I sat at a bar for over an hour yesterday. Nothing notable occurred except for me getting some high scores on some of the video games. That is m legacy. My lore. Word of my accomplishments on the JVC video game console will echo down the centuries, as tales of the mastery and virtuosity will regale future generations.
My mother used to talk like that. She was a video game addict. Now and again after she triumphed on a certain level or got the all time high score she would accept a round of applause and an occasional standing ovation from a fantasy audience she had gathered around her performance.
I cannot lie. I’d had similar fantasies, clearly meant as a joke among me myself and I. I think my mother really had some aspiration to broadcast her game playing, but she was on that scene way before it was practical. Except for text-based MUDs and that kind of thing there was, in her heyday, not much of a scene in live-action shooting games being played competitively across the Internet. She would have loved Twitch.
Today’s news seems to be the incoming weather. Rain but no snow to start, then temperatures plunge for the weekend. Holiday travel will be a mess, and even subway travel should be unpredictable. We have no work from home option here. I would not want to do this job from home even if I could. My job is my job and my home is my home. In a perfect world ne’er should the two ever meet.
I made someone happy last night. A woman at the liquor store, who is permanently happy, locked in a state of perma-glee, nevertheless was visibly delighted when I gave her a Snoopy pin/refrigerator magnet. She alwyas calls me “Mr. Snoopy” because of my Peanuts t-shirts. I call her “Ms. Happy” because she is virtually always a bountiful, abundant source of happiness and glee. I don’t actually believe she’s as happy as all that (nobody is) but at least she’s reliable and I know what to expect. If the rock she wears is an indicator she is married, though she does not wear that gaudy hunk while at work, I guess because the latex or rubber gloves she has to wear do not play well with hard diamonds. When I briefly imagined her as a prospect it was before I saw her arrive for work, wearing that very expensive looking ring.
Yesterday sent me up Astoria Boulevard again, to scope out another derelict piano. I would imagine whoever does this also dumps pianos in other locations, to avoid a dragnet that DSNY would allegedly deploy to catch the people doing this. Sanitation is said to set up sting operations when they get reports of chronic illegal dumping but I don’t know if such exercises are effective or serve as much of a deterrent.
Trying to remember much of anything from the B train trek down to the Grand Street station, where I made it over to Orchard Street and other streets nearby. Seemed like a lot of young people live down there, doing what to survive I do not know. I felt like an outsider for some reason. I mean, I have no reason to feel like anything else in this part of town. I don’t think I know anyone. But this time it felt tiny. I felt tiny, like a necessary but forgettable breath of air. Little things almost made me cry. A soreness in my foot. A memory of a woman I used to know who lived somewhere around Orchard Street. The word “Orchard” and how I have no idea if it use as a street name has historical significance. So much of the history around me I will never know or understand. So much of New York I will never know. I walked past apartment buildings, almost entering a NYCHA complex before realizing it was not a library. Something about the entrance just said “library” to me.
Whose lives are lived behind the windows? What journeys begin and end with the steps taken through those doors?
Potentially interesting development at home is the formation of a hornet’s nest on the fire escape outside one of my windows. That could make for a fun webcam.
I was scrolling through one of archive.org’s RSS feeds yesterday. That might be one of the most random RSS feeds ever. From a newspaper in Brainerd Minnesota (I think) I learned of a brutal murder left covered up for months until the perp offed himself when police began aggressively pursuing.
Apparently the small man was intimidated and humiliated by his much larger wife, and he got fed up and chopped her up into several pieces. Just a nice little window into the world of 1930s homicide. I think this was February 1930.
Pretty much anything could turn up in the archive.org RSS feeds. Audio of church services mix with a band named “Glory Hole” then there’s a newspaper from 1930 and a bunch of cryptic metadata files that must mean something or they wouldn’t be there but it’s lost on me.
I read a bit in the CJR about how news websites do nothing in particular to archive their work in any meaningful way. Much of what passes through our newscycles today is terribly vulnerable to vanishment. Maybe all this will be gone soon.
