Looks like I was wrong about the woman upstairs. The dude was not moving in with her. He was helping her move out. She and I had a conversation, our first ever in maybe 4 years of her living there. She acted like she had never seen me before, asking which apartment I lived in. I think she was feigning ignorance, though I can’t understand why one would do that. We tell ourselves lies, we do. I asked where she was moving. I think she said 35th and 5th, and then from there she was moving to 15th and Third. Or something like that. I’ve always suspected she had a lot of daddy money, since it sounds as if she leaves her apartment very infrequently. Contrary to the impressions I’ve gotten of her over the years she seemed like a nice person. Having never said so much as hello to me I guess it’s easy to fill in the blanks with scenarios that would concern me. She made a whole hell of a lot of noise up there. There were times when I felt certain she was doing that in response to my piano playing, which I have assumed she hated.

Today I went upstairs into her apartment. She asked if I wanted anything that was left. I took a nice looking lamp and a big fan, the latter item falling victim to my stupidity. I don’t understand how I could have broken that thing but I did. It’s too annoying to explain but looking at it now I don’t see how it is even possible I could have murdered it so thoroughly and so efficiently. I was angry at myself. Some random person does something nice for me and I stuffed it up.

If I pay seemingly undue attention to the comings and goings in my building I guess it is because I am there more than anyone else, or almost anyone else. I would like to think that here is some kind of bond among us all but really there is none. The woman next door, for instance, does not seem to want to acknowledge that any others of us exist. I wish she could just say hi to me, not just because she’s cute but because her insularity is so conspicuous that I almost take offense at it. Another woman who has often commented on how she loves my piano playing has lately taken to giving me no more than a passing grunt. I think she felt that I interpreted her comments about my piano playing to mean that we should be buddies, which is not what I had in mind.

I just went to Rainey Park thinking I would sit and write at the one table that is present at that park.  I was foiled in this intent by the presence of a whole goddam family eating a monster picnic feast. They did not look like they were going anywhere. So I wasted my time with that. Now I am at the LIBARRY. That phrase “whole goddam family” brings back memories. In college I chased after a woman who lived in my dorm, just a few rooms down the hall. It was a frustrating pursuit but that is no excuse for how badly I behaved. I would never do the things today that I did back then in my gawky youth, but neither is that meant to excuse myself in any way for my idiotic actions.

Be that as it may I remember talking to my mother about the situation, this before it got totally out of hand. The girl I was after had been dating the same guy for 5 or 6 years. We were sophomores in college, and at that stage of things it was like she had been with him her entire life. But she was having doubts about their future, which I guess I interpreted as a possible opportunity for me to be with her. We were not exactly distant. We spent a lot of time together but nothing intimate ever happened except for my one failed attempt at kissing her. I guess you could say that’s when things got out of hand and I let loose my inner asshole. I was just so bad in that situation.

I described the situation (up to a point) to my mother. Her comment that I remember was how situations like this get really complicated “when the whole family gets involved.” At that point both families were very much involved with the situation, since everybody across the board assumed these two were getting married. She did finally break up with the guy, and it was by any estimate a Big Fucking Deal. But she didn’t choose me, like I thought she would. She found some random guy and (by my interpretation, which might have been skewed) flaunted in front of me the fact that they started fucking the very first day they met. I did not know how to handle that kind of situation at that age.

But enough about that.

Another memory that phrase evokes is how a college friend used to laugh when I said that I bought chicken in the family pack size “so I can pretend I have a goddam family.”

…

Did some interesting research today. I was doing something about the Picturephone scene from 2001, A Space Odyssey. I could have just left it at sharing a video o the scene with a few pithy comments. But it turns out there really was a video payphone introduced in 1989. It did not do well. Today it turns out the video payphone market is thriving in the prison system. Who’da thunk it? It’s not what Kubrick had in mind but still, it’s out there.

OK, too dark to type…

Bye now.