No sooner do I consider tearing this place down — this website, that is, not this physical roof over my head — I find myself distraught and vulnerable upon discovering something amiss with its innards. A database error, corrupted table or somesuch, was easy enough to fix but had me shaky.
Shaky, but why?
I’ve been ridiculed for this kind of reaction by those who see me as a babysitter of a child that does not matter, that child being this website, more or less continuously updated since 1994, although at different URLs.
I don’t care.
My aggressions toward myself, toward my waste and failures, they show no signs of letting up. Meds yesterday had me feeling positive, but none of that led to any productive activity. I walked 11.7 miles, walking to what, walking from what I cannot say. It was a beautiful day.
I stopped carrying a torch for the woman I knew a few years ago. I walked past her house every single day, sometimes 3 or 4 times, hoping to catch her coming or going. My game is to make it look like we crossed paths at random, then reignite what was, truth be told, a perfectly flameless romance. She was a stripper, and quite possibly doing work as an escort when I knew her. A horrible woman, and even though seeing her naked was one of the great disappointments of my adult life (I had been hot for her for years) I trained myself to be insatiable for her, and to keep her satisfied. Since that 6-month dalliance (it was really just an extended hook-up) I’ve messed around with a bunch of women. Bunch… hah. I guess it’s been five. A 63 year old Chinese women from Jamaica. I ran away when she started talking about me moving in to her big house. She had magnificent breasts. I could hardly stay away from them. But she wanted too much from me, and we had virtually nothing to talk about. A 40-something Jewish woman in Greenpoint, who made almost no impression whatsoever on me. I remember her simply for being present, and for being extremely interested in herself. She segued into a 50-something Chinese woman born and raised in Flushing who turned out to be some kind of monster. We’d been dating about 6 weeks before she saw fit to tell me that 6 months earlier she had wired her life savings off to some dating site scammer who had her thinking he was a Marine in Afghanistan held hostage by ISIS, and that he’d be freed for $100,000 ransom. She wired off the money to him, emptying her 401(k). He turned out to be in Turkey, and a complete sociopath. She was not an unintelligent woman but something about the guy’s script and delivery piqued her emotional aspirations, and even guilt. How could she let this poor man rot away in an ISIS torture chamber? When she realized the scam and felt the sudden vacuum of loss open in her soul she first played pragmatic, attempting to make financial arrangements with her employer for some kind of loan. I lost track of those details, since anything she tried to set up seemed to have failed. With no other options she was in pursuit of a husband, someone of wealth she could marry and sue for divorce. Somehow she got the impression I had money enough to be a suitable candidate. Before fully realizing that was her game I made abundantly clear I had nothing near what she had in mind. Just like that the lights went out. It’s not a new scam but I’d never encountered it fact to face. I did not let it fester but, until that moment at the Oyster Bar when she announced her real intentions, I felt this was someone I could fall in love with. The reality of her intentions and plans washed that away. A few months later, on a Q66 bus to Flushing, I met a 26-year old woman, also from Flushing, who I nicknamed “The Japanese Waif.” She might not have weighed 80 pounds but she wore it well. We made every magical-seeming connection in our first conversation to make it seem inevitable this Q66 bus ride would end not over a cup of coffee or a drink at the bar but in her bed, where we fucked until this old man, almost twice her age, had to beg for mercy. She laughed, invited me back, and return I did. She lived in a basement apartment, its furnishings and placements a curious mix of spartan and messy. She was illegal, and made ends meet as a street vendor on and around Main Street, selling cheap jewelry and tchotchkes. Her housemate supplied the stuff she sold, and she also did work for what she said was his decently lucrative eBay business selling some of the same junk she sold on Main Street. Everything she did, and even her very existence, was off the books. My first memory of her apartment was a stack of what looked like 200+ copies of a Harry Potter book, stacked so high it looked like it was holding up the ceiling. A window-unit air conditioner sat splat in the middle of the room. I don’t even remember now if she had other furniture besides that beautiful mattress. When Covid rose up we decided, probably too late, to play smart, safe, and put our encounters on pause. The Japanese Waif and I both got Covid early, and at the same time. I don’t know if she gave it to me or I to her. Is it possible we somehow we gave it to each other? Whatever the case we attempted phonesex a number of times but she was just horrible at it. As fate would have it my quarantine was blessed with contact from a woman overseas. O, how we connected. We never met in the flesh, and probably never will, but the phone and netsex we had was like no other in my life, and that’s truly saying something. She left me shaking, sometimes for hours, and most satisfying of all is that it was mutual. I cannot count the hours we spent together, masturbating and sending pictures and videos, neither of us unaware that the anxiety and uncertainty of the times we lived in contributed mightily to our use of each other as distraction, and catharsis. But none of that takes anything away from the intensity, of the beauty she made in sound and sensation by reaching sustained orgasm for countless minutes. Her voice itself was a masterpiece, as were the hours of time we spent talking about our lives, and our experiences. In the end she just wanted to know if the love she felt was reciprocated. I told her yes. God, yes. Concurrent with her quarantine appearance I started getting phone calls from a woman who had found my contact info in a Nebraska tourism book. I did not write the book. I had donated it to Salvation Army and, as I regularly do, I rubber-stamped the inside covers and random pages with a custom-made stamp I assembled with my own two hands. It had the WSBJ.com web address, my public phone number, my PO Box address, and the words “I WANT TO LIVE FOREVER.” I do this because I think it’s neat knowing whose hands a book had passed through, and because I wanted to possibly connect with someone at random via this conduit. After donating hundreds of books thus stamped that connection I’d dreamed of finally happened. She found the Nebraska tourism book at a Salvation Army in Murray Hill, and started calling me at the phone number stamped therein. She said she’d listened to my piano playing and thought I should come to her place and play her Yamaha baby grand. Her lover had been a pianist and she spoke of lying on the floor under the piano when he played, listening to the sound and masturbating to it. Our conversations turned painfully intimate, with her accounts of her lover dying from Covid, in her arms, drooling thick mucous and suffocating on himself. She got Covid too but recovered. He had preëxisting conditions that made his survival virtually impossible. I cannot lie, as emotional and spiritually starved as these conversations were I did have it in mind that it might lead to a cathartic, month-long fuck frenzy. But that would have meant cheating on my phone sex lover, and I am constitutionally incapable of cheating on anyone. Further to that I soon recognized my role in this relationship. I was to listen, affirm, sympathize and function as a sponge for her outlay of grief. The calls stopped and I never heard from her again. I don’t even remember her name. The overseas netsex lover and I had decided our encounters were too intense to sustain. With no foreseeable opportunity for foreign travel and thus no foreseeable time at which we could turn our words-on-words into flesh-on-flesh we mutually, and amicably, did what the Japanese Waif and I did. We put thing “on hold”, probably forever. I don’t know how many weeks or months followed before the Japanese Waif reappeared, lusty as ever. With ample mutual assurances we were getting tested regularly we resumed our guileless, daffy encounters. The say she turned 27 is when things got weird. She got deported on account of being a compulsive shoplifter, and a real pain in the ass for a bunch of Flushing-area store owners, not to mention ICE, which gave her every last possible chance to heal herself of the compulsion to steal. I knew she was illegal but had no idea about the shoplifting or how much trouble she’d been in. I knew nothing about that until a call from her upstairs housemate came to inform me she had been deported. She and I were strictly fuckbuddies but still, I liked her and cared enough about her as a human being to feel some level of loss, shock, and chagrin. Her housemate assured me she would be safe and taken care of back in Japan, where she had family and a place to stay. She never stole anything from me, as far as I can tell, but as her housemate explained it shoplifting from a store or entity stirs an adrenaline different than stealing from an individual. I also later learned, when changing the sheets, that she was a bedwetter. I know how to pick ’em. Next in my life was a doctor,. I’m not ready to talk about her yet. It’s too soon. It ended perfectly amicably but the emptiness of our encounters was enough to make me ask why I think think I need or even want a woman in my life? Cannot I be happy with my own company?
