I don’t know what to do anymore. I programmed a whirlwind of Perl/MySQL code yesterday, in the interest of creating a cipher that would be very difficult to translate. It’s not a new language. It’s based strictly on the 26-letter English alphabet. But why? What secret messages do I have to communicate in such a manner? I guess it would be fun to fool everybody, or to cause genuine bafflement. Efficiency is not its strong suit, nor was that a goal. It uses full words to represent individual letters.

That kind of programming/thinking, when I have not done it in a while, absolutely squeezes dry my brain. I slept long hours, though woke up once, which is unusual these days. I took advantage of the restlessness to do something kind of gross but necessary: earwax removal. Just dropped some drops and let them sizzle, while lying in bed on one side. Then turned over, thinking it would just gush out, but it was more blobular. But a lot of gunk came out.

Speaking of gross but necessary, this weekend’s 15½ mile trek through Queens included an experience first in my wanderings. It leads to a pro tip for any urban or suburban wanderer: carry a roll of Charmin with you. Not a full roll, necessarily, but enough to get you through an unexpected situation.

In my case I had to go, and luckily found a playground somewhere in Ridgewood. After I did what nature demanded I reached for the toilet paper in the metal covered container, where they make it difficult or impossible to steal the paper.

The paper was on fire. I pulled a bunch out and it was smoldering black with small flames coming off it. I guess someone had gone in there to smoke a cigarette (not allowed at parks or playgrounds) and stuffed the cig into the toilet paper dispenser. Couldn’t they have just flushed it?

With the smoldering scraps of TP on the floor in front of me I went for the Charmin I’ve been carrying around for years, remembering how a friend made fun of me a little when she saw that I carried that stuff in my bag. But then she conceded the point, that you never know when you might need that stuff, then admitting that she carries TP in her car.

I got a laugh out of informing this friend that I thought of her as I performed this little maneuver of getting the Charmin from my bag. I stopped short of introducing the story by saying “I thought of you when I wiped my ass today,” though her sense of humor is crude enough to handle such thoughts.

Exiting the bathroom I looked around, curious if this had been some kind of setup where kids outside were waiting for my reaction. That didn’t make any sense but I wasn’t thinking with complete clarity. I also looked around for a park ranger or some authority type figure but I guess playgrounds don’t have that.

I moved on, wandering through Queens. Maybe 10 minutes later I started thinking I could have called 911. But it didn’t seem like this little smoldering roll of TP had any potential to further spread or ignite. It’s just a bathroom, the TP dispenser affixed to a tile wall which didn’t look like it would have had any internal gas pipes or the like. Nothing could have ignited.

But by the time I started thinking along those lines I couldn’t remember the name of the playground, and I also hesitate to call 911 for anything potentially embarrassing, since you cannot hide your phone number from 911. I mean it could be considered ludicrous to have called a full firehouse out to tackle a tiny little roll of toilet paper.

But back to the headline of this post… I cannot decide what to do. A person like me, restless and directionless, is dangerous. My mother used to talk about a kid from another school in Tampa, saying he was dangerous. He was all kinds of smart, with straight A grades and I think he almost aced one of the standardized tests. But when the day came that he was allowed to drop out that’s what he did. He sat in his bedroom all day, every day, doing nothing. Or so he said. He might have developed some esoteric brainiac extravaganzas, like the cipher I, for some reason, feel determined if not destined to perfect.

It is hot, humid, and I feel like I am drowning in my own anxiety and indecision.