I had designated today a walking day, and tomorrow as well. Now not so sure. Woke up with a small headache after a night of what felt like zero sleep. Managed to get through without wasting another panic pill, but I know why. It’s so I can drink again tonight, even if the goal was to wait until tomorrow night. The routine of yore was to drink only Fridays and Saturdays, with occasional Thursdays when there was an office outing or whatever, and maybe daytime drinking on Sundays if it was some kind of poison-yourself weekend. That’s been my sometimes-way of referencing consumption of booze: poisoning yourself. “Toxin” is essentially right there in the word “intoxicate” so it’s not like the poisonousness of alcohol consumption is hiding behind a euphemism.
Thinking again about abandoning this domain name, flaneur.nyc, and incorporating its content and all my other content under one supersite, which (if it’s going to be under any domain) should be under the payphone thing. In a way it would be like coming home, but dumping all these years of content under that umbrella would also make the huge admission that the subject matter of payphones is ingrained far deeper into my person than I’ve been willing to admit on a potentially far-reaching platform.
But my little self-styled gimmick of making this site invisible has gotten kind of old to me. If I think on it too much I feel the firmament encroaching on my tiny presence at this beautiful desk, that firmament slowly but unmistakably filling with water and other-worldly forms of weight that will explode, drowning me in an instant but leaving my spirit to know I’ve been erased as the body washes its way toward oblivion.
I’ve discovered, or rather revisited something that I guess I’ve always known. People out there look at me. They wonder who I am. Some of them probably consider me a social retard, while others must think that I think too highly of myself to deign to be among them. Neither is true but the hacker community in particular, while they don’t lose sleep over my existence, has muttered and mumbled about why I keep such a distance.
I think I’ve mentioned earlier here that my reasons are such that almost anyone should understand. But that I had not taken those reasons into deeper consideration until a couple of months ago, or however long it’s been (months pass like days around here).
After I found the paperwork for “The Case” I did what I’d never done in the years 25+ years since it ended. I looked it up. I got onto one of those searchie things, starting by looking up names of the lawyers and Districts Attorney and others involved. I have always remembered handles and code names of people I encountered over the VMBs those nights but never considered the possibility those pre-Internet names would be recorded on the open Internet, or anywhere else. What happened in those 1980s VMBs, I assumed, stayed in those 1980s VMBs.
(“VMB” stands for Voice Mail Box.)
But I’m not going off on this well-word ramble again. Burning some fresh-from-bed energies is all this is.
I found an erotic story I wrote when I was 23 and sitting in the 9 West 57th Street building, working (but obviously not working) at my first real job in New York. It’s a decent enough story, if I say so myself as one who does not read or write that kind of stuff. I’ve taken part in a lot of phone sex and typed a lot of netsex but writing out fantasy pornography isn’t something I’ve done much or even thought of. I always thought it seemed cliché. The story makes clever use of a telescope, and involves a younger man’s cougar fantasy fulfillments. I guess I know where that premise came from. I was 23 at the time and working among women twice my age and older, some of them scary beautiful to me.
It’s taken until recent years for me to allow that my encounters with women mostly start with fear.
There are real-life experiential details in the story but mostly it’s fantasy.
At the end of it I wrote what I’ve often written about things I type out: It could use a rewrite. How many times have I said that over time without doing the work of the rewrite? Countless times. The story comes from that MEMOS.doc I mentioned earlier, a 40,000 word scrawl from my earliest days of corporate.
Time for a shower and a shave and a rumination on this glorious gift of a day. Yesterday was only the second day in months that I did not do the shower talk, in which I use the field recorder to record ramblings and blabberings from the freshest mental energies of my day. I’ll take a pass on the shower talk again today, and maybe on the walking, too.
