An obvious and recurring problem with my payphone radio project is how many calls just don’t work. Tonight, even though I hate being in the rain, I went out anyway to give the mood of the call a noir element. I don’t know how loudly the rainfall would have come through via this particular phone but I dumped three quarters in to make a nearly 9-minute call describing something I did today that seemed risky.

I Instagram-followed an ex-girlfriend from… I guess it’s been about 8 years since it ended. The risk in doing this was not on me, although if she blocked me or ignored my follow request that would have been a little sad.

The risk was that I was opening a little hornet’s nest of questions directed at her should anyone from her world take notice of me appearing among her hundreds of other followers.

But no, she followed me back immediately, and that was that. No other contact.

I’ve never posted anything to IG and pay attention to it almost entirely for payphone purposes. But cruising through her pictures gave me a nice feeling even if I tend not to believe anyone is as happy as they appear to be on social media. I forgot how beautiful she is, and unless IG has a fat filter she even might have lost some weight after cranking out two kids. I don’t know how she could have produced a blond-haired kid when she and her husband have dark brown hair but that is not my business.

Her family knew I existed but regarded me as nothing more than a friend. They are Muslim and I am not. I am a white lapsed Catholic. Being with her was like having an affair with a married woman. She had been reading my websites since she was a little kid but we never had any contact until what I think was her 25th birthday. Hers was not a strict Muslim family where there would have been punishment for her dating a white guy. That wasn’t why I was a secret to them. She just felt that they would subtly pressure her and tell her she was wasting her time. In the end she promised me this was not the case.

I just have to hope she is as happy as appearances would make it seem, having entered into the kind of life she insisted she did not want. There was never any angry fallout between us but I like to think I at least matter to her in some realm, since I’m one of only three guys she was ever with, and the first one sounded like a loveless arrangement made by family. We always knew it was a foregone conclusion that it had to end, but I saw the tea leaves when we went to San Francisco and decided that to travel light we would share her laptop and I would leave mine at home. So I wasn’t snooping when I opened the laptop to find she’d been cruising a dating site for Arab men. I never said anything about it but suspect she met her husband through that or some similar website. In the end love didn’t matter enough for us. But I still get a little weepy remembering when she said “I love you. I will always love you.”

I could never feel anything but happiness about our time together. Everything was so easy with her. We maintained contact for a long time, I even got some dish on how the dude proposed to her in Central Park. But barging in on her life now just to get a glimpse of insight into what it’s really like is not going to happen unless she wants it to.

You know what’s kind of funny, getting back to the matter of our time together being such a secret, is how I cannot see almost any of the comments on her pictures. Everybody in her circles is secretive, trying to slip under the social media radar while still being there. She was like a Swiss Army Knife of Facebook permissions. Family could see this, a certain circle of Egyptian friends could see that, very few people were allowed to see me ever…

Anyway, it was a good call, I think, but the fucking payphone, which I used just yesterday with no problem, left only silence in my voicemail. I went out of my way to use that phone since it seemed to be the most reliable one around.

…

I am meeting up with reporters tomorrow to spill the beans on how I’ve been doing the street theater. Not really nervous but also not sure what to expect. Whether or not I’ll let myself be identified is something we’ll work out as we talk. I could come forward at least in name but not on camera. This would be so anyone who has been seriously irritated by my little pursuit won’t recognize me and punch me should they see me on the street. But I don’t think awareness of this would ever reach a point where that is likely. Then again there’s been so much chance at play in this that maybe it’s not that far-fetched.

I could come all the way forward but with the promise that I’m done doing this, which may be true. I can move on now, having made my point that the smart city is pretty flippin’ stupid if I’ve been able to get away with this, and that it’s a badly-designed piece of furniture if it is so easily turned into a noise nuisance.

I also think the point should be considered that just because the services offered by these things are free doesn’t mean usage of them should be unaccountable. Usage of those things should have some kind of connection to who is using them, since illegal activity carried out over the kiosks could otherwise never be traced.

I’d love to know how the NY1 reporter got the number, and what role my actions played in Vonage being replaced, without any announcement, by RingCentral as the VOIP provider.

Gonna be a big day, maybe, or just another dud. Who knows…