I ended up in somewhat familiar territory. I don’t know anyone in East Harlem but I’ve rambled through enough to recognize some shops and, of course, spot some payphones. I only spotted one, at the Thomas Jefferson Houses on 2nd Avenue. But there are probably still others that remain along 1st and 2nd Avenues.

My mind did not feel like it wanted to be inside my body. My body concurred. I was walking off something, walking out, walking away. I ould have gone anywhere, and I did ride the subways a good sprawl. I keep meaning to make it up to Highbridge Park but I am plagued by contradictory feelings that it is just too far, too foreign, too much for me. It is none of those things. It is just a strip of land.

I discovered there is a PLEASANT AVENUE in Manhattan. Who knew? Who needed to know.

I wanted to go to the cemetery again, but with the chapel permanently off limits to the public except during Saturday Field Mass I have little reason. I did want to reinspect a mystery outside 4th Calvary, the mystery of 54th Street. There are, or at least were, parallel instances of 54th Street near the back gate entrance to 4th Calvary. Different maps show different info, though. But the street signs on the ground clearly showed one 54th Street with a few houes on it, and another 54th Street that leads straight to the cemetery gate. It’s a strange vagary of the Queens street grid, but ultimately harmless since the second instance of 54th Street has no buildings or addresses on it. Still, it could confuse the delivery peeps.

I am eating strawberries and drinking water, reflecting on a new contact made online last night. We communicated directly for the first time, and I followed up just now with a longer note. Oddly, it’s another Asian woman in Bayside; this after a rather clumsy attempt to connect with a statuesque Japanese woman in that area last week. There have been some other odd bits of kismet like that. I was trying to win the attention of a black woman named Crystal when another black woman named Crystal entered my life through the chat line I used to inhabit. She was my first black woman. The other Crystal, I later learned, was already pregnant when we met, and that might have explained her reticence. Either way she quit the job here and I don’t even know her last name. The Crystal I did connect with was in Cypress Hills. Being with a white guy was a big deal for her. I cannot say that being with a black woman for the first time was a nothingburger for me intellectually but after the novelty wore off race really meant nothing to me. It meant plenty to her, though.

I slept weirdly after the 1am connection with the Japanese woman. A long dream in which I finally had a breakthrough conversation with a woman I’d been wildly attracted to evolved into a sprawling series of conversations with women I never knew or who, as far as I know, never existed. The Japanese woman made no appearance, but as I slept I wanted her to appear. She never did but in a sense I guess you could say she did.

I sent a note revealing that my mother considered aborting me and that after his death I learned my father was gay. My very existence is an existential quagmire. Should that have been my opening salvo? I will find out soon enough.