Went out to Staten Island and then up through Bay Ridge yesterday. Bay Ridge, all I can ever think is “Ray Bidge,” a fictional used car salesman whose name simply defined him as a used car salesman from the day he was named. “Go big with Bidge.” “Bidge won’t budge.”
My mission was simple. A reliable source directed me to an abandoned payphone at a strip mall near the Prince’s Bay SIR station. This was an easy find and also reasonably impressive. The phone was intact, covered with graffiti but fully intact and revivable. It was ethically decommissioned by having its coin slot blocked, so no one should lose money thinking this phone actually works.
My next order of business is to find what there is on BDA Payphones. Their name appears on my old listings of Staten Island payphone locations, though not as frequently as other payphone service providers from back in the day. I don’t know what “BDA” stands for but it’s likely the initials of whoever owned the company. Or maybe it’s a running gag; Big Dumb Ass Payphones.
The ferry ride was uneventful in terms of seasickness. I don’t think I got it at all.
It was too cold to canvas the area around the BDA phone for others. Sometimes when there is one there will be others. Maybe there were but the winds were pretty rough and I wanted to get a bus from SI to Bay Ridge via the mighty Verrazano. I’ve made that passage a number of times but never by bus. I’m not sure why that seemed to be such a special thing for me but it was. Something about being transported by bus makes me feel like a child again. School bus associations? Memories of the school bus?
A moment for a favorite poem, author I can’t recall but should be lookupable:
School bus.
Hard on.
School bus.
Hard on.
Every day, same thing.
School bus.
Hard on.
I don’t get hard ons on the bus, at least I don’t think I do, not normally. Once a woman groped me on a Q101 as we sailed over the Queensboro Bridge. That was fun. Her lips puffed up but we didn’t get all out obscene, or rather lewd.
The video I made of yesterday’s stramble is over 40 minutes, including what I think is about 20 minutes of the S53 bus trek over the bridge. After finding the payphones by the bay I found the miracle bathroom up on the roadway, a humble structure I don’t think has any signage indicating its status as a public shitter. Afterwards I chatted briefly with an older man who was picking up feathers of a pigeon that had just been attacked by a Peregrine Falcon. He said the sky had filled with pigeon feathers moments earlier, and he was out picking them up. Why? I did not ask. Tidiness, perhaps.
I wanted to know what else that man did with his days. Was I becoming him, or he me?
There is word of a newly installed and fully functioning payphone in Bay Ridge but I did not have time to get to it yesterday. It’s at a bar, and I guess you could say its installation is something of a gimmick, but that takes nothing away from the fact that it really works and was set up by someone who knew what he was doing in setting up a VOIP payphone. I might get to it Sunday.
Not much else to report. Malaise about the job has new inspiration. I don’t know if they want to fire me or not but I wont be surprised if they do. Evidently I am required to contribute to a retirement account whether I want to or not. I don’t expect to retire from this company and fundamentally do not believe the 401(k) and similar setups are anything but a big banking scam. Now they’re going to take money from my paycheck to make up for contributions not made over the course of this nearly-a-year at this job.
Damn, I drink a lot of water.
