It is worse for wear, with stains to explain and other stories to tell. But The Chair, the mythical, coveted, ultimately consummated Mission-style recliner chair that was my first significant purchase in New York, is now back in service. It feels good, too, The Chair. The stains are either wine or blood. It’s possible and even likely I collapsed on The Chair one night after cutting my head. But it might also be a wine stain, even though I barely ever drank wine and can’t imagine spilling wine in such a way as evidenced on The Chair. It’s possible a wine-willing woman of wetsterday spilled it but that’s kind of a long shot.
But The Chair feels good and, at least for the moments last night, like it has a fresh future under my butt. It still feels well-made and solid. I’d been using what I guess would be used as a beach or lawn chair. Very comfy if a little too much so, and also not built for something like using a computer mouse. The Chair has good flat surfaces on either side. My mother derided The Chair, and its flat armrest surfaces in particular, saying I was only going to use them to hold a beer. She wasn’t wrong but why, among infinite other innocuous or even positive comments possible, would she say that?
I slept well but remain unclear why my phone buzzed at 2am. There did not appear to be anything there. I woke with a hard, hard boner but failed to masturbate for lack of time and for performing my ablutions out of their usual sequence. There was no tawdry image from the Asian woman, though she had consistently sent photos of herself in the bath and on the piano bench pretty much every day last week. She knows my history with the piano but when she puts her hands on the keys it is obvious she does not play. I got another call from the woman I was with last year but she left no message. 2025 is shaping up to be a year of nothing on the woman scene. None for me. I’m not worthy or deserving. I am also unwrapping myself from the mindset that has plagued me since youth: That having a woman in my life improves me as a person, increases my value to society.
I made an interesting discovery yesterday, or rather re-discovery. I had a foggy memory of seeing phone books where, for whatever reason, businesses had the option of including their payphone number with their listing. The main number came first and the payphone could be listed next. I assume they paid a fee for this, and that it was one of the ways the phone company squeezed more money out of business listings. Or maybe it was free. I don’t know. I also rediscovered that, in my hometown at least, phone book listings someone’s included a separate “TEENAGER’S PHONE” listing when the family was rich enough to afford a dedicated line for their garrulous high schooler. Did family’s pay extra for this, the same way they paid to be unlisted?
I had foggy memories of seeing both these idiosyncracies in my hometown Tampa phone books but I so far fail to find evidence of the payphone numbers being included in some business listings. That’s because the scans I found at the Library of Congress are not converted to searchable text, as were other phone books from Alabama. I was able to find the teenager’s phone listing because I was friends with someone who had one, so I found it by flipping through the scanned pages and finally finding his name.
Including a “TEENAGER’S PHONE” number in a public directory sounds quaint by today’s standards. An obvious target for pedophiles and creeps. I wonder if it ever resulted in indecent calls or incidents…