Z

All eyes, all of mine at least, were on Z today, and last night. Is she my destiny? Am I hers? Are we each other’s density?

By virtue of her distinctive name I was able to piece together a rough profile of a talented designer and illustrator. A Malaysian export. I had not guessed that at first but also had not noticed her skin looked slightly darker yesterday than I remember from before. She also has tattoos but I could not tell what they represented.

Because of seating arrangements I talked to one of her friends quite a bit, with the bar-savvy knowledge that anything I said to her would be repeated to Z. Hoping so, at least.

She seems like a happy person, actually 1 year older than me. That is probably all I should say. I did not plunder and pillage the intertubes for info on her, but it is amazingly easy to find her exact home address, phone number, possible evidence of a husband who died.

…

I’ve been deciding what to do with the notes I take at this job. So many stories come alive with just a couple of words to summarize them.

Some of the voices sound so mysterious, or probing, like they are reporting something no one had ever reported before. An abandoned truck. A stop sign knocked over.

…

Nothing to report today, aside from tempered ambitions about meeting a beautiful new woman. New to me. I slept well, with dreamland seemingly pretty tame. I talked to myself about sleeping. There must have been madness and insanity in the dreams. There always is.

I might want to move on from this job. I feel like I’m in a cube. A deteriorating cube. Much of what I signed up for has already come to pass. I collected things, stories, and other materials with which I could wreak havoc.

I cruised up to Jamaica yesterday, never making it to my destination of Hollis and Hollis Hills. Somehow that area looked intriguing to me over the Cyclomedia. I took a portion of the Q54 I’d never been on, with much of the morning unfortunately consumed by a spine-weakening need to take a shit. I finally found a sanctuary, a library on Metropolitan Avenue, with a perfectly adequate shitter right inside the front door. It was righteous, but the hour spent focusing on this felt like an hour wasted.

I ended up on familiar buses, familiar byways. Jamaica Avenue. Forest Hills. Passed St. John Cemetery on the Q52 which I’d taken all the way from Rockaway a few weeks ago. St. John is large. I always think of it as smaller in my mind but it just rolls on and on.

I could have checked on the payphones in there but somehow I’ve come to be skeptical of cemetery photography of any kind. It’s private property and I have no permits, why should I assume I can just romp on in and document away.