meeting the demands of the searchies. Too many sharks in the water.
But those old boards, there was a lot of grist and grizzle in there — content-wise, that is. I did not spot it just now but I remember some years ago sitting at a bar when, purely by chance, I landed on reading the 9/11 discussion as it happened that day. It was terrifying. But enough about drama there was just so much discussion about all sorts of things that I either never noticed or never knew happened. Apparently people were playing Scrabble with my sister? I think that was actually my mother. My sister did play with me and my mother but not much and not for long. My mother probably read those boards more than she let on. I know she read them all the time in their earliest days, but may have tired of them for a while.
Looks like I’ll go down to Tampa May 7-12, pending checking with Tom that he’ll be able to fix my shitter that week. I’m basically giving him the whole week, which is an extra couple of days over the 2 or 3 days he said he’d need. Flight is cheap, too. $246 round trip. Is that even possible? That’s what the app says but I haven’t booked a flight in a while so I am probably forgetting all the gotcha fees.
Tampa will be hot. I should be able to use one of the cars here or there. No Car2Go down there, though that stuff gets pretty expensive if you’re not careful. I just want to go payphone hunting at my old stomping ground. I remember the red phone booth outside the Shell Station on Bearss Avenue. That went away long ago. And the phones at my high school (there were two) are certainly gone by now. They will still be phones at the airport. But where else? The shopping malls, I guess. Tampa has changed a lot.
Oh, that reminds me, a girl who was one totally hot for me moved from NYC to Tampa. She’s married now but we’re still friendly. I thought I might be going down there a few years ago and she said she and her hubby would love to meet up. I think she is in Ybor City, which I seem to remember as being kind of a scary area back in my day. Today’s it’s an up and coming gentrification thing.
There used to always be payphones outside the strip clubs. Probably not anymore. Mother and I spent an afternoon driving around Tampa, looking for payphones at the strip clubs around Dale Mabry. I could barely stand to go near those places today, though I might approach if there is a payphone outside. Just nasty to me. The first place of that ilk I remember going to was in (I think) Elyria, Ohio, or else some obscure butthole town outside of Oberlin. It was more hilarious than anything else. 3 or 4 friends and I sat and watched each other, one by one, stare right into a woman’s bare ass. It was not a lapdance place, as best I can recall. No physical contact, I don’t think, unless I’ve just blotted the encounter out of my precious mind. I didn’t like being there with other dudes.
It was the Mons Venus in Tampa that was my first real entree into the slippery, grimy world of the strip house. I could not get that Vaseline-like stuff the girls rub all over themselves off of me for days. And the glitter… don’t even ask how the glitter somehow got into my ass. I guess this was the summer of 1990, but which time I would have been old enough by 1 year to enter such places in Florida. And I think the Ohio club visit also came soon after my 21st.
An image of the Mons (as the locals called it) that always stayed with me was of getting a glimpse into the dressing room (or undressing room) where the women did their preparation. I did not see all the way in, and I caught what glimpse I did by accident. They looked like a small army back there, getting organized, peeking from behind the curtain into the main room. Their mood I could not really tell. They might have been looking out for each other to see if anyone was being treated badly, or else sizing up the place to look for any nice, decent-looking men they felt safest approaching. Their collective nudity seemed ludicrous to me, though not without its intrigue. I can’t say I did not have a decent enough time there — in that time. The girl who pounced on my face said she was a classical violinist. Today I don’t think you could drag me screaming into a place like that. It’s not just the vulgarity of romping around a shared space in who-knows-whose fluids with a naked stranger. It’s just everything about those place, from the ATMs that charge $75 withdrawal fees to the criminal and other unsavory elements drawn to them.
As an example, some years ago some friends and I were drinking and laughing and, in the spirit of some line of conversation it was decided we would plan to go to Scandals, the strip club at Queensboro Plaza. At first I was drunk enough to be like “Yeah, sure” so as not to dampen the mood of the moment. But after a minute I said probably not, not for me, Scandals.
Well, that night, or rather early the next morning, 2 people were shot and killed outside Scandals, one of them an innocent bystander and I think the other was one of the strippers. Imagine what might have happened had we been all spontaneous and gone to Scandals that very night…
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“There are still more public libraries in this country than there are Starbucks.” I just heard that anecdote, which I assume to be true. Interesting. I did not catch who said it but it would not be hard to find. I am listening to a robotic voice reading news stories from the wires. I don’t do this enough. The voice is decidedly non-human, with half-blossomed pronunciations and articulations that almost make me think it is, in fact, an organic voice. But it is not. It would be based in some part on a human voice, I assume, but it’s no Siri.
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Anyway, too much typing. Double-feature postings today. Yay.
