I noticed a few weeks ago that the woman who wrote the piece about me for the Huffington Post a couple of years or so ago is now doing similar style bits for the New York Times. Happy to see it, though in a way it confirms my vaguely cynical belief that her columns about “Astoria Characters” were being done as an audition for bigger and better things. From my experience with that piece, and in my observations from reading the earlier columns, all I can say is that nobody was reading that stuff. Nobody, that is, except the editors and clickthrough verifiers at the HuffPo, whose 4 or 5 pageviews comprised the totality of hits I got from the links in that story.
But hey, I don’t mean to be negative about this individual’s apparent path to some kind of more legitimate notoriety. I don’t exactly feel like a STEPPING STONE but I also do not feel that her future notoriety has any capacity to bring fresh attention to any of us featured in her hundreds of HuffPo pieces.
For the more ambitious among us it could be said that all our work is a constant audition for the Next Big Thing, however long it might take us to even recognize what that Next Big Thing is (or was). Among my many character flaws is my laziness, which I grandiosely refer to as my capacity to find efficiencies in all things. You’ve heard the quote, right? Allegedly uttered by Bill Gates (but probably not) the quote is something like “I would find a lazy person to do a difficult job because that person would find the easiest way to do it.” Gates probably never said this but even if he did the concept is not new. It informs some of the earliest thinkers who developed the assembly line and, watching their workers, noticed that certain of them were getting as much done as the others while making significantly less movement and expending considerably less energy. A seemingly lazy worker such as this was singled out as a sort of prototype for training others whose motions and frivolous gesticulations on the assembly line might have made them look like busy bees but in fact they were wasteful and caused slowness.
I call myself lazy out of another of my many character flaws, which is self-loathing and disrespect. I think about doing things far more than I actually do them, though I can honestly contribute some of that to circumstances of my present days in which I am unmoored to a routine and feeling as if I should just sit around and wait for something to do. A smart person with nothing to do is dangerous, my mother used to say. She said it most memorably in reference to a kid I’ve been meaning to look up just to see how, or if, he turned out as an adult. I have no memory of his name, though I am in touch with a friend of his from back then who would at least remember that. He was top 1% GPA in school but a rebel. On his 16th or 17th birthday, whichever one was the legal age at which he could drop out of school, he did that. He just quit and sat in his bedroom, taking visitors, doing absolutely nothing. I only met the kid one time, when he took my friend and I as visitors to his poobah-like perch where he made no apologies for giving up on school. I remember sensing an attitude of privilege, or elevated malcontent.
What to focus on today, though? I managed, or rather felt forced into not doing any booze last night. Innards felt wrenched asunder and blood pressure blasted off to something impossible. The BP happens once in a while. I’ve gotten used to that. But the innards thing is new, and bothersome. Today it’s all gone, possibly proving yet again that my body wants to be healthy but the mind has other ideas.
I am in a small sea of my life’s accumulation, packed in unopened boxes from the storage locker. The quantity of those boxes is far less than it had been, making this place feel positively spacious. But most of it has to go, or it has to be hidden away in the bedroom or in the garbage. This last batch of storage remains is the hardest for me to get rid of, since it is the very first stuff I put in there however many years it’s been since I rented that stupid room. I rented the room as a reaction to getting mugged at knifepoint outside the building. They got away with my drivers license, leading me to imagine (not unreasonably, I think) that with my exact home address they might be back for more. Of course breaking and entering is a vastly different skill than street mugging, and nothing ever came of this fear I had. But I still thought it made sense to have some extra place where I could store certain things in relatively safe keeping. I ended up using the locker as offsite storage for hard drives, among other things which proved to be useful. But by now I just don’t need that space anymore, and the storage company itself teed me off once and for all. The place changed management many times since I’d been there and every iteration had its idiosyncrasies, or rather security flaws. For a few years all the doors to place seemed to be wide open at all hours. Today the system of security codes and access restrictions seems to work, except that some of the doors remain unable to fully close or open.
I guess I can say now that I am free of this place that the storage facility was Public Storage, on Northern Boulevard.
What teed me off for good was their recent claim that my credit card had been declined. I was thus penalized with a late fee of something like $30, and no one at the storage place would even consider my statement of fact that there was nothing wrong with my credit card, and that there had been a mistake. Post cards about the late fee arrived around the 10th of the month, days after the fee had been levied and before I could have done anything to respond. There was actually a phone call but it also came too late, after the late fee had already been charged. To add to the annoyance the voice of the person who called was almost completely inaudible. The only reason I knew the call came from the storage place was because the phone number showed up on CallerID and I looked that number up on the Internet to see who might have called and left this unintelligible message.
So I am out of the locker, thanks in very large part to a friend from the neighborhood who proved to be quite the friend indeed. For now, with a lot of nervous energy to burn, I am going to sort through that stuff yet again.
