I feel like I am stirring inside my own life. Something is stirring.

I just walked and talked, as I have been wont to do the past years. I don’t remember when I started doing this but it’s been a while, and I have oceans of audio recordings to show for it. A lot of it would be unusable for anything but notes-to-self, assuming the intention was to make the pieces any kind of listenable product. So much wind noise and recordings of such poor quality that I myself cannot always remember what the hell I said.

That little incident involving the police helicopter the other night has stayed tangled in my mind. The quality of the light from the chopper was blunt, and rude, like the sun itself when it has trajectory to violate your space with its overwhelming and unquestionable strength. Without question the police were not scoping out my particular domicile, nor do I think for a second that any kind of mistake could have been made. But the image of that light was enough to remind me that all it takes is one single second for one’s entire life to turn, to change, to go from comfort to a filthy, stupendous mess.

I would have to know it was coming. I would not know from experience but I would think almost anyone who has police intrusions into their lives knows it is coming. This was fodder for a bit of comedy I heard on the radio. I think it was Jim Rome, a sports guy, talking about the TV show “COPS” and how every time the police barge into someone’s house the occupant is sitting on the couch, acting surprised that the police have appeared, and respectfully asking “Hello, officer. Can I help you?”

I knew a guy who got locked up for 9 months for embezzling something like $80,000. He had been an accountant with easy access to that kind of money. He knew the feds were going to come for him, and even though they maintained some element of surprise he pretty well knew what day and at what time they were going to arrest him. He knew all this but said nothing to me that New Years Eve when he and I and some others welcomed the new year. I did not know him well enough to get into his hopes and fears but when I heard later that he’d been arrested and that he knew it was coming it added an element of silence to whatever memory I had of that New Years Eve.

I’ve written about this individual before but thinking of it now I see it in a context of silence. All of us have our silences. Some of them amount to lies, others are simply denial of the half-truths and half-certainties that litter the foundations of our dignity. I hear tremendous silence in this apartment building of late. This is partly on account of rediscovering the borderline loony letter from a former disgruntled resident upstairs, claiming the owner of this building threatened him with bodily harm over a financial dispute. It makes me ask what kind of relationship anyone in this building might think we have each other, the strangers upstairs, next door, at times just 5 or 6 feet away but almost always silent.

I probably think about this sort of thing more than others in this building on account of me being here so much more the others. I think the woman downstairs, the travel writer, is also in the building a good amount but then she travels a lot, seemingly for weeks and even months at a time. The woman who used to live upstairs seemed to be at home 24/7. Other than that I only see occasional intra-day Grubhub deliveries to indicate that anyone besides me is in this building during the weekdays, or even weekends.

It is not lost on me that I am, relatively speaking, pretty damn lucky with this place. I basically cannot get kicked out, however many times that threat has illegally been laid on me. After one such threat, in 1999, I actually commenced the process of finding a new place. It was not entirely motivated by the angry landlord screaming at me for no reason and illegally threatening to not renew my lease. It was just that at that time I did not expect to be in Astoria for very long, something I say now with not even a tinge of regret or the like. But originally I aspired to live in either midtown or back on the Upper East Side, in the same huge apartment complex I was in before I moved to Atlanta. I really wanted a particular place in midtown, on 55th Street between 6th and 7th. It was a very quiet block, which might sound unlikely for the midtown area but the apartment itself was well insulated from the noise of the Avenues. I never got the place. It was a bait-and-switch listing from Prudential Realty, a company whose familiar brand name I mistakenly thought made it more credible than your average independent real estate broker.

But I think about that pursuit sometimes and ask how different my living arrangement would be today had I followed through with it. I wrote a letter to the owner of this building explaining that on account of all the yelling and the threats that I did not feel comfortable living here anymore, and that I would be getting out of his way. He apologized, saying he didn’t want to kick me out. He said “You’re a nice guy” and just suggested I do a better job cleaning this place. So I was not being kicked out after all. It’s just an elaborate schtick he has.

That beam of light from the police helicopter had me imagining scenarios like the accountant and his embezzlement, where there comes a day and a time and a moment where you are plucked out of your home, taken away from everything you know and with which you are familiar. You lose everything. These moments happen. I do not know how I would handle something like that, being thrust from this soft life of unmoored obliviousness into some kind of government- or police-controlled system.

The silence in here could fill a lunar ocean.

…

In other self-absorbed ruminations I find myself thinking about L. again, I guess on account of having seen her on the street last week and her smiling and saying hi. She also crosses into my thinking as I contemplate the silences that inhabit our lives. She is someone who, I suspect, has a lot of lies to keep track of. I could not tell you what those lies are or in what order of importance or priority they are marshaled. For as much relationship-building we engaged in I think there is nothing salvageable about our attempts to make something work between us, and the feeling seems to be mutual. So why am I even thinking about it? Just because I saw her that day, and she smiled. I don’t see a lot of pretty, smiling faces in my days. It reminded me that as thorny a mess as she might be she actually really liked me, and considered me a decent and sweet guy. She said such things, though I know now how her fantasy idea of romance had a false feeling of truthfulness about it. True or not, my decency or whatever other good qualities I might possess were not enough. It was the Carrie Bradshaw effect, where only the most butterfly-summoning romance and Absolute Perfection in a man would suffice. You can die waiting for that.

L. does not concern me anymore.

…

I shredded the night away, this after scanning about 150 pages worth of credit card transaction and phone records. None of it matters but storage is cheap and who knows, maybe I’ll find a story idea somewhere in those records. I need to keep doing this, writing, re-reading, and listening back to all that or at least most of all that audio I spit out. The new recording technique, which I have not been able to use out of doors for about a week on account of the BOMBOGENESIS, went off without a hitch today, save for a little bit of wind noise.

…

I was awake at 8:30 with ambitions of making a day of it. Instead I slept until 1:30. I was going to go to a toy store and look for stuffed animals, since I have become skeptical of Amazon’s inventory in that realm. I don’t know what I might get next but it’s not going to be from “Where the Wild Things Are.” I’ve had too much trouble with Harry, who I think is evil and just ugly in weird, gawky ways. I asked Bruce if newcomers were OK and he said it was fine. Then he did the Bruce Shuffle.

…

Someone e-mailed yesterday saying her brother-in-law had just contacted her using a payphone in Los Angeles. He has been homeless for 5 years. She got the number from CallerID but it is not in my database, so I could not help her. That’s too bad. The only insight I could offer was that she could be certain it really was a payphone, since she called the number and heard the fax-modem type sound emitted by most public telephones when you try to call them. At the very least she could be sure it was a payphone, and that the person who called was not lying about it.

I listened to a walk-and-walk audio I did back in July, where I walked around the area checking in on the payphones. I never thought of that as anything special, it’s just a thing I do, but I ask now if anyone would find it interesting in any way. I was recounting a conversation I had with the only friend I ever made in the real world of the payphone business, and I actually found the level of detail to be surprising. I’ve always known more about the business than I let on on my payphone website. I just never felt like I should be the one going on record about it. That would be for the professionals. But they don’t especially want to talk publicly about their business, which is largely stigmatized by what small portion of the public has any reason to think about it in the first place.

…