Most of my prestidigitational and mental energies of late have going toward the correspondent in France, which has evolved without growing out of control. Expansive would describe it. The fact that it is email and not live chat makes it seem less demanding, if that’s the right word.

I was just reminded that last week I came about as close as I ever have to getting plowed down by a truck. It was at Third Avenue and 59th Street, where I calmly ambled into the intersection asking “Why is that loud horn blasting and why is getting so much louder so quickly?” Or rather I asked as much of that question as I could in the ½ second it took to turn back and see 20 feet high of tonnage barreling right at me. I had to jolt backwards to get out of the way, and it did not look like the driver was going to slow down. I had goosebumps all over for much of the balance of the day, imagining the odds of surviving something like that or if I’d even want to keep living.

I think I fell for the subtle effects of sympathetic jaywalking. People ahead of me had crossed against a DON’T WALK signal, but as I recalled later they actually ran to cross, presumably because they saw that goddamn truck coming. That didn’t register with me in that ½ second of near doom. Seeing them cross in front of me was a subconscious clue that it was OK for me to do the same. I think that sort of thing happens  more often than people realize. I saw a car turn onto a one way street, going the wrong direction, after he saw a delivery dude on his e-bike racing the wrong way up the middle of that street. I think the driver of the car’s assumption that he was turning the right way came entirely from seeing the e-bike guy moving so confidently on that street.

After the light changed I crossed 59th Street and saw a couple of people going the other way. One of them was laughing and shouted out at me “You almost got hit by a truck!” I responded saying “It was my fault” but when considering the sympathetic pedestrianality of the moment I’m not ready to blame myself entirely.

I felt the same way about nearly getting tangled up in a bunch of bikes up on the George Washington Bridge. I was looking over the edge of the railing. This made me dizzy enough that I didn’t realize I was drifting away from the railing, where I came very close to landing in front of 4 or 5 bicyclists. We all managed to avoid each other but it was close. I’m surprised this sort of thing does not happen more often given my flâneur ways, but some day, man… I’m gonna get clobbered.

…

Today I pitched a payphone radio idea to a station in New Jersey. I can keep making new stuff but I could also leverage all the hours of calls I made already. Or I could just keep languishing in self-inflicted obscurity on this site I’ve made invisible to the searchies. I think a ½ hour a week of payphone calls from a gruff-sounding voice like mine would interest some element of the listenership. I’ll probably just be ignored but it felt good reaching out to someone like that.

I’m also planning to reach out to someone I’ve avoided in years past, with regard to The Case and my change of outlook on things since finding the paperwork and actually looking things up on the Internet. In all these years I never thought to do that, thinking whatever happened in the 1980s stayed in the 1980s, or whatever happened in those VMBs stayed in those VMBs. For the first time I looked up names like The Condor, The Flash, Professor Falkan… and there’s a fourth one I can never remember. Those were the names I remembered hearing out in the jungle and until recently I had no idea who they were connected to. I still don’t know who The Flash was, but there was also Wisconsin Jim, or as we called him Whiskey Jim. I actually don’t remember if he called himself that or if we did but he was the one who got me into the jungle, and who possibly helped get us all into the trouble we got into. I never heard anything but male voices. Well, except for one. My mother. She called in to me a handful of times. I remember she once described how she was at a beach or near some body of water, not relaxing but for some reason related to her job. She and I made fun of the automated voice attendant. I don’t remember the key sequences now but she would say something like “To listen to your messages press 2.” My mother said she pressed 2 and was sad to hear the attendant say “You have no messages to listen to.” My mother and I agreed that this voice, when making that particular statement, sounded positively plaintive and sad.