Game Over

OK, then, my little street theater fascination is officially over, at least where the phone call shenanigan is concerned. I had been concerned about the irritation this project might have caused in certain scenarios. I’m thinking outdoor dining establishments where everyone is calmly enjoying brunch when out of nowhere one of those stupid machines starts screaming at them. Or maybe someone working peacefully at home is unnerved by strange sounds coming from the loudspeaker someone placed right outside their living room window without asking if that would be OK.

But really, I think the sounds I spewed out pale in comparison to more universal noise nuisances of car alarms blaring endlessly, raving lunatics, and (of course) ice cream truck jingles. What’s more, the noises I made rank maybe even a notch below the disturbance caused by people making “legitimate” phone calls, screaming into the machine as the voice of whoever they are talking to blasts loud and clear for all to hear.

Reaction to the last Gothamist piece seems to have been mostly positive, and my endgame seems to have played out about as close to target as I could have anticipated. Those who say they hate what I was doing out there don’t seem to understand what LinkNYC is, and that’s a demographic (of sorts) that seems to include people at Intersection (the company that put these machines on the street). I don’t know how much those folks hated all this but I have good enough reason to think there were turncoats at the company who fed information to NY1, if not other media outlets.

But enough of that. It’s a trifling footnote. I’ll be looking for a job in 2019. I have no idea what it will be or if I have any chance of finding something where I could be of value. I’m a creative thinker but that tends not to be as welcome a commodity in corporate as the suits make it sound. I’m a hard worker but who isn’t? I don’t need or even have the desire to make a lot of money, and I am the farthest thing from a career-minded individual. Still, I could take a job at a company and stay for some years. Whatever I do I cannot continue doing what I’ve been doing.

I was working on the Payphone Radio again, and I added two new tracks to the Dream Radio. I had not been able to remember a dream for at least two months but yesterday and today I squeezed out a couple of foggy narratives about being at the Olympics and being in a social circle with someone who called herself “Rice Pudding”. I’ve been sleeping under a 25-pound weighted blanket and I think it truly has changed how I sleep. For my weight I was supposed to get a 20-pound blanket but I asked for 25 because I always like to go big. If my Snore Radio recordings are any indication I still seem to squawk and wheeze under this blanket, though not so much if I don’t drink at all.

I woke up Christmas Day with what is becoming an all-too-familiar desire to purge my space of objects and eyesores. I’m still looking at the 800-page folder containing my father’s living trust documents. He died over 13 years ago. I did think it reasonable to retain all that estate stuff until the building he had lived in finally sold. That finally happened about 5 years ago. But at this point in time there is no reason, I wouldn’t think, to keep any of it. But I should shred at least the pages with personally identifiable content.

I am also looking at a plastic container which holds a bunch of little scraps of paper containing phone numbers for the Apology Line. In addition to the phone number each scrap of paper includes a single word. So a scrap of paper might say “APOLOGY 255-2748”, another reads “FORGIVENESS 212-255-7714”. Some of the more desperate scraps read “AGONY”, “PAIN”, and “SAGA” followed by one of the three phone numbers you used to be able to call and listen to or leave a statement at Apology.

I still have this container of paper scraps because I was the one who created and printed them. I left these paper bits all over the place as advertising for the Apology Line, and I remember Allan Bridge (née “Mr. Apology”) saying that this and other things like it that I did actually worked in reeling in new callers. I also transcribed excerpts from the Apology tapes and printed them onto stickers which I stuck on payphones and other pieces of street furniture in midtown.

But I still have these scraps, some 25 or 26 years later. I’m not intending to reminisce about my involvement with Apology. I just don’t know why I let my mental and physical space be perpetually furnished by aging items of use or value to nobody.

Then again if there is ever some kind of Apology renaissance I would be one who possesses potentially unique bits of ephemera related to the project. I don’t think I ever got proper credit for the work I put in to Apology, specifically with the creation and production of the magazine. But at the time I don’t think I wanted any credit, given the somewhat murky cloak of anonymity that characterized the project.

I tried to shower standing up yesterday for the first time in over a year. It felt altogether unnatural. I started showering sitting down over a year ago. Yesterday I didn’t stay standing for long. It also seemed to confirm that I’m saving a lot of wear on the shower tiles by not blasting water all over the place, as tends to happen while showering in the normally ambulatory posture.

In other boring reflections I find, not all that surprisingly, that Google Maps has a lot of errors. The errors seem small but given Google’s ability to rename neighborhoods and influence other real world circumstances it might be worth assessing the possible disruptions some of these errors might cause.

First of all, though, what got me looking at online maps was the odd discovery of another Queens street-numbering vagary. On Astoria Boulevard South the other day I saw that 44th Street for some reason turned into 43rd Street. I later discovered that in Astoria north of the Grand Central Parkway there is no 44th Street to be found. How do mistakes like this happen? I suspect 44th Street’s union with 43rd had something to do with the construction of the GCP (specifically the 43rd Street overpass) creating the perhaps unintended consequence of making it impossible for 43rd Street north of the GCP to connect with 43rd Street on the south side of the GCP. But 43rd Street had to connect with something, and 44th was the only option based on where they had to place the overpass.

This discovery of yet another Queens street-numbering weirdness led me to scroll through other parts of the area on the various mapping services, where I found mistakes of varying severity. I think the most notable error is where Google Maps claims there is a 32nd Avenue between Broadway and 31st Drive. That strip of pavement is really an alley lined with parking garages, and has no street number assigned to it. But I would bet that if you asked Google Maps for walking directions from the Bel Aire Diner to Jamesie’s Place on 31st Drive and 14th Street it might suggest you walk through private property to get there. OK, I tried that, and it did not direct me to 32nd Avenue, but then this wouldn’t be the best example of what can go wrong since the fictional street is so short.

OK, that’s boring even me.