I walked to the POPS at 875 Third Avenue. I thought it would be hotter. Feeling kind of dazed. Was playing piano earlier and I was getting things completely wrong. That never happens. Not sure why I am here or where I think I am going.
Just remembered something about those phone booths at the NYPL, where the CBS spot was filmed. I was in the very phone booth I used to call Verizon and cancel my landline. I don’t know why I went to such lengths to cancel the landline from a payphone but it seemed like an appropriately symbolic way to do it.
It turned out I did not need to call them at all. I had transferred the number to magicJack and that transfer took care of everything. It was all I needed to do.
I mentioned this little tidbit to a friend. She seemed to think i t was a thing of awe that I had done that, used a Verizon payphone to cancel my Verizon landline.
A memory, or set of memories, that I have had countless times finally made it into my articulate thought as something more than a rapid fire stream of consciousness. Whenever I go to Calvary, as I did on Sunday, one of the first things I see is a tombstone for someone named Burton. Invariably this reminds me of a girl I dated in the early Internet days. Her dog was named Burton. I would probably not remember her dog’s name today if not for the fact that her online screen name was Burton.
Whenever I see that marker I look to the left, for the McFadden tombstone. From that same circle of friends was a woman whose last name is McFadden. I don’t think we’ve ever met but we maintain a cordial online-only acquaintance.
I knew both these people and many others through an early Internet dialup message board. It’s funny how memories like that rise up. Who would think that walking into a cemetery would remind me of a message board I frequented well over 20 years ago?
I don’t think I knew what Ms. McFadden’s last name was until the Facebook days started. But memories of her fade as inevitable memories of “Burton” come back. Not all the memories are good but I try to stay with the ones that are. A puzzling scene replayed itself in my mind on Sunday. Her dog was prone to seizures. The usually came and went quickly ut one time the dog burst into the bedroom and entered into an especially violent episode. There was drool and chunky shit coming out of his mouth and his full body shook like it was being electrocuted.
We had to stop what we were doing, the woman and I. We had been HAVING SEX. She was, appropriately, concerned about the dog’s condition but also apologetic. She made a joke of it y saying that this had never happened “while I was having sex.” That was our running punchline for the rest of my visit. She was in a place outside of Washington, where I would travel to by bus or train. She came to my place on the east side maybe 3 or 4 times.
I have long thought that I never should moved out of that place. I moved to Atlanta to follow the career thing at CNN. I returned 6 months later, at which time Manhattan apartments were just about impossible to find. Or so it was made to seem. I don’t know if I would have had any luck getting a place back at the building I had been in on the east side. Three years earlier I was able to get the apartment very easily for reasons that would only become clear to me later: The building was slated for demolition. I remembered noticing how empty it seemed when I went to look at a few apartments. The building was at the center of a Landmark dispute, with real estate developers anxious to tear all the buildings on that block down and put up 50-story high rises. This seems like something the person who showed me the apartments should have mentioned. She was not a broker. She actually worked at the building. So she had to know. A broker could possibly not know something like that about an apartment building but someone who actually worked there would have to know.
I would like to write more but I need to skedaddle. A woman wearing flip flops and socks just passed by. Three high school girls are nearby laughing and laughing and laughing.
