Was headed for the Windmill but nought for the wind, cold, and the threat of murderous, rampaging, malevolent, marauding children who scheme to incinerate me and send out their cremain-starved attack dogs to lick up my remains.
Bah, those kids are probably back in school by now. I’m at a Starbucks, or as I used to call it, the Tarbox. That’s in memory of Katie Tarbox and Katie Jones, whose paths crossed when Penguin published Tarbox’s book recounting encounters with an online predator, and explicitly chose to name the book Katie.com even though they knew full well that domain name was taken by Katie Jones, whose log was found at that address. The title of the book led many to associate Katie Jones with the sordid events recounted in the book. Not an unreasonable assumption seeing as Jones owned the domain and all. It took three years for Tarbox herself to issue an apology to Jones, and to rename her book. Penguin Publishing, for its part, stood its ground and never contacted Katie Jones again. Bunch of assholes.
Memories, memories, memmmmmories. I went to my storage locker a couple of months back and returned with one bag full of old cassette tapes, some as old as my grade school days — before my voice change and I sounded like a squeaky wheel. Years ago, before the great Chinese hacker attack on an old web server, I had recorded this bag and several other bags full of cassettes, encoding them as FLAC files and intending to… well, intending to do what with them I do not know any more. I had dozens of tapes I made in college of the voicemails friends and I left for each other on those corporate voicemail systems we broke into.* I think I intended to dump them into the Dragon speech-to-text software and see what half-intelligible hilarity of text matter spewed forth from that software. I also wanted to revisit my piano improvisations and assorted voice recordings, of which I now have no memory.
*I pedantically say we “broke into” those systems, since none of those even had passwords to keep us marauders out back then.
Making those hours of recordings was not as tedious as it might seem. I did not actually listen in as they recorded, but let the tapes pour into FLAC files in the background, for later listening. I did get to hear some of them but, for reasons I’ll never remember or excuse myself for, I dumped all my copies of those FLAC files onto the web server and apparently nowhere else. When the server got hacked all those hours of recordings were gone.
So, here I go again, using a cheapo $20 USB cassette recorder to encode as many of these tapes as that piece of shit player can get through before croaking. Already I found some interesting (to me) stuff, including some piano improvs that sound surprisingly solid, as if I knew what I was doing at the instrument. I also found a few of what I remember now to have been a particular interest of mine: dying music boxes, or rather music boxes that slowly trickle down in speed until that can no longer play, sometimes expiring (poignantly) just before the last note of the song could be plucked.
That interest is one I picked up from my mother, who loved music boxes for their inherent sadness. I appear to have inherited my gluttony for sadness from her. She loved music box I got her for Christmas one year — until I told her I had purchased it at the Trump Tower. She threatened to throw it out, but never did. That box played “Send in the Clowns” and featured a slightly undulating clown emerging from (if I remember right) a bass drum container. It might still be at the house I am re-visiting in a few weeks. I know what I’ll do. I’ll STEAL IT.
Another cassette I encoded a few weeks ago has my friend Martin and I engaging in a night of foppery of which I had absolutely no memory. We sat around my place (I assume) calling payphones across America. Sounds like we had a good time of it but damn if I ever would have remembered that night happening.
Oh and another tape from today has me talking in September, 1998, from the house in Tampa. My voice sounds unlike me now. But then I’ve been told time and again that my voice can sounds quite different from one day to the next, from one conversation partner to the next, from one atmospheric condition to another. I remember Ugo saying he heard me on NPR and did not even think it was me at first, so unlike me did I sound that particular day. I was tired.
…
So day 3 without booze has me following the usual routine: eating and eating and eating, any goddam thing I can stuff into that useless hole in my face. I slept well enough last night but have concluded that Lorazepam is just not any kind of a sleep aid for me. Tonight I’ll try to go pill-free, as I did a while ago. But I might also do the Unisom thing. Sleeping like this was impossible in months past but lately I’ve started to reconcile the experience as part of a pattern. It’s different from what I’ve become used to but I can cope. It’s like sailing on at-first unfamiliar waters to which I am becoming acclimated.
The most unnerving thing is the jolts, but I’ve even come to embrace those. I can never remember the technical name for them (have looked it up any time I used the term here) but it is theorized that the body feels itself literally falling as it falls asleep, and wakes itself up to somehow prevent that plunge into the abyss from happening. This leads one to wonder if people who jump off of buildings are, in their final seconds, plagued by these jolts, feeling electrocuted all the way down.
On top of that I’ve been jolted awake by a feeling that I have fallen over. This is a half-dream thing in which I am on a staircase or a high cliff and I slip off. Waking up from falling down while actually lying asleep is a little strange but, like other elements of this newly explored bridge between by my unconscious and waking life it is something I’m actually having fun with.
If anything was a little off kilter today it was the cacophony. I felt like I was thinking in complete paragraphs in my head but that all the sentences and inflections were mashed into a fence-like miasma, tangled up in each other so awkwardly that it was impossible for me to sort out what I was trying to say. It was like transparent layers of words laid on top of each other, thick enough that you could not figure where to start reading, but clear enough that you could almost divine some sense out of it.
Oof, it is later than I thought. Going home to deal with some old cassettes and be otherwise maximally productive, as always. Hah.
