Have not done this in a while. At the ghetto coffee shop, where a dude nearby is screaming into his cell phone. What is he saying? I had thoughts to relevate but the scampering, trilling sound of Greek has shaken them from the treebranches of my unrooted mind. I’ve been listening back and editing down some of the shower talk recordings, which now must number over 100. Going in sequential order from around the time of the first Gothamist story, as I still can’t decide if I should send that anonymous message I drafted last week. But starting from earlier showers I expect to find my Jon Arbuckle recordings, in which I sound like the depressed, depressing, middle-aged loser from Garfield Minus Garfield. I’m OK with that. If I sound like that it is because that is what I am. I don’t want to create a phony version of my reality that I expect anyone to actually believe. This life is what it is.

I took another panic pill yesterday, as I think I already reported, and will probably chomp another one later today, and a half one at bedtime. BP is still high but not as bad as yesterday. I skimmed through some medical website where someone suggested high BP is a side-effect of abstaining from alcohol cold turkey. That would explain this, if it is true, but I don’t remember it being like this in my past adventures with sobriety.

I looked at the emergency room papers for the first time since someone handed them to me. There was something abobut minor erosion in the thaoric something, or something like that. Looked it up and it seems to be no big deal for someone my age. But I noticed that the doctor left all the bullet points from the last ER visit 3 years ago, including the medications they prescribed, as if they were still current. That was not true but you can’t change what authority says, right?

I have oceans of sound to wade through. I’ve been saying that for years. Getting through it is never as daunting as I expect but it is still tedious, and singular in its pursuit. I find I cannot focus on anything else, or do two things at once, while listening to and scanning these WAV files for lengthy silences or sneezes and sniffs. I’ve come to cringe any time I hear myself sniff, although in the shower I guess it’s acceptable. After I cracked my ribs I found that the most pain was caused by sniffing, which I do surprisingly while eating more than often than I would have thought. But sniffing was what caussed the sharpest jolt of pain in my lower right side. Coughing caused some pain  but shitting, I was relieved (huh huh) to find caused no pain to speak of beyond the usual discomfort of unleashing a newborn 14-pound octopus into the city’s sewers every time I poop.

I talked to POOP about all this. He empathised, but still can’t wait to poop himself once The Team gives its approval.

…

I put on the VR headset three nights in a row last week. It was at turns entertaining, boring, even monotonous. If you have one of these look for the $2.99 short story called “DISPATCH”, it was well made. I also have a surround-you video game that’s hot shit, even if it feels dangerous playing it. I mean I’m spinning around in the office chair trying to find the enemies and the Mother Ship… can’t remember the name of the game but it’s what I had in mind with VR gaming.

The porn, on the other hand, was laughable. I didn’t think it would be as easy as it was to find VR Porn that I didn’t have to pay for. But all I had to do was peck “VR Porn” into the searchie and within seconds I was looking up a cowgirl riding my (virtual) 14-inch schlong (with quite the girth) begging me for more and shoving her freckled/pimpled boobs into my face. I let this go for 20-30 seconds before I started laughing, and took off the headset. Some of the VR I’ve seen is good at making me feel like I am there. Porn VR only reminds me that I’m not.

OK, so I had taken a break on this .MOBI writing from the phone/tablet at the ghetto coffee shop but now that I’m here again I remember how much easier it is to type away from home, and do the different kind of work at home. The apartment makes me stir crazy, even if I stay busy most of the time.

I had planned to hit the NYPL today to get a footnote from a story about PRAY. Strange how it spins around. I was going to the NYPL to get a physical copy of a book about 1970s-1980s street writers, as graffitiists came to call themselves. Book is called “Getting Up”, and after a bit of clicking around the NYPL web stuff I found that excerpts from the book were freely available through Google books. But that led to another source that makes going to the library necessary after all.

In that book one of the street writers, BAMA, was interviewed, and the interviewer appended one of BAMA’s comments about PRAY with a footnote citing a New York Post story from what I assume was around the time of the book’s publication (1982). The Post has no index or searchable archive of anything pre-Internet. So I have to go to the library after all, since the Post archive (as far as I know) exists only on that recalcitrant microfiche. Not complaining, just saying that if you think everything or anything even approaching everything is at your fingertips from your home PC I find that it seems to me like only a fraction of it really is.

I was surprised to find what’s new on the NYPL website in terms of magazines and news sources. I just browsed through the first issue of Cosmopolitan I think I’ve looked at since the girlfriend of 1990-something, who carried copies around in her bag and sometimes left them on my couch, opened to a specific page where I was supposed to figure out what she wanted me to read. She was funny like that, even if she seemed to live by the advice contained in that magazine.

Among the wisdom shared in the current issue, in response to this purportedly genuine reader’s question (emphasis mine):

Q: When my “BOO” is going down on me, WHAT DO I DO?

One answer was PLAY WITH YOUR NIPPLES, the other was something like “SHARE THE PLEASURE, STROKE HIS HAIR.”

That was some edifying time spent on the NYPL website. I was thinking they would carry recent editions of Poetry magazine but all I could find in that realm was Threepenny Review, to which I used to subscribe but gave up on in the interest of paper abatement.

Alright, then, gotsta get back to real work.