I am speaking this posting. I have not done that in a while. Walking over the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan. It is a beautiful day.
Ruminating over the correspondences of the last few days. I gave up on what seemed like meaningful connections through those stupid dating sites. I had not taken those sites seriously for awhile.
I feel badly for the little window that opened into the world of a woman who said she was in New York but is actually in Florida. She said her husband beat her, and that was the grounds for her recent divorce. I don’t know if she was telling the truth but her descriptions made me sick. I told her that physical violence or even the threat of physical violence is reason to end any kind of relationship. I was trying to be supportive of her but she did not seem to care. I did not get out of her for how long that had been going on or if she ever called the cops on him. I told her it took me about a year to get over my last big relationship. That’s when she implied that her divorce was very recent. I don’t know for how long the proceedings had been in the works but it sounded the kind of rapid fire turnaround dating that is unhealthy as hell.
The other one I gave up on just suddenly became annoying as hell, and like a lot of people on the Internet she lied about who she is. I completely understand that people obfuscate and obscure their personal details when dealing with random people from the big bad Internet. But she (and the abuse victim as well) were just being too paranoid. I give the former some slack for that, since it sounds like the divorce and the circumstances that led to it are still fresh in her mind.
The other one said she will be 30 next week. Her profile page said she was 41. She said she was in Dallas but it sounds like that is not true either. We talked on the phone for a couple of minutes. I was in a really noisy place and could barely hear her. But I heard enough to discern that she had an incredibly thick accent. It sounded Eastern European to me but she said later that both of her parents were from Spain. Whatever the case I did not say anything but I had to ask myself how could someone who said she had lived in Texas her whole life have such a thick foreign accent and speak almost unintelligible English. I guess it is possible? I don’t know. She also claimed she was a supply chain manager at some huge company. She is actually a sales clerk at what I think is a shoe store.
Still, we were making decent enough conversation. I can allow that people lie on their web site profiles, and that’s fine as long as the truth eventually comes out.
But I gave up on her yesterday when she started asking me for money. She said she was broke and needed 50 bucks to buy songs off of the iTunes Store. I was just like girl I’m not exactly rolling in cash these days myself. So no. But she wouldn’t let it go, and it started to feel like some kind of scam. She didn’t want cash. She wanted me to go somewhere and buy her an iTunes gift card. She said I should pay for it with a credit card. Is that some kind of scam? Maybe those gift cards automatically refill with money when paid by credit? That sounds unlikely but hey, who knows. I don’t know and I do not intend to find out.
It is annoying and even a little ugly the games people play. I’m going back to not caring about this sort of thing. Going to see if I can find a place where I actually enjoy my own company. A friend of mine used that expression a couple of months ago and it has stayed with me. She said she has been able to do that and thus does not especially care about potentially spending the rest of her life alone. It reminded me of a tag line I used to use for sorabji.com: Entertainment For An Audience Of One. The “Audience Of One” was intended to be YOU, the reader, most likely sitting by yourself as you read these words. But it sounded too much like a reference to masturbation.
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I am back at the POPS where I was on Sunday. I’d been curious how this place looks on a regular weekday compared to its silent, abandoned weekends. It is, as expected, quite active. There is a piano player. He is annoying to me. My stomach feels like something bad went down last night. I don’t feel good. Going to the 181.
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Now at Rockefeller Center, having thrown out most of the things in the 181. Strange thing back at that POPS. I stepped onto the up escalator and a man ahead of me turned around and asked “Are you coming?” I didn’t understand the question so I just kinda shrugged. Then I thought he said “Are you obsessed?” I just kinda waved it off, thinking he was nuts.
I got upstairs and, trying to avoid him, looked around for an open table. None seemed to be available. That’s when an Asian woman sitting at one of the tables either asked me if I wanted to go downstairs or else suggested I do so. I didn’t quite catch her exact words. So I realized the guy on elevator did not ask if I was obsessed but if I really wanted to go upstairs. There was no indication that the space upstairs was seated to capacity but I guess the regulars at that space just have a way of communicating this point.
Yeah, this matters.
Too fucking noisy here in the Rockefeller Center underground. My misophonia is kicking in.
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At another POPS, one I don’t think I’ve ever sat in. I think this is 47th Street off of Fifth Avenue. Listening to Deep Purple at the suggestion of a new friend. DP seems to be best known for “Smoke On The Water” but this person’s point was that they were a lot more “out there” and versatile than most people probably think. He also suggested ZZ Top’s entire discography is a source of riches. I tried that out but got nowhere good. Sounded like monotonous bar band music, but maybe I just missed the spirit.
Listening to albums from start to finish often feels like work. There is not that aspect of joy or spontaneity that comes from discovering music through the radio or in performance. And anyone familiar with the business knows that half of the songs on most albums are just filler, making a fully considered hearing of the whole album to be laborious in its way.
I was uninstalling all those dating apps when I remembered I have HAPPN. It shows you people who you’ve come within 850 of. Theose people, of course, have to be using the app, too. It is quite strange. It’s too bad it’s a dating app. There should be a nice app like this where you are alerted any time you are near someone who shares your very unusual interest. Payphones, anyone?
I remember when I did the guided tour of payphones around Union Square. This was a promotional thing for someone’s movie… I can’t think of the director’s name or the movie, which actually wasn’t bad. But the director said that hearing me talk about payphones reminded him of an account he read where Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and at least one other celebrity got together to talk about baseball. These guys knew baseball better than anybody. A journalist attended one of these meetings and said that for several minutes the level of discussion was so high that he could not even fathom these guys talking about baseball at a level normal people could understand. That, this filmmaker said, was what hearing me talk about payphones was like. Hah.
Oh, how I bluster.
Aw man it’s already 4pm. Getting outta here.
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