I don’t know how she did it.
She found where the softness is most vulnerable to attack.
She says it was a mistake.
If it happens again I will leave her, as I did before.
I see her on television, or in the papers.
Last time she spit out a stream of insipid, bitter lies, not targeting me but taking for granted the fact that she loved me more than I loved her. She wanted me more than I ever could want her. The lies she told involved babies. She claimed she never wanted to make babies with anyone but her current husband. That is an outright lie. We talked about babies, and what our children would be like. She exploded with some kind of preemptive envy when I showed her a picture of me holding my newborn nephew. She said that would be us someday, I would be holding “our” child and smiling.
But there she was on television pretending I never existed. As well she should. As I should reciprocate.
…
There is a woman I’ve been seeing in my neighborhood. It’s been bitter cold some days lately and I see her standing outside wearing pajama bottoms and a thin shirt. Slippers on her feet. She is rail thin, and when she stands outside talking on her phone she smokes a cigarette and drinks beer from a clear plastic cup. She paces about and while it is not my intent to eavesdrop I cannot help catching a word or two as I pass her by. Not enough words to form a narrative or open a window into her world, not that I intend to anyway.
Any time I see her, though, that thin body and somewhat troubled appearance with the beer and the non-winter sartorial appointments, I think “That looks like my next big mistake.” She will not be anything like that, I don’t think. But she looks like the kind of woman I’d pursue, or who would come after me. Troubled, toxic, and insatiable. My last woman was like that so maybe I’m projecting a bit. There is even a physical resemblance between this woman and my last involvement, whose repeated refrain of “Do you want to lie down?” comes back to tempt me into reopening that connection. The sex was good and getting better when everything else fell apart.
…
I got to the first part of transforming my WYZE cameras into traditional webcams. To produce 24-hour videos at present I go through a somewhat tedious process of copying the videos from the memory cards and using a bat script to assemble the 1-minute bits into 24-hour length snapshots of a day in the life of an ordinary street in Astoria, Queens. I did not know until recently that there is a way to use Docker on Windows to convert the cameras into more or less standard webcams and store the video files locally on a PC. That could make the whole project a lot more streamlined and comprehensive.
Unfortunately I continue to be unable to use archive.org for this project. Upload speeds for my accounts have been throttled and no explanation or remedy has been forthcoming. I actually tried uploading a 560mb video from a LinkNYC kiosk to archive.org yesterday. It claimed upload speeds of over 500mb. But it was the same glacial upload speed from LinkNYC as from anywhere else I try to upload 24-hour video captures to archive.org. I have no bandwidth issues uploading video to any other source. I didn’t plan ahead for that experiment, though. I shoudl have set up an FTP account on the new server to test that upload speed. Maybe it’s my device. It’s kind of crazy to realize that I can, in theory at least, upload 1gb+ files to a web server using free curbside public WiFi.
…
I had sex dreams last night. I remember nothing more than that I was being eaten alive and I liked it.
