EAT

It is nice to have an appetite again. The first casualty of me drinking again is a lack of desire to eat and general ignorance of nutrition. Best I can do when in the booze fuze is eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, but even that passes me by after a while.

I had to stop writing last night’s posting, which surely would have been Pulitzer worthy. I had to quit because of a panic attack that I should have realized had been in progress all day. I barely remembered most of my walk over to Times Square, and memories of the phone booths mostly relied on the pictures I took.

I was sitting at SekUnd Sun (however that is spelled) when I realized I was sweating and shaking. It couldn’t have helped much that the beer was nasty to me. Good thing I drank barely any or I would have been hesitant to take the panic pills.

For as much interest I have in the booths I have to say that the project is kind of a dud. You pick up the phones and hear stories told by immigrants about their experiences moving here. The first few stories I heard were told in languages other than English. The others I just could not quite understand. But I was, as I now know, in the midst of an anxiety attack where my blood pressure had blasted off to something impossible. So I should give it another try.

That’s why I am here today, in midtown, at the Bank Of America Tower public space on 6th Avenue. This is an awesome spot to just sit and watch the carnival of humanity saunter past. Everyone is here. With my noise cancelling headphones I can lightly play the continuing discography of Deep Purple as the people just 10 feet away move past in profound silence.

I knew a movie score composer who once said writing music for movies is the easiest thing in the world, because almost anything goes.  I think he had to have been pretty experienced and skilled to be able to say that, but on the other hand this song I am hearing right now, “The Well-Dressed Guitar” feels like perfectly perfect music around which to build a film of nothing more than regular people walking past, some smiling, some oblivious, others looking at me for no reason I can discern.

..

OK, then, after about 40 minutes I am once again permitted to edit this fucking document. DOn’t know what happened, don’t really care. Just this technology gets IN MY WAY as much as if not more often then it lets me express myself.

I am sitting at a red table in Times Square, between 49th and 50th Streets. This section is curiously vacant, though it is for many people the start of a holiday weekend.

I came over just to check in on the phone booths and see if my suspicions about this area’s LinkNYC devices are true. It seemed yesterday as if calls from here timed out after exactly 2 minutes. Instead it may just be that it is Skype voicemail which have suddenly and without explanation cut voicemail durations from 10 minutes to 2.

That would actually make more sense.

Except the notion that Citybridge would limit call times in this area almost made sense. Too bad it does not seem to be true.

So I spent some time looking for possibilities that Skype’s customer service had evolved from its nonexistence. But it does not appear that they have.

This is a strange post on which to sit. You still have to be careful out here, though it’s nothing like it used to be. This is still a nexus point for lunatics and preachers, not that those two are to be uttered in the same breath for any particular reason.

Talking to some tourists, who are trying to identify some celebrities in a montage of photos above the Caffe Bene. We cannot seem to agree that the image of Peter Sellers is that of Peter Sellers, even though I am certain enough to just let it go.

A giant billboard for THE NINETIES towers above all. THE NINETIES is when I moved here. Times Square would have been among the first places I moved through. I wanted to live in the big building on the southeast corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. A similar old building at Herald Square had my interest, back when I still thought living in such places was not that big a deal. I don’t suppose it is a big deal if you have the funds.

I remember being proud to have worked on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue web site back in… 1996 or 1997. I was not proud of the project or the web site but I thought it was pretty cool that it was advertised on the Jumbotron. I told my mom I never thought I’d work on something that was displayed on that giant screen (which seems not so giant anymore). Mother did not care. She resented my successes. Although in this case I think she resented the big city New York aspect of things.

…

I just fast forwarded to the end of my life, at which time I sat in a chair happy to have spent my final years sitting here in Times Square watching the peoples pass. I could get tired of this but being surrounded by giant screens and beautiful women is feeling just about right for now.

I moved over by the TKTS stand. Those tourists seemed nice enough. The child asked the mother if she ever had Teletubbies in the 1980s. She did not, and emphatically asserted that did not want Teletubbies. What a fascinating discussion to have tuned in on.

I could bring back out the field recorder, and its binaural microphones. That setup picks up every goddam thing, too much really.

It is just nice to be around people. I had not thought of Times Square as a place for that, ranking it about as desirable a hangout as the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And now that there are phone booths here I can just set up residence therein.

I had so much more to say but there’s been so much distraction, some of it something, other of it nothing.

…

Wrapping up today’s wanderings at the public space of the former Sony Building. Somewhere under /yo is a recording I made of a church group rehearsing church songs. It was nice. Good acoustics in here for that.

Looks like I wore this keyboard out already. Damn. It’s wigging out in boring but unbelievably irritating ways. How can the quotes sign “ and the @ sign keys get reversed. Those are shift-reached keys, and the lower case ‘ and 2 work fine. I’ve never seen that happen. But the bluetooth also flakes out here and there, causing the letter that I was typing right as the bluetooth faltered to repeat indefinitely. Yeah, that is really fucking annoying. I might become known as the midtown misophiliac (that’s not a word, I don’t think) who sits at public spaces crying and hissing at his computing devices “Work, just please fucking work.” Just like I do at home.

Ian Parker, at times, sounds like Bob Dylan. Not always but sometimes.