Since last year around this time I’ve been surrounded by my past, present, and possibly future. The past returned to my space in the form of handwritten and typewritten papers from as far back as grade school that had been lurking in a storage locker for as many as 15 years. I once again have possession of the corporate annual reports I horded while living at the Parc Lincoln. Someone in the building was an investor (I guess) who discarded dozens if not hundreds of annual reports filled with news on how publicly-traded companies performed that year. I never read the text but I was interested in the faces of the directors and presidents, finding their presentation in the reports to be strangely comical yet impenetrable. They were put forth as gods, it seemed, almost approaching the depth to which professional athletes are treated as such. But these were captains of industry, titans of capitalism, and movers of untold billions of dollars. My idea, which has stayed with me since 1991, was to collect all the faces of corporate and build a monument with them. It might have been a wall of my apartment completely covered with these faces (virtually all of which were men) or it might have been a series of trading cards. When the Internet came into my life I would eventually produce a simple page called The Face Server, which in the same spirit as my corporate face project served up random images of faces I found on the web. What I don’t remember now is if I ever used the corporate faces in this project. I would have had to scan them, obviously, but I don’t remember having a scanner in the 1990s, when I made The Face Server.
On my kitchen counter is a Chicago Symphony orchestra pen I bought in college, when I visited that city to see my aunt and a high school friend.
In front me is a Bill Kilmer NFL football trading card (1977) which I kept because my dad once said something to suggest Kilmer was his favorite quarterback. By referring to him as “Billy” I thought dad had a fondness for the guy. I was not aware that everyone called him “Billy” and that the trading card probably should have reflected this.
Also in front of me are a couple of checks I wrote to my mother in 1993. These two were among maybe a couple dozen checks I wrote to my mother during the early 1990s, and I have no memory of ever doing that. It can’t have anything to do with student loans, since I paid those directly. It might have something to do with restitution payments I made as part of The Case, which would mean I paid them a lot more money than I realized. Sending that kind of money through my mother would make sense because I remember wanting to shield my contact information from the company. I used money orders for some payments but might have gone this route for the rest. Damn.
I’ve also taken a new interest in the things my father saved, with today’s curio being the school address book from his senior year at Castle Heights Military Academy. Why would a person who saved relatively few items save something like that? I mean it’s the sort of thing I might keep around, space permitting, but dad was such pretty minimalist with physical space and keeping stuff around. Turning through the pages turned up a couple of intriguing possibilities of relatives I never knew of, but it’s probably just coincidence that a couple of names in the book’s advertisements mention people whose last names are Thomas. One person is named Day Thomas, though, which is strange because my grandmother’s middle name was Day, as was my father’s middle name.
With regard to Day Thomas I guess the text from that person’s advertisement could be called funny: “We specialize in Cold Coffee. Carefully prepared Eggs for Slump-Shouldered Red Birds and Shoe-Leather Steaks“.
I never knew dad went to school with so many foreigners, or even that Castle Heights drew students from so far away. I had thought of it as a regionally-populated school, which is not to say I gave the school extended consideration. But you’d think with such exposure to foreigners early enough in life he would not have turned out to be such a xenophobe.
Castle Heights also graduated Gregg and Duane Allman, of The Allman Brothers Band.
I also found a strange little volume called “Bend With the Wind“, a book produced by the military with instructions on how to deal with unexpected circumstances and disasters. Maybe it’s not as strange as I think but the book starts off sounding like it’s going to be a common sense type of narrative, but the circumstances for which instructions are being given gradually inch toward apocalyptic, albeit a rather disjointed apocalypse. It’s strongly suggested that the book be kept in a very safe place, but easily accessible, as if one would be reading from it when figuring out what to do when a house is on fire or when encountering an unconscious person. I have a very foggy memory of my mother joking about this book and its deadpan style of instructions, so maybe dad held on to this on account of it being funny. Or else he retained it because having it in his possession made him feel important. It is an odd little volume, which at first glance had me thinking it was a book of poetry.
I had not done much scanning in a while, so this was fun getting random sheets digitized. I also found and scanned a copy of a porn and sex toys catalog from 1993, but I won’t be posting that, since it contains explicit sexual content. After I scanned it I left it in a payphone enclosure near here, because hey-why-not. I had the catalog delivered to my 181, probably in late 1992, but no way would I have paid the $9 cover price.
While browsing through that smut catalog I looked up some of the 900 numbers to see if any still exist. Somehow it had escaped my attention that those 900 and 976 numbers no longer exist. Those numbers were most commonly associated with phone sex and lurid chat services, although a wide range of other programming was to be heard over some of those services. I used to call the Patric Walker horoscope number, 1-900-786-3444. I made recordings of some of those because his voice had such a haunting loneliness to it. The death of 900 and 976 numbers does not signal the end of pay-to-play phone sex. These days I think those services are accessed via toll-free numbers with credit card verification required.
I also used to dial in to Aline, which was a dialup connection from the U.S. to France’s Minitel. Aline was where raunchy shit went down, but it’s also where I connected with someone I should possibly never have let go. She was a PhD candidate in Brussels, studying what I cannot remember now but it was something involving the environment. I made her laugh so hard, she said. But I stayed skeptical that anything trans-oceanic could work, to which she said she was planning to move to New York for a job at the United Nations at the end of her studies. I think that would have been two years down the road. She wrote me letters but never included photos, and in too many ways I found her caginess to be annoying.
But that’s who I met through Aline, along with a bunch of women (I guess they were being truthful about that) who liked talking dirty, as I sometimes did. There was one time I was talking to somebody and thinking she must be mentally challenged in some way, because she sounded like a child to me. It turns out that’s exactly what she was. Another person on Aline messaged me out of nowhere to say Sally, or whatever her name, was 13 years old. She must have informed this person of our conversation and he, perhaps trying to save me some trouble, warned me of her age. The conversation had not veered toward anything even remotely inappropriate, and I don’t think it ever would have. But I couldn’t help think it was some kind of trap.
