Since procuring a mechanical keyboard, which makes a lot of noise as you type, my writings have had the feeling of a stampede. But the keyboard, while a lot of fun, is not very good. It disconnects for a minute at a time, as I now know is common for this product having read the reviews a little more carefully.
I revisited an opening line that I came up with a long time ago:
I walk around a lot, and I look at things.
That simple premise feels like it has promise, as a promising premise. Yesterday I started thinking about the physics of seeing things, and how seeing somebody or some object leaves no forensic evidence. An object does not gain or lose mass on account of being seen, yet its significance in the world might be increased or decreased. Where is the evidence of this increase? I want there to be evidence, if even in the most minuscule form of some electrons being rearranged or attracted to the object. I want there to be scratch marks on my eyes, or strata reflecting every single object and person I have ever seen.
You can see something without really seeing it. As I walked and talked yesterday I noticed that the image of a person standing on their front porch had registered in my mind. But that person only registered with me as a distant body lurking not in physical shadows but in the shadows of my indifference. Did I leave that mythical residue on the bark of that person’s tree of life? Did that person think s/he had been seen by me?
Yesterday I was walking on 48th Street, on a stretch of road where I once crossed paths with a beautiful woman. I watched her enter the house where I assumed she lived, and noticed her name printed in large letters on one of the mailboxes. She had a distinctive name and I guess I find it too easy to do this sort of thing to not do it: I went home and looked her up on that Internet thing, finding her on the first try and clicking through her thousands of Instagram photos. One of those photos showed her talking on a payphone. It had all the makings of a magical moment if not for the creepiness of my approach. I don’t think I would ever do this but I imagined some possibility of romance in the scenario of crossing her radar via social media and acting like I had never seen her anywhere before, even though I had. But there would be no evidence that I had seen her. No residue or disheveled electrons could be summoned into the courtroom of our relationship, should one develop. I would have to tell her, though.
I did not pursue this beautiful woman in any way. From her Instagram photos and comments I gleaned she came from a wealthy family, grew up in Greenwich, CT, and disliked living in New York enough that she had already planned to move back home after moving here just 5 or 6 months previous.
I wonder how many people realize how much of themselves they broadcast to creeps like me who hurry home to research them online. I mean, I don’t consider myself a true creep since I do not take any kind of action or make untoward contact with anyone just because I saw their name on a mailbox. It’s just that I find it interesting to learn what there is to be learned about strangers using ephemeral bits of information they let float out there.
I could build a dossier of sorts on an apartment building by simply getting a picture of the names that are printed next to the doorbells. In fact I tried this once, just to see how vulnerable people are for simply having their first and last name set out for all to see. I found that a seemingly well-known fashion model lived over on 34th Avenue in the same building as a Croatian musicologist who had written some books and peer reviewed articles about composers from his country. I found that a flamboyant singer/entertainer lived right across the street, but I did not learn that from seeing her name on the front door. That was when I had the full paid access to ancestry.com, which lets you type in a street address and browse what in some cases amounted to a history of who inhabited the place. Typing in my home address did not really turn up any surprises, except that I found the actual name of the Japanese woman who lived here for two years before I moved in. I remember the building owner, when I first looked at this place, saying that a Japanese woman had been here for two years and was moving back to Japan, but of course he would not have had any reason to tell me her name. I remember seeing her name on wayward pieces of postal mail addressed to her but it was a Japanese name I would have a hard time remembering. Prior to her the building owner said his son had lived here for something like 10 or 12 years.
Mental machinations like this serve no purpose, do they? I am attempting to straighten out what I think is a lurking dilemma in the simple acts of BEING SEEN and SEEING. Because, you see, I walk around a lot, and I look at things. I see things. It feels scandalous sometime, this window I have onto the world I inhabit. I feel like there are many things I should not be allowed to see.
In a similar spirit as the beautiful woman from Greenwich I once had a flirtation with a cashier at a Rite-Aid. Her first name, which happened to be very distinctive, was printed on the store receipt and, as I and I suspect others are wont to do, I pecked it into a search engine to see what I could find. Thanks to that very distinctive name she was easy to find. She turned out to be way younger than I thought, maybe 19 or 20. By appearances I might have guessed late 20s.
I read a story years ago about how it was becoming common for prospective romancers to routinely do a search for their suitors. At the time (this might have 15 years ago) it was described as a behavior that was just becoming standard, having been previously considered kind of weird or needlessly cloak and dagger. I don’t know if my little pursuits of looking up names and info on people I just happen to see on the street falls into another category of acceptability or its opposite but, as always, I consider myself harmless. It’s what flâneurs do. We saunter about the physical world, seeing things, following up in ways that would have been impossible just decades ago.
My genius website/app idea that I think would be impractical as hell to execute would be to compile names of businesses that formerly inhabited buildings and street addresses. This is not actually my idea. A friend of mine from years ago made a melancholy comment that there should be a plaque of some sort on every place of business listing the names of all previous businesses that existed there. I researched this up to a point, concluding that the quality of public records is simply not suitable for this. With access to enough old phone books you could scan them and OCR the text and stuff it all into a database that might at least begin to represent the transience of business entities at certain addresses. It would be like that ancestry.com ability to do reverse searches against street addresses, just not for individuals… and frankly I think that ancestry.com feature is somewhat provocative and potentially dangerous, even as the records are not especially current or bullseye accurate. Some of the records, as I recall, were complete rubbish.
Rubbish public records might be there for a reason, though. Some years ago I made what I considered to be a troubling discovery. Someone had legitimately purchased a database of every virtually American’s identifying information, with social security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, etc. This data was obtained for the purpose of scrambling it all and generating millions upon millions of fake identities, seeding the internet with countless websites displaying billions of names and addresses of people that never existed. Months, even years of industry went into creating this garbage content, all done with the stated purpose of foiling identity thieves.
I found this data on a site that made it clear all the identities shown were fake. But it was implied that the data was also found on sites which did not present any such disclaimer. I have no interest in thieving anyone’s identity but I had a lot of trouble rationalizing the good intentions of the fake identities project. The fact that the site appears to no longer exist only stokes my vague sense of nausea over the possibility that all that bad, rubbish data is now exclusively on sites that people take seriously. Where does all that crap data end up? Who ends up using it thinking it is legitimate, and what role do the advertisers play in all this?
I don’t know how deep the bad data goes but something tells me the Internet is drowning in it.
The fake identities project, while intriguing on some levels, might have subliminally inspired a story idea I had about a secretive network of funereal artisans who planted fake tombstones at Calvary Cemetery, creating phony histories of people and families that never existed. I’ll go revisit that, I think, after a brief evening constitutional.
