I felt like I was building a secret museum yesterday. A collection of content so secret that no one will ever see it. It’s not scandalous, at least not by my reckoning. But it is what I envisioned when I started accumulating the content a couple of years ago. It’s me showering. I point a surveillance camera at my bathtub and record everything I do, from the mundane and expected to the stuff that keeps the museum a secret. Watching myself is not something I do much, nor do I intend to now that I have months worth of documentary evidence showing how I shower and perform other acts in the bath. Sometimes I pee. Most times I masturbate, sometimes twice. Shocking, isn’t it? Single man lives alone and masturbates. Film at 11.
Speaking of being single again one of the shower captures had me talking to the then-girlfriend on the phone. I don’t think I told her I was naked in the shower as we had this conversation. I could have. She was safe for things like that, even encouraging at times. But this recording reminded me that I just discovered two days ago that she’s been calling me, sometimes multiple times a day, without leaving messages. I thought I had blocked her phone number, which felt like a mean thing for me to do, and I am not a mean person. But it seems I only blocked her number from ringing my phone. Calls come in I just don’t get a ring or even a vibration. So now there’s this call history of ignored/missed calls and I have to ask what she’s even thinking at this stage. I’m guessing she regrets ejecting me from her life. She said as much the very next day. But she said what she said and when I saw what she said I said “FUCK THIS.” I was never anything but decent and kind toward her but, as always seems to happen with me, I summoned abusive tendencies from her.
I don’t even want to think about this. I’m feeling sad and vulnerable again, as the season changes and I was not prepared for that. What concerns me this year, and for the last couple of months, is how late I sleep on days off. I simply do not want to get out of bed. Yesterday I was there almost until 11am. I normally rise at 5 or 5:30, so these kind of variances are not good sleep hygiene. The difference has been that I take my fist full of pills and then go back to bed, feeling the calming effect the BP and anxiety meds have on me. Normally I don’t really feel that. I breathe serenely, but every minute that drips away feels like waste incarnate. Normally I’m in motion after I take the pills. I gues the effects actually are felt just not as explicitly or beautifully. In the early days of taking these pills I’d feel a certain down-ness, like a sinking, almost dizzy feeling. That does not seem to happen anymore, although I typically pop the pills while seated in the shower, where such a sensation would not have much impact.
I don’t feel good, though. I feel numb, and stupid. I take some joy in the new-fangled commute. I don’t have to cross Broadway anyore. I hated that part of the journey, and find that all along it was never really necessary. A stairwell leads to a passage connecting to the Fulton Center, which sends me up an escalator where I emerge at the John Street exit/entrance to the Fulton Center, a location typically inhabited by scowling, howling vagrants (do we still use that word?).
Yesterday, restless and disappointed with my existence, I took a train to an undetermined location, which ended up being Woodside/61st Street. I looked for a winter jacket for myself, finding nothing satisfactory. Pockets are key in this decision making process, and nothing I found had pockets even big enough to hold my phone. And thrifying is not cheap anymore. New jackets at a shop on Broadway in Astoria are less than what the Salvation Army in Woodside was asking for used, visibly worn articles. I am very close to running out of money and reentering debt for the first time in well over 20 years. I do not feel good.
