Doing what I seldom do, which is discarding stuff I don’t need or forgot I even had. Got all nostalgic about the boxes in which were shipped many of the gadgets I’ve owned over the years. Packaging is seductive. Good packaging, that is. Next step is to purge a few boxloads of those old music magazines, the ones from the 1940s on.

I got the PCMD100 after waiting here all day Tuesday for its promised PRIORITY OVERNIGHT arrival. This time the delivery person did not even try. A note in the online tracking said I was not present at 6:03pm. How can they say that without having rung the doorbell? It’s just a UPS lie but I’ll move on. I picked it up at the Strand Pharmacy.

Unboxing the device I couldn’t help but notice that it looked like it was resting in a coffin. The sound of recordings on this thing seems significantly better than the D50 right out of the box. I need to spend more time with it, and I shall.

…

An old friend from the NYTimes called. I don’t know if he’s interested in me or just wringing me for my ideas. Sounds like he anticipates moving on from the Times, either voluntarily or not.

I was not altogether understanding him but it sounds like he’s considering me as a personality profile or character study on the A&E network involving everything I have done with payphones over the years. He also wants a confessional aspect to it all. That’s weird because I guess I never told him about Apology or how the culture there revolved around payphones and the anonymity they were thought to provide.

He sounded depressed by much of the conversation. I told him about the drinking and the ER and other bad shit that’s gone down. He sounded depressed but not surprised. I think he was reading his questions from notes he keeps on all his sources, to make it look like he actually remembers all the things going on in my life when last we spoke maybe 4 years ago.

I don’t know where that’s going but it was good to hear from him again. I had wondered why he was absent from any new stories at the Times. He’s on book leave, writing about the piracy on the high seas that no government seems able to control. It’s going to be made into a movie starring … can’t think of his name, the dude from Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio, who I saw in passing is now banging Kate Winslet. Good for him, I guess. Like the rest of us he of course already knew what she looked like naked.

…

I spotted this woman I’ve had a thing for for several months. I’m am no smooth operator by any estimate but assuming I had interest in even trying there has been a fundamental problem: I cannot tell if she is 16 or 26. She just has a youthful ambiguousness about her. Interested enough to at least look it up I found, through the magic of Facebook’s unintended stalking tools, that she is most likely 20 or 21. I figured this out by typing her first name and, without any other bidding, it filled in her last name and up popped her picture. It had to have helped that her first name is pretty distinctive, and that Facebook defaults name searches to people they think are near you. I knew her first name from seeing it on a store receipt.

I guess her age by how she’s a second year student at CUNY. 20 or 21 is too young for me. 26 is a stretch as well yet it might be possible. But not 20 or 21. Not without some consummate magic, and I think I’m too old for that.

She exudes a great attitude about life, though. That’s what had me thinking things… That positive energy.

What happened was I saw her ambling up 21st Street, toward 31st Avenue. I had never seen her outside the context of the grocery store where she works. She looked a lot different. Much better dressed and more adult looking.

Anyway, blahblahblah. I move on to having not even the remotest prospects for romance. Yay.

…

I worked some today and yesterday on getting .MOBI to mix it up and get it on with the .COM, all of it moving over to Flaneur.NYC, a site I first messed with 6 or 7 months ago and revisited this week. I like the look but a lot of code and database cleanup is in order, as I discovered today.

Tried to do authentic .MOBI today but the Wi