My piano music was playing on as many as 10 kiosks earlier, now it is down to 4. This is what I guess is called getting back to my roots. I cannot hear the kiosks from here, of course, but I could earlier when I turned them on outside. This has every possibility to be a new form of radio, if I could get volunteers to dial in for me. But that would require interacting with the type of people who probably regard me as something I am not, which is a phreaker/hacker/anarchist. And of course if it ever became widely done or publicized it would probably be shut down, though that would turn into a game of whack-a-mole since new points of access would be easy to find.
I like this better and some of the other stuff I’ve been doing with this of late, having moved on to nobler material than just porn. I did the porn first to get it done and out of the way. I figured I should hurry because it might be possible that some sort of network monitoring by the kiosk owners could detect this activity and someone would shut off my improvised means of access.
But the more I do this the more I think that nobody there is paying attention to anything going through these devices or over the network. I guess I tend to think I am the only person doing anything on these things but that can’t be true, as much as it seems to be. I was surprised today to see someone attempting to use a kiosk to make a phone call. He happened to have chosen one of the kiosks around here where the phone does not work.
…
It is later in the night, nearing 7pm. At present I am blasting through 8 kiosks recordings of those shortwave radio numbers stations I used to hear when I was a kid. This is from the CONET series, and makes for quality stuff to pump through those kiosks, since these transmissions from the shortwave are often righteously loud and mysteriously semi-intelligible.
…
I took a panic pill earlier, even though I was not at the level of anxiety I usually reach before giving in and taking the thing. I think I’ve been feeling less manic lately on account of all the writing I’ve been doing, which expels a certain quantity of slothful tension. That sounds paradoxical but it is not. Tension rises from idleness and non-productivity.
I took the pill because I need to quit drinking for a while, and from what I understand it is far safer to quit cold turkey with the aid of this particular pharmaceutical than without. These pills may have saved my life but it’s hard to say, since my body continues to have a tendency to fall back into healthiness. As gross and innardly-twisted as I felt earlier I feel almost normal now, albeit with burn marks on my constitution.
Sometimes when I take the panic pill I feel a fog slowly lift. I think “Oh yeah, I remember me.” Other times it’s like my body has stopped its eternal expansion and is no longer at risk of exploding. Today it was the former. I remember this pre-alcohol version of me. I am a soft soul, if I may say so myself. I always was and always will be. But now I am also bored and lonely, the latter which bites more than it ever has and makes me disappear into the haze of booze.
I have friends who I talk to and whose company I appreciate, don’t get me wrong. But I need something new, something comfortable and free. Instead I am stuck with sober me, a depressed middle-aged loser who comes around once in a while like an old friend.
Now I am listening to content from my Plex server, which is probably among the more unusual Plexes out there. It includes digitized recordings of cassettes from my old Panasonic answering machines and corporate voicemail accounts. I shared one of those voicemail accounts with a friend from high school, one of the guys who was involved with The Case. We left messages for each other almost every night. We also sent cassette audio letters, filling hours upon hours of TDK and Maxell tapes with mental meanderings and updates on the progress of our fascinating lives. I am listening to one such tape presently, in which M. was reading from training materials for his job as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in Gainesville, Florida.
He mentions a name that I forgot about until now, that of Esmeralda Wockenfuss, a fictional gag name he made up for someone he assumed never existed. Wockenfuss is not an unknown name, and of neither of course is Esmeralda. But the only possibility I find that such a name was ever assigned to a real person is in a couple of sketchy looking sites that fit the fake data model I think infests a lot more content out there than most people realize. Forget about fake news, sites like this are fake everything. There are billions of pages documenting identities and information about people who simply never existed. Ms. Wockenfuss is probably one of them, despite the presence of the name on that above-linked site. It is such a fake, phony, and fraudulent world we live in, and maybe it always was. But the ability to churn out bogus data and make money slapping ads on it sent the matter spiraling out of control.
On that tape referenced above M. makes a comment that he listened to the last tape I had sent him twice, and that he wanted to keep it forever because it was so cool. I do not remember what that was about. Evidently a woman’s sexy voice is heard on the tape I sent. He said he wanted to be able ti listen to it in 50 years.
Now, through a perfectly legitimate stream of consciousness he is saying that his mother’s menstrual cycles were wildly erratic, sometimes lasting 7 days other times lasting 50. Was he exaggerating?
Now he is entertaining the possibility of coming to Oberlin to attend my college graduation, saying that if he did this he would have to drive up with my mother and share a hotel room with her. He seemed to think this was a ludicrously weird scenario. I totally forgot about this possibility, which I evidently took pretty seriously, but it never came to pass.
Listening to these tapes, even just knowing they exist like an ocean of correspondence mostly forgotten to both of us now, makes my life feel heavy and my head numb. This is digital hoarding in all its sodden heaviness. How can you move on from your past if you do not want to delete it?
…
So tonight I play my sober video games on the phone while listening to the BBC 4, then try to make sleep happen. That is my sober routine. I was thinking earlier today that I don’t miss the booze. But that was earlier in the day, and I never was any kind of a day drinker. I miss its kiss now, approaching 10pm when I am usually on my second or third beer. Now I am thinking about it because, after all, I have nothing else to think about, and no one to talk to about it. I was looking at online message boards and chat rooms but they all look chaotic and dominated by teenagers. I had tried one of those random penpal services but nothing came of it. That might have been a year ago. A friend from Louisiana strongly encouraged me to initiate a correspondence with her single woman friend in Portland. I sent an email, not too long and not too short, but she ignored it. I don’t think she was on board with the Louisiana friend’s attempts to connect us.
Today while walking and talking I was remembering the Belgian woman who I met online in maybe 1993 or 1994, when an online service called Aline let Americans connect to the French Minitel (and other Americans). Oh hell, I’ve been poring over a bunch of the early online prospects that got away, all the ones I can think of at least. It’s a depressing monologue, a lonely middle aged loser summarizing his failures in online romance.
This bit of memory-mining was prompted by a recent phone conversation with someone I met through the Internet in 1993 or 1994 and have stayed friends with ever since. I mentioned a woman we both knew from those early days of the WWW and he commented that he would have “hopped on” her without hesitation. I responded that she posted tawdry and erotic fiction and introduced me to some bizarre sexual books and movies but that for all that I found her to be quite square.
A number of people from that early NYC Internet scene are married now, having met through BBS forums or IRC channels. I am not among them and that is fine with me.
