Woke up early, feeling good anyway after almost no sleep. That will come crashing down but I will be out in the world. How this pendulum swings so wildly I cannot explain. Up at 3:30pm one day, 10:00am the next, and today I’m up at 6, after basically never getting to sleep. Adventures in sobriety, as this is called. I woke up feeling fine, what with no booze polluting my innards and synapses. But I also wanted a beer, after denying myself such libations last night. I don’t think I have ever woken up in the morning thinking “I want a beer.” I think it’s a symptom of so little sleep and my body thinking it’s still night time. My body, which wants very much to be healthy, has not connected with my mind in years.
I had to pop a couple of panic pills again. That’s not a source of pride but it’s amazing to me how well they work. Blood pressure had blasted off to something impossible and my innards felt like they might gurgle up into my throat. That’s the effect I’m noticing these days, more than in the past: Digestive troubles linked to anxiety and high blood pressure. For a long time I know appetite has been the first thing to go when I start drinking again. When quitting booze the desire to gorge on sammiches and potato chips returns within hours. The last time I quit drinking for a few weeks I gained 8 pounds.
So today I made righteously productive use of my early rise from bed. I finished scanning and posting 323 receipts, after a hiatus of several months from that project. I had to get a part replaced on the ADF scanner, and it works fine now but it took a dozen or so passes for the thing to self-clean and work like new. I thought I’d gotten a bum piece of plastic to replace the… whatever the piece is called… but no, for once I managed to fix a gadget instead of just chucking it and buying a new one.
I should get out into the world on what should be a boo-tee-full day out there. But I should also stay inside and write, and figure out this mess of a life that has me sleep sprawling not just all over the king size mattress but all across the orderly patchwork of time that organizes our society I seem to have left so far behind.
PLAYING VIDEO GAMES
Someone on FB just posted that he is 48 years old and still playing games like Zelda and the type of strategy/role play titles intended for people in age up to their 20s. He asked if anyone else still plays these games in their 40s and 50s. I almost responded that my mother played those games, Zelda in particular, until she could not do it anymore, well into her 60s. I did not post this comment. I nurture a lurking fear that something I posted to Usenet in 1993 or 1994 would come back to haunt me, even though nobody on Facebook would have reason to know I wrote it, nor would it be anything they would care about enough for them to perk up their trolling antennæ.
In a video gaming newsgroup I posted something like “I lost my mother to Nintendo.” It was true, at the time, or at least in 1990, before I moved to New York. Nothing could pull her away from that game console or the comfy chair from which she played. So engrossed in her games was she that she did not know I was there a lot of the time. When I sometimes made plans to go out at night she would snap out of her virtual Mario Brothers trance and display genuine angst, real dismay, deep offense that I would do such a thing. I was just supposed to sit there and watch her play video games, listening to her detailed play-by-play commentary on the ACTION at hand. It was uncomfortable as hell but this little ritual repeated itself several times during the summer of 1990.
We did play games together at times. It was fun. Sometimes my friend Phil would come and we’d all play some crazy game involving fish flying through the air. There was also a zombie game featuring a sinister old man that could not be hatcheted to death with a normal ax. You had to use some sleight-of-hand technique to get him. My mother explained this technique to Phil and he did what was necessary. When he was lined up to get at the elderly man my mother yelled “NOW GO KILL THAT OLD MAN!” That became our tag line for the summer. My mother was also funny about winning a round, or finishing a level of a game. She would pretend to acknowledge a crowd of spectators applauding her achievements, saying “Thank you! Thank you!” and waving one hand at the adoring masses with the game controller held firmly in the other.
I think such things sometimes when I play a video game, that an audience above or around is on the edge of its collective seat, gasping at my virtuosity as I collect 60 cheese chunks in “Alpha Betty Saga”, or as I skillfully summon the nuclear bomb in “Fishdom”. I don’t think I actually got that little gaming flourish from my mother, though. It’s a natural instinct.
SUNDAY SAMMICH
I made my way up to the Sandwich King the other day, finding upon my arrival that the place was closed. That was only one turning point in a long afternoon spent searching for a decent sammich in Astoria on a Sunday afternoon — not exactly the most deli-fresh time of the week. The journey ended with a bizarrely recalcitrant ham and salami concoction at the place on Broadway that used to be called “Bagel Nosh”. This sorry excuse for a sammich fell to pieces as I picked it up. I bit into the mess unable to penetrate with my generally sharp-enough teeth the leathery-thick bottom slice of salami. The slab of salami undercut the sammich creation, forcing lettuce and tomatoes (the latter which I did not want) to simply explode onto the table. I was hungry enough, though, to let this sammich splatter just to be what it was. This sammich, I thought, is expressing itself.
I got a plastic fork from the condiments placed atop the trash cans and ate the messy sammich like it was a cold cut salad with bread thrown in. The parts and pieces were all surprisingly fresh for Sunday at 4pm but the dude behind the counter who threw this thing together just did not give a fuck. There is nothing like having the act of eating food make you angry, but that’s what happened to me. Happy to say no one in the vicinity noticed my gladiatorial combat with or cursing at the Sunday Sammich.
I had set my sights on the Sandwich King after spotting a piece about the place in the Times, written by the woman who did the story about me for the Huffington Post. I am yet to change my mind about what a waste of time that interview was for me, but if her star continues to rise maybe some of her past columns will experience a renaissance or, better yet, a rewrite.
I look in at her columns on HuffPo now and have to ask if it has not become a parody of itself. Today’s “Astoria Characters” are as eccentric as those who climb trees in the park or who eat at the same diner every day for 54 years. To think that I thought she was scraping the barrel when she found me. But her much-improved writing at the Times is interesting to note for its better game-face, vastly improved editing, and more substantive writing — not bad for a puff piece.
“UNHEARD” PODCAST
Time for a shower and to listen to the end of a podcast I started listening to last week. It is called “Unheard” and is going well so far. The last podcast I seriously tried was “Guys We’ve Fucked”, where two women host and bring on to the show as guests all the men they’ve had sex with. They talk with them about the sex they had, sometimes in merciless, meticulous detail. I got through one episode thinking this was kind of interesting and wide open. But after a little bit of the second show I gave it up. It’s too crude and vulgar. I might like the format more if it was not so explicit. But then what would be the point of that? I don’t know.
“Unheard” is a fictional mystery about a woman with alleged hearing problems who disappears and is found hanging from a tree with both her ears cut off. I don’t like hearing about murder and suicide, even when it’s fictional, but this one got me all the way through episode 7 of 8 so why not see how it ends. As with the “Guys We’ve Fucked” podcast I find this one also has more gratuitous obscenities and needless cursing than I need from something to which I feel I am donating my time and attention. “Unheard” has the feel of a classic radio noir form but you would not hear “fuck” and “shit” in those old programs. I could appreciate not using those words in productions like this. The script of “Unheard” is dampened with fuck juices and shit smears.
