I had a dream in which my sister and her husband announced they were going to a place called Peanut Butter Park. It was an amusement park with a peanut butter theme, something every childhood never knew it needed until now. That is pretty much all that is left of the dream in conscious mind. There had been some conversation before but it was perfunctory, and all intended to clear a path for the big announcement. “We’re going to Peanut Butter Park!”
My dreams, like most peoples’, slip away when the eyes open. I had one last night in which I wound in some kind of camp. They were not ready to call it a concentration camp but I began to surmise that it was exactly that. A place where many of us would die, we just had to wait for our name to be called.
I found a shower stall that looked inviting. Small enough to be a teleportation chamber but I doubt anyone could fit into it. As a shower I wanted in, badly. It was clean, stocked with soaps and towels, and it had a sun roof through which air could come and go. It just seemed like a perfect shower but my frustration grew to anger when I found it would be impossible for anyone to squeeze in, thus explaining its pristine state. If I did get in I’d be trapped forever, in a shower of deathly delight.
I gave up trying to fit into the shower and returned to a room full of beds. This was where we all waited for our names to be called, and for us to be summoned to a fate unknown. One person in the room was someone from this office where I work. I don’t think anything from this job has ever followed me home, at least not into my dreamspace, but there she was, a 30-something woman for who I had a brief attraction. I barely talk to her… I barely talk to much of anybody here … but she seems like a nice, decent person.
In the dream she took it upon herself to open the windows and lift the blinds so we could see a beautiful day outside. There was a small body of water on which small boats floated. But she barely got the blinds to lift and we could only see a small shred of the water surface. In the process of her trying to arrange a better view she climbed up on top of something, I don’t remember what, but she put herself in a position that was directly over me. All I could see of her was her mouth and nose. It was very strange, not sexual at all even though I find this woman to be quite beautiful. It was as if some force went out of its way to make her look a strange and awkward as possible. I felt no kind of attraction to her, which is oddly true in reality too. Beauty is a thing but as I said, my attraction to her was brief, lasting until about 10 seconds after she started talking.
I’ve been away from this office for a few days. I don’t know if the time off and the subsequent return had me mentally comparing this to a concentration camp. That’s a pretty ugly stretch. In the past I drew parallels between having a job and going to jail. This analogy also seems stale to me now but it made sense in the context of having not had a 9-5 job in almost exactly 20 years, and having to make mental and lifestyle adjustments before transitioning from the flaneur life to the office. Sure, it’s a prison of sorts. It’s not really where I want to be but necessity beckons., and being alone at home for 20 years wasn’t where I wanted to be, either
I did some city sprawling with my days off, two of them at least. One day was too much rain so I stayed home for most of that. Made it out to Gowanus and Red Hook for payphones and PRAY. Also made it to Ozone Park to check on a phone I’d only found on Streetview. I spend part of my days looking at maps, and to make an otherwise meaningless job feel productive I sometimes find a new-to-me payphone worth investigating. I look for the fully intact phones to see if the number is still readably printed on it and I like to check if the phone was listed on my website. It’s a small joy that takes me back to when my website had actual relevance in helping people determine where unwanted calls came from.
Ozone Park is not new to me so I’m a little surprised I’d never seen this phone in my passings-through. I walked around the area a bit and was surprised how beautiful the Bayside Cemetery was from the outside. Very treeful. Rockaway Boulevard didn’t offer much for my sensibilities that day, except the smell of gas from the cluster of gas stations there was giving me a headache. The A to Rockaway Boulevard went quicker than I expected (on a Sunday). The conductor repeatedly announced that this A was going to Lefferts, not to the airport or to the beach. People were actually going to the beach in early March. I think it was over 60 degrees.
Subway this AM felt odd. Someone, who I presume to be an MTA conductor, opened the door and stepped into the crew room. He did not have any MTA logo upon his person, as far as I could tell. Another person, sitting on the handicap seat, was staring at me, right at me, as my eyes moved between him and the door that had just been shut. There is word that the National Guard is going to start screening more nags at random in the subways, which has people assuming there’s some credible information that an attack is coming. Are we due?
I also made a somewhat half hearted visit to the last phone booths of Manhattan, finding that none of them work, as expected. I wonder if anyone at CityBridge, with all its turnover, even remembers those phones are out there and that the consortium is legally obligated to keep them in working order.
The big disappointment upon returning home was that Da Vinci Resolve no longer recognizes videos from my phone. It reports them all as “Media Missing” or “Media Unavailable” even though they are there, where they are supposed to be. It picks up the audio but not the video. Could something be wrong with the Samsung phone’s video format? I spent too long trying to figure it out last night, bored almost to tears with the monotony of shit that just doesn’t fucking work.
Earlier, the day before, I had been the type of hero that would have been showered with adulation and blowjobs had any such appropriate individual been present to witness the triumph. I finally got the Lenovo tablet, the 27″ screen that has been my piano sheet music reader for several years, I finally got it to turn on again. It had been stuck in some loop where there was a problem with my PIN, but there was absolutely no way to fix it. Long story short it seemed the device somehow got stuck in safe mode without networking, so it couldn’t validate the PIN, which I never wanted on the device anyway but there it is. Some sort of check-in/handshake with Microsoft is mandatory if you simply want to turn the fucking thing on. I don’t know how it got stuck on safe mode but another curio is that the machine was also stuck in time. I tried my current password for my Microsoft Account but it didn’t work. I had to use a password from months, maybe even years ago, making this the first time I ever benefitted from keeping old passwords documented alongside the current ones.
Yes, I was the hero but there were no sloppy kisses or hand jobs at the piano as there would have been in previous arrangements. It’s fine. I’m probably too old for that kind of carrying on. Oh, no I’m not. Bah. I’m lonely as fuck these days and it’s eating my mind. I need to talk to somebody but not transactionally. At work I will not open up too much to anyone. That’s hard for me, in conversation, to not expand the palette of subject into realms far from what we focus on here. But for two years I’ve managed to keep my life outside of this place nobody’s business.
