Yesterday I felt a strange touch. A woman I once came close to loving, who I wanted to love, who I would have loved if we simply had more time together… How’s that for an intro of woe? Aha, I care not for loves lost, flames dimmed, the past is the past and it’s staying where it is.
But it was interesting to find that one particular woman still even thinks about me, and possibly with some fondness, after what I guess has been 25 years. An early WWW babe, kinda crazy but weren’t we all? The technical barriers to entry were still pretty steep, as were (for me at least) the stigmas associated with being online. TIME magazine was still writing shit claiming the Usenet was 99% pornography, and talk of CP was not-so-subtly injected into any discussion of being connected to anything online.
I classify myself among the cast of mid- to late-1990s confessional bloggers before that stupid word existed. “Blog” never sounds like anything to me except a mix of “blah” and “log,” the latter half of the word implying lackadaisical fecality, because that’s just how I roll.
I don’t know when that little scene fizzled, or if it ever really did. I don’t think I get nostalgic for it, nor do I give myself any credit for simply being there. It’s not lost on me that accidently creating the internet’s first payphone website gave me some enduring credibility on the subject.
But that’s a niche thing. Being an early proto-blogger doesn’t make you a better writer or creator than people who came later. As rapidly as things evolved there’s not much value in having navigated Archie and Gopher servers, although the Dark Web seems to have gravitated toward those old protocols. I don’t know why that is, as the Dark Web doesn’t interest me much. People I know who do drugs swear by it, and that’s fine by me. But I found it kind of frozen-in-time over-hyped wasteland, with acres of txt files and warez once considered hacker gold.
The Dark Web, as I encountered it, resembled the early .MOBI goldrush, when all that old Usenet-scraped crap was resuscitated and ads slapped accordingly thereupon.
Blahblahblah… I was up earlier than usual today. I don’t know why. Saw a can for “food scraps” and thought SCROOD FAPS. SCREWED FAPS. FOOD WASTE? WOOD FACED!
Talked to someone last week who said she applied for a Mitchell-Lama apartment 24 years ago. In her 70s now she cannot reasonably expect to get a M-L place in this lifetime, and she wanted her $250 application fee refunded. The best offer she got was a $150 refund, which did not satisfy. What happens to all those M-L application fees, anyway? How much interest have they accrued, and to whose financial benefit?
I seem to remember considering putting myself on a waitlist for a place in a building on Broadway around 70-something street. I never did and suspect I would have been unreachable today based on contact info from back then.
Once in a while I call my old numbers and ask for me. I want whoever has my original (212) number to know that it used to be mine.
I was relishing the significance of how phone numbers are formatted. The parentheticizing of the area code, and the hyphenation of the 7-digit portion, is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest pieces of information design. It turned a too-long string of 2125551234 into digestible portions, with the area code, parantheticized (!), held off to the side as a sort of appetizer. The real meat of who you are calling, the unique code assigned to an individual or entity, is the 7-digit string formerly characterized by EXchange names. Those letters basically disappeared for most callers but the memory remains and a certain telephone cognoscenti sees (212) 255-2748 and thinks “Aha, ALgonquin 5-2748.”
The days of operator-assisted calls are not completely dead but dialing 0 for operator does nothing on most if not all modern cellphones. From landlines or payphones it might send you to a murky world of automated prompts guiding you toward what I do not even remember. Collect calls and third-party billing, I guess. I’ll try and remember to dial 0 at my next Payphone Radio call.
Phone numbers have changed in another significant way, more recently. Today you’ll what was previously impossible. Numbers like (212) 500-#### and (212) 700-#### have opened up thousands of previously unavailable numbers not just in the coveted 212 area code but in all areas. You never used to see #00 after the area code. WHAT AN EXCITING TIME TO BE ALIVE.
I was showering and masturbating yesterday when for no particular reason I had a fresh appreciation for that little luxury. Hot running water, a safe place to bathe and beat, no one to bother me except by invitation.
I’ve only had one shower mate in the last couple of years. I guess that was last summer when we started doing that. I still have the dildo I bought her. I wonder if she ever remembered leaving that behind, or if doing so was meant as some kind of signal, a reminder, a token of something…
Dildos are somewhat insane, are they not? Always happy, always hard, always ready to play with no complaining or expectations. They can also look kind of threatening when they form small armies.
