January 10 2023 802am

4 days until the glorious 1-year anniversary of my employ at this august establishment. Will there be parades? Speeches? Awards, rewards, raffles and ribald bacchanalian orgies?

Doubtful. It could mean I get to move elsewhere in the organization or it might be my cue to just quit. It depends how the money looks.

In the meantime, who has time for such mundane ramblings… I riffed, again, on the word RESIN. It’s the only beer I drink at home, the Resin IIPA, or as they now call it DIPA. My riff starts with RESIN, uses only the letters from that word:

RESIN RISEN.
IN INNER SIN I
RISE, RINSE, SNEER.

Usually I leave it at that, since it succinctly expresses my wake-up ritual,  but sometimes I try for extra.

I SEE NINE RISERS,
SEERS IN NINNIES’
RISEN SENSES.

I don’t even know what that last part means. Who are the ninnies? What of the Seers?

There are two people I frequently see as I walk toward the subway each workday. One is a tall, rangy, baseball-cap-wearing man who seems to recognize me from our frequent passages. The other is a well-dressed woman with an uneasy look about her. I used to question where she started her trek but last week it appeared she lives at the Georgian Hall, one of Astoria’s named buildings. She is clearly going to an office somewhere in Astoria, and has the luxury of being able to walk there. I would like that, to be able to walk to a place different from where I eat, shit, sleep, and sometimes fuck.

The man I get little of a vibe or reading. He seems confident and directionful. I know now where he is headed but somehow 20th Street doesn’t seem like a common route people take to get to work. Cars use it to get to and from the RFK but with limited quantities of employers in the area it’s interesting to see who does report to work around the area.

I stayed at a friend’s place in a suburb of Philadelphia for a week. Every day I walked from his house to the SEPTA station, and every day I passed a woman, about my age, whose gait was determined and purposeful, at least the first couple of days. The more frequently our paths crossed the more I saw her stern countenance relax, signaling perhaps that she welcomed the familiarity of our daily passages and wanted to make more of it than just a visual passage.

But then I went back to school, and never saw her again. This had Spring Break so if I had any intentions of connecting with that woman I would have had to act quickly. I sometimes imagine she was a love missed.

I don’t get so wistful about current passages, although I concede to having heterosexual thoughts of a carnal nature toward one woman I’d seen almost every day on the subway. She writes poetry and posts naked pictures of herself online, making carnal thoughts seem perfectly reasonable. Thoughts are only thoughts, after all.

But I like to keep track of strangers. People with no knowledge of me would have no idea I keep little dossiers on their paths in life, for as much as I can summon. I should be a private investigator.  I justify the hobby on account of how most of us are not able to choose our neighbors, but I think we do at least deserve to know who they are.

But neighbors don’t know neighbors. I don’t think that’s unique to New York. We knew some neighbors where I grew up in Tampa but most were kind of a mystery. There is no camaraderie that I feel for living in the same building with approximately 30 other people.  We pass in the halls, courteously and not unfriendly. But never communicating beyond trifles.

I’ve imagined an alumni association of sorts, comprising everyone who’d lived in my apartment. I identified only two previous residents. One was a Japanese woman who moved back to her country after 2 years in Astoria. Prior to that the building owner’s son lived in there for12 years. I never dug deeper into the past than that though I probably could.

That alumni society didn’t sound very inspiring, but the idea of all souls who once whiled away their years in this transient space could one day come together, in a spirit of arbitrary congeniality.

I imagined a similar alumni society formed among people who share a table in a public space. Strangers at first, conjoined at the proverbial hip for the rest of their lives simply because they sat at a table together.

This is flimsy writing. I had more ambitious goals for today’s morning textsplat but it’s not happening.

Certain things I cannot write about in public. Sometimes I do anyway. Then I delete. I don’t need the misguided vitriol of thought police sweeping me into the lake where Nessie lurks. I posted a picture of a beautiful woman I saw on the subway but deleted it. We don’t talk about women that way anymore. We don’t talk about them at all. We look away.