I don’t want to talk about it. But it is almost enough to make me want to cry. I feel bad, am bad. Remembering a woman at Queens Plaza a couple of weeks ago who repeatedly shouted “I DON’T FEEL GOOD, AND IT’S PISSING ME OFF!” I heard her shouting this plaintive wail at least a dozen times. She was comical to me then. Now I want to be like her. This day feels eternal. How early did I get up, anyway? I don’t even know. I feel like drinking but it is too early.
As a favor I digitized a small number of cassette tapes a friend had from childhood. I only listened to a few moments, to be sure it was recording, but those few moments contained his voice at 5 or 6 years old singing the Diarrhea Song. What’s heard cannot be unheard. Actually it was just funny. I used to sing that song at summer camp. Only line I can remember is “Some people think it’s funny but it’s really wet and runny…”
Speaking of digitizing I noticed that archive.org is finally carrying scans of The Etude, that magazine which consumed so much of my intellectual and industrial resources over the years. They have almost every issue from 1940 to 1957. Upon noticing this I downloaded them all and hauled two box loads of my printed magazines out to the curb. I only kept December, 1946, because that issue is for some reason not among the otherwise complete set from 1940-57. There are also a number of the very old issues from the 1880s, including issue #1, which I don’t think I’d ever seen in its entirety before. I should really just continue with that relatively small purge and discard all or at least most of my copies. I’ve scanned almost everything I need and if the uploads to archive.org are any indication there will probably be a complete set. There have been complete sets but they were derived from the notoriously awful microfilm copies used by libraries. These scans are 300dpi and seem excellent, though I would have scanned them at 600.
I talked to John, my only friend in the real world of the payphone business. He is 59. I guess that age is about what I might have guessed, though I might have said a little younger. He was in good spirits, which was nice to hear. Last time he called it felt like he was yelling at me. I think Ugo mentioned once that the side of John he saw was different what I seemed to get. With me it’s like John’s on his best behavior. Ugo came away from some encounters with John feeling worried about him. He may have exaggerated but I think I got some sense of that from John in our previous conversation a few months ago. A coarse, frustrated, even angry person. Today was different, and he knew it enough to mention it himself. He credits his current sunny disposition to having found a new girlfriend. Good for him, I guess. I will ask more about that when we meet this week. He is giving me a payphone, right at the point where I am closer than I’ve ever been to pulling the plug on that website and moving on.
I kind of feel like throwing up.
