It is December 1, 2022. Didn’t think anything of it but this is the first 4-day break I had from this job. Unfortunately it was on account of getting boosted, which left me feeling like death warmed over for most of Monday. I slept 12 hours Monday to Tuesday and spent the rest of the day like a zombie. Wednesday seemed OK and now I guess I’m fine, but why do we even do this? I was told my 2 days off would be paid but now I’m thinking they might find a way to change that.
One of my websites got hacked. I took it in stride when learning it was just spam. Some scripts and stuff had me cranking out tens of thousands of spam mails every hour. There doesn’t seem to have been any destructive intent but I should keep an eye on things as best I can. I don’t understand my relationship with that stuff anymore, the dedicated server originally procured with reasonable ambitions It has since become an expensive pita. I don’t try to think about it.
I feel like air today. Just the air, breathed in, breathed out. I think I slept well but there was rapid heartbeat even though I took the beta blocker pill. These days when I don’t work I’m unmoored. I don’t eat, I waste time, I masturbate, I spend time forgetting the very moments in which I am the breath, the air. I forget everything.
Aw woman approached me yesterday, or maybe the day before. I’ve seen her around for years. She seems sane at first but the more she talks the more you see there’s something wrong. I may have a picture of her somewhere. She wears a clapboard type of sign on her front that has some text about having been screwed by the DOE. At least I think that’s what it says. We had one conversation that I can recall. She did all the talking. At first I was intrigued, even enchanted. She’s not unattractive. Waif thin, white, a kind of dismal, weathered countenance.
Is she homeless? I don’t know, but she is out there walking all the time, frequently on Crescent Street but I’ve seen her up on the Ed Koch/Queensboro and, yesterday, on Broadway. I was dicking around with a LinkNYC machine when she walked over and asked, as best I could hear, if I was a photo journalist. I later discerned she was referring to our encounter on the bridge, when my fancy-looking camera seemed to have captured her attention. I have a brief snippet of her on one of my Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge stramble videos.
She wanted to talk. She said something about how we had a conversation once, and that she saw me the day before, and she just kept seeing me around. I think she was implying that these repeat encounters signaled something, some kind of connection.
She asked if I lived on Crescent Street. I said no, fearing she might go further with the personal questions. She seems harmless but still, you have to be careful with people who walk around wearing clapboard protest signs claiming they were dicked over by The City years ago.I think I asked her if something was happening, if there was any trouble. She said no and started her retreat. I wasn’t going to give her the recognition she seemed to be looking for, the recognition that we had connected and had a conversation once. She seemed to think I was a nice guy. But her questions, in the moment, sounded like she was asking if I was a famous photojournalist. Maybe she remembered or was aware that I got a brief video moment of her in one of my videos. Maybe she wanted to talk about that. But it was noisy, and raining, and dark as we navigated this strange encounter by the LinkNYC machine.
I bet I will see her again. I think she follows me. She seems a lot nicer than another woman I see around Astoria. I call her Cocaine Jane because she always looked jacked up on something, with an urgent determination to go somewhere when it seems obvious she has nowhere to go. I loved her for a hot minute but then saw the trouble I’d be entering into.
But I did earn a glimmer of recognition from her. We’d been crossing paths everywhere from Ditmars to Broadway to the border of Woodside. On one day she shot me a smile, a recognition. That’s as much as we connected.
But the clapboard woman, I’m letting her linger in my mind. What does she do all day, as a modern flâneur? Is she directionless or purposeful? Wandering but not lost?
