Sometimes I stop and think about it: Why did my mind just flood with a memory of being a certain age, I don’t remember what but somewhere around 14 to 16? It was an age when I was supposed to be granted a summary gift, a token of progress. I was to be given a telephone. But I wanted my own phone, not the one my father demonstratively pronounced “YOURS.” This was the same phone others had used and would continue to use. It was not MINE. Father had no concept of ownership, it seemed.
But why now? Why that memory now? I can think of no reason.
Doctors appointment tomorrow. I don’t remember why. Might cancel. Been taking new suite of pills for a couple of months now. Well, I added one new pill to the suite, and made a daily dosage of the anxiety med a new fixture. In the past I took Lorazepam when shit reached a boiling point. When I got the shakes real bad, or when BP hit something impossible 200/100. I don’t get to that point now with the daily fistful of pills, but it seems like a bandaid solution. Something’s going to give.
I expect to get fired from this job, if I don’t fire myself first. I deserve to be fired for some of the mistakes I made yesterday. But everyone makes them. Right? I think I overheard someone making some kind of mistake yesterday. Didn’t say anything because who am I in this realm? Just a menial low-paid serf.
I tested negative for the -19. I had no symptoms but I ride the subway, never sanitize, often go maskless while doubting its efficacy when I wear it. It’s only effective if everyone does it.
I’ve been relishing color. One of the great crimes of my life has been wearing corrective lenses. They flatten color, and sharpen objects and faces in unnatural but subtle ways. Most people probably never notice but to me the subtleties of color and the nuances of shaped objects are gentler and more earthy without glasses or corrective lenses. It’s too bad I can’t see clearly enough to do much that is useful. It’s risky even going down stairs at the subway stations, and I only rarely do that without the glasses.
I looked around the subway car today, sans glasses. It felt real, and of the earth. Put on glasses and it puts a layer of plasticity, some veneer of fakeness.
I made an interesting video yesterday. Myself eating breakfast at a place on William Street. I severed all ties with the cute Asian woman at another establishment. The flirtations were getting weird and my interest was not sustaining itself. It is unlikely she is affected by this loss. I can’t imagine her weeping into the hot food buffet, adding the taste of tears to the scrambled eggs I used to get there.
I get my eggs elsewhere. Cost is the same and quality higher, though I am left asking if those eggs and accompanying sausage links truly exist. Am I eating air? Am I eating holes? If people see me engaged in this act do they see me behaving as a mime?
The zit that popped yesterday today shows as more of a scar than I expected. It won’t last.
I shaved today, reflecting on the woman I knew whose life changed in one significant way because of our time together. She now sits when she showers. She never did this before, and agreed with me that it was the best fundamental change to her diurnal routine that she could remember.
Of course she was half my age, and probably not of the perspective where showerly changes are of epic import. But it’s meant a lot to me and I was happy to find that the same was true for her.
Standing in a shower feels positively strange to me now. Awkward and wrong.
I get my daily Jack Welch moment when I reach for the towel, I imagine being Jack Welch and having servants and serfs arranging my daily shower just the way I want it, with the soap dish there and the shaving cream at the ready. A side table now holds the morning porn screen, but the most important element is the towel, which must be placed on the shower curtain rod such that it hangs long enough for me to reach without standing up. That seems like something Jack Welch would have specified in his elaborate post-GE parachute package.
I took a call from someone last week named Vivia. Vivia was the name used by the Japanese Waif who was such a sexual wildcat, insatiable for my body. I don’t think it was her real name. Japanese and Asians often use Americanized names. I never found a speck of her existence online.
I thought of her last week when I found myself explaining why I own a dildo. I bought it for her because she’d never had one before. She did not find it interesting. I wanted to watch her play with it but she couldn’t accept it as even a toy. With the real thing right in front of her what did she need this stupid thing for? I was thinking she’d take it home but she never did.
When she got deported she had to skedaddle quickly and I wouldn’t think the dildo I bought her, left at my place, was on her list of must-haves. I ended up playing with it with another woman, the chubby doctor who was happy to mess around with it but with 5 or 6 dildos of her own she didn’t really need another. She, too, didn’t think to take it with her when our dalliance ended. This is why I own a dildo.
She reversed the tables, so to speak, by getting me to play with that thing. I took as much of that 6″ girthy thing into my mouth as I could, as the doctor laughed so hard I thought she’d hock up a lung. She was not much of a laugher so this bit of watching much suck a dildo must have had some deep resonance for her.
