Yesterday was like my olden days, yesterday and the day before, to be exact. Wandering areas I’d never set foot upon. Guy R. Brewer Boulevard had a payphone, fully intact but spray painted with graffiti and, of course, not working. It looked like a Verizon but closer inspection might have revealed it to be one of those models that looked a lot like a Verizon but was really a COCOT. With no specific direction in mind. This phone was alos a twofer, with an intact Telephone Exchange Name on a sign above the phone. Unrelated to the phone it was for the mkaer of the fence behind the phone. BANCUSO IRON WORKS, with their old JAmaica EXchange number.
I just walked and walked, tallying as much as 20,000 steps according to one of those fitness apps that tracks my every move and sends it off to China or Ireland, I forget which.
A large crowd of people had assembled to pick up free food at a distribution site, I believe that was on or around Tuskegee Airmen Way. I was impressed bu the quantity of people, there must have been hundreds, lined up for free food. I’ve seen sites like this in my part of Queens but the lines, except during Covid, are never like that. Some people dropped potatoes and large carrots onto the road.
Most unnerving, and I cannot deny that my gut clunched a bit upon encountering this, was a fake dead body, or something like it. My immediate thought was “how could something like this sit on a City sidewalk as people pass by frequently?” That was during the brief moment when it seemed possible to me that this was a human corpse. Butas I neared the object it was obviously not a freshly dead human, just someone’s artistic rendering of such an unfortunate possibility.
There is more to report but there will be not enough time. I should see if I remembered to upload the video of the payphone to YouTube. Looks like I did not. Maybe tonight.
I slept interestingly. Asleep earlierr than usual, this only ever means I wake at 12:30am and fight my way back to sleep. I don’t use sleeping pills per se but Carvedilol has its way of functioning as a sleep agent. I’ve been reminiscing about my meds and how they have changed my abilities to stay calm and not let anxiety take over. I still encounter triggers but the meds keep the whiteness at bay, most of the time at least. You are supposed to take this stuff “as needed” but I never know when I will need it. A few weeks ago I encountered a co-worker on the subway. He is exactly the kind of guy who would have caused me to nearly hypervenitilate over a year ago. He spoke continuously, no stopping to breathe, talking about marginally interesting things but never stopping to take questions or make a conversation of it. People like this don’t just trigger anxiety because I can’t possibly keep up with them. It’s because I feel like they are spinning out of control, a condition that I could experience just as easily but when it happens to me no one will know because it will be silent. All that spinning of words he was gushing forth unstoppably is what circles the drain inside my head, never fully emptying itself and never slowing down, at least until the last year or so. But I kept it together this time, deliberately controlling my mental tics and reflex actions and not letting myself go white inside.
