Another bit of randomness for the “what are the odds?” category into which some of my recent musings could be categorized… Earlier I posted a photo of an interesting red car that was parked on 28th Street in AsLIC. About two and a half hours later I heard loud music coming from a car on Broadway. I turned toward the music-making car and it was none other than the bright red Slingshot SL. It pretty much has to be the exact same car I had passed earlier. I say this not just because the car is unusual enough that there wouldn’t likely be two of them in the same zip code. I also passed by the spot where I had seen the car 2+ hours earlier and it was gone. That’s nowhere near as random as crossing paths with Molly in Tampa, or the time my college friend met my childhood next door neighbors from Tampa in New York. In fact this sort of path-crossing happens all the time, or so I assume. Still, just a little weirdish. I’ve been setting aside a spot in my brain for stories like that. Everybody seems to have one but I feel like I have more stories like that than most people.

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So the other night I bumped into someone I’ve known for at least 10 years, probably more like 12. I can’t really call him a friend, since I never spend time with him. I guess he’s what you’d call a bar buddy. That genre of friend is one where guts and misery are revealed with the assumption that most if not all of that soul-baring will be forgotten.

Indeed, if the stuff of much of our conversation was any indicator, he had forgotten almost anything and everything personal or revealing about me. I was surprised, then, at how much I remembered of him, or what I at least thought was an accurate set of memories. I thought he was a freelance IT consultant. In fact he works for Morgan Stanley, but he was in fact an independent IT consultant when I knew him better.A mutual friend of ours said something to within the last few years to suggest that he was still doing independent consulting.

The first thing he said to me was that it must have been 7 or 8 years since last we met. I made the unfortunate correction that we last met at Sandra’s funeral, which I incorrectly said was last year. It was 2 years ago. The years pass like strangers to me now. A vast, endless blob of faceless strangers.

We didn’t talk about the funeral, though, or Sandra. But the conversation flowed well. This was at a bar I have set foot in for probably 10 years. The beer tasted like vinegar and the relatively enormous place was mostly empty.

There had been a myth circulating years ago that one of the owners of the place committed suicide. One of that person’s friends had it on good authority (the brother of the deceased) that it was just an accident. He fell off a balcony.

I had a spooky sort of follow up to that incident, though, soon after it happened. The brothers did not really resemble each other. I thought the one who had died was the shorter one. I was certain of it. So I was agog when I entered that bar and the shorter brother appeared from the shadows. Obviously I got the two of them mixed up. As much as I wanted to say something to him i did not. Anything I might have said would have been stupid. “I thought you were dead.” Yeah, that would have been entirely stupid.

A similar moment of WTF happened about two years ago  when I stepped into Sunswick for what felt like the first time in a long while. The woman behind the bar looked so much like Sandra I could not f’ing believe it. Sandra had been bartender at Sunswick. Seeing her doppelganger in that space was enough to make my head explode.

Catching up with Rob was congenial enough. I always think of him as the first person who ever punched me. He probably does not even remember that, though he might recall that I didn’t talk to him for a while after that happened. In my younger days I probably would have stuck to that silent treatment. But at that time I remember making a deliberate life decision to allow people into my life even if they offend me or somehow contradict my sensibilities. Sandra (not to keep mentioning her) was among the first of that wave of people in my life, most if not all of whom I guess came from one pub or another around here.
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At the ghetto coffee shop. The radio announcer is talking about a contest where, to enter, you have to call him and name a country that does not contain the letter A. I think of Chile, Mexico, Egypt, Luxembourg, Peru… funny how stubbornly the letter A comes up in almost every other country name I can think of. It’s like these A-less countries are a separate class of outcast nations. They are decidedly not A-list. These countries are A-Holes. Hah. Now I am laughing at my prescient humor.

A quick perusal of a world map brings up Benin, Togo, Congo, Turkey, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Philippines, and I’m sure others.
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I had an interesting thought, or what I thought was INNNNteresting. I saw a garbage can that did not look like a normal NYC trash receptacle. It was just solid black. It made me wonder if there is a racket in placing rogue trash cans on abandoned properties, in the spirit of the rogue payphone which is still standing outside the abandoned Sports Authority on Northern Boulevard. One could set up a trash can anywhere they want, it seems, and sift through it for the inevitable object of value that many of us have accidentally thrown away at some point. SImilarly one could set up one of those giant metal bins which solicit old clothing and toys. In fact I’ll be shocked if that sort of fly-by-night collection bin has not been put in place, and the people who placed it there made the recipients of whatever junk or random items of value are dumped therein.

Maybe that’s what I will do with the rest of my life. Illegally collect the leftovers of individuals and families and mine them for riches.

Hah, that’s what a thrift shop is, isn’t it. I had called those places treadmills for the possessions of the dead. They are also aptly described as places for the leftovers of our lives. What a dour yet appropriate name for a thrift shop: Leftovers.

I once requested a dataset from NYC’s Open Data. I wanted a list of trash can locations. I wanted to make a map from a list of latitude/longitude locations of every trash receptacle in NYC. Yeah, I had high ambitions.

If you’ve ever requested anything from Open Data you probably had the same experience as I did with the trash can dataset. Nothing happened. A new mayor was elected, and if I gave the matter any further thought I must have assumed that the request just vanished.

Alas, FIVE FUCKING YEARS LATER I got an email from nyc.gov saying my dataset request had been published. By this point I could not even care about this anymore. I was never what could be called enthusiastic about the subject to begin with. It just seemed like an unusual if not unique mapping project which I could execute so as to get some value out of some WordPress mapping plugins I had purchased.

My first encounter with Open Data was more interesting. I requested (what else?) the locations of every public pay telephone in NYC. That request was completely ignored. Then Sandy happened. I made the request again. It was promptly filled — promptly meaning within a couple of weeks. It seems that the role payphones played in post-Sandy life made the value of that dataset more apparent. IT WAS ONE OF THE GREAT TRIUMPHS OF MY LIFE. Hah.

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Not to drone on about the Links, but I managed to capture what sounded like an ace bit of conversation. Someone was standing at a Link, talking about it, and from what I could hear he was entirely dismissive of them as big pieces of junk.  I have to play it back again but it would be hilarious if that’s what it is. I’ve scooped up quite a bit of audible conversations through those things. I do not intend to continue this spying, I’m just doing it to prove that these things are not just unneeded but potentially even more invasive than we already know them to be.

I mean consider the possibility that someone connects to one of these devices outside of a school or place where kids are known to be. With the lure of a voice emanating from a piece of street furniture it’s not too far out to imagine someone trying to get a child to hold still long enough that they could… yuck, don’t even want to think about it. I’ve seen kids react to sounds coming from these devices. To them it’s all fun. They will stop and stare and (I suspect) even engage in conversation with a voice coming out of one of these things.

It’s a long shot scenario, I know. I mean if someone is going to do something like this they will find a way, with or without this particular piece of street furniture.

Well, I gotsta eat. It is sammich time. Oh yeah.

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