It’s supposed to be called waking up, up implying uplift, something positive, a lift from the valley of sleep. Why did I wake today feeling I was waking down? Numb inside. I was awake at 3am. Usually I’m up at 4. I noticed something unexpected. A spark flashed on the phone charging cable. Somehow the wire got twisted enough that the cover cracked, exposing the wires and basically rendering the charger close to useless. I replaced the cable. I may be waking down but I don’t need the risk of burning up. The sparks were not big or threatening seeming, and nothing particularly incendiary or flammable was to be found in its presence. But you don’t need to sleep with a spark. Not that kind of spark. I recalled the story of a Vietnamese girl who was electrocuted by her phone’s charging cable when it was in a state similar to mine. I was among the skeptics who doubted that a 5V charge could kill a person, but there may have been more to the story than was reported.
Could this frayed wire have killed me?
I used to think that charging a cell phone was expensive. I may have got this idea from an innocuous comment made by Matt Drudge on his now-defunct radio show. Or it might have been more recently when the cost of generating an AI image on Dall-E was said to use as much energy as charging a smart phone from 0 to 100. This comparison made it sound like charging a smart phone was a costly task. In fact it is not. The most you’d ever spend charging your phone is around $5 a year, and that’s assuming you live in an area with expensive electricity. Most likely it costs even less than $5 a year.
I spent too long in the shower today. The water felt unusually calming, and earthy. I turned on the radio twice hoping to get a weather report for the day but none was forthcoming in hte period of time in which my patience thrived. I felt soreness in my left arm, almost like atrophy. Is it from barely playing piano in almost a year? Or is it (more likely) from carrying an over-heavy messenger bag on my 20,000 step flâneur treks? I’ve tried switching shoulders with that bag but I can never get used to having the bag on my right side. I was born a lefty but mother forced me to be a righty. I sometimes imagine this has affected left/right issues such as this, where my mind simply refuses to accept carrying a bag on the other side of my body.
Yesterday I woke up, and felt decent and upbeat for several hours. Today I woke down, never feeling a spark of joy at this precious gift of a day. Maybe it’s a continuance of yesterday, when my good feelings were squashed by something potentially inedible entering my digestive system. What happened was, at the SW corner or 34rd Street and 7th Avenue a woman stopped and looked at me. It may have been recognition, or perceived recognition, but in the moment of our eye contact I believed she looked my way because she loved me. Her passion would take time to organize itself, and mine would take time to reciprocate and fully form our unique vocabulary.
She was pretty, with an amiable presence. I thought I’d walk her way, follow her for a couple of blocks to see if any clue about her life could be gleaned. But she walked too fast. She got away. Her love for me will bless another. As she disappeared into the mist of 23rd Street I spotted a cheap pizza place. $4 for a two-topping slice. The place had stools that were far too tall for the small counter at which they stood, but the dude behind the counter seemed friendly and competent. I had just been thinking about how much trust we put into the hands of strangers who produce and serve us our food. It’s a cultural trust that you will not be poisoned or made ill by the foodstuff of a stranger, even if the possibility is always there.
I dug into this slab of sausage and pepperoni pizza, confident it would be enough to get me through this fastable day. I tend to eat very little on my days away from the office. This 10am pizza slab was to be all I ate until the late afternoon.
The pizza was wrong. Something about it chewed badly. There was onion on it, when there should not have been. But it was about a third of the way through this immediately questionable slice that something unexpected emerged. It looked like a small clump of fabric, like a swatch pulled off of a plush towel or garment. Whatever it was it had no place on a slice of pizza. I rolled up the remaining two-thirds of the pizza slice, stuffed it into the trash, and left the place, returning to 23rd in search of love.
Even before the appearance of something non-edible this pizza had already twisted something in my innards. I burped an unusual number of times over the next hour, feeling nauseous but retraining my mind to not worry about it. Barfing onto 23rd Street would likely not impress the woman I thought loved me so, should our paths magically cross again. I had to keep that in mind. Be at my best should love appear.
Whatever sickening element may have been in that pizza made its way into neutralized digestive oblivion after about 3 hours. But it summarily and commandingly erased the sustained feelings of waking up on which I had coasted. I walked on, and around, directionlessly, eyes teraing up at times from the innardal tumult, each step feeling 2½ feet closer to some kind of grave, be it traditional in-ground, or just thrown into a dumpster. Either way it won’t matter to me.
Previously I passed through Penn Station to see if the word I got from a source was true, that the payphone there had lost its dial tone. It was true. No Dial Tone, or NDT, as as I abbreviated it on my original payphone site. Writing “NDT” always had a certain twitch to it because my father’s initials were NDT. I darkly humored myself with that anecdote at his funeral, thinking “No Dial Tone here. Not anymore.”
I made a mockery of the subway system trying to get from 23rd Street to the Brooklyn Public Library. I was in no hurry but through the twitsy shit in my brain caused by having possibly consumed a piece of fabric I guess I just didn’t care that I’d boarded an express thinking it was local, that I had to go through 4 or 5 stations before getting an F train, which was my second choice to the 2 or 3. Either line gets you a weirdly long distance away from the BPL, a journey involving many crossings of questionable safety, not to mention scaffolding around one of the structures that made walking on the street unavoidable.
The payphones at the BPL are probably the only working public payphones in the 5 boroughs. Other payphones exist but they are either in non-public places, like halfway houses or jails, or else they remain in use as the house phone at any number of pubs and restaurants. Four phones on West End Avenue do not work, not even for 911, and they likely never will. I went to BPL to confirm a hunch that arose after the last time I encountered them.
As they appear to no longer be managed by PTS, even though the placards indicate they are, I wanted to test the truthfulness of the claim that 50¢ would get you 15 minutes of call time, as was the norm for PTS phones. Unsurprisingly, this was not true. For 50¢ only 3 minutes were allowed before I was cut off of my call to 212-255-2748, the coveted phone number I acquired a few years ago for use as a way to access Payphone Radio by phone.
Mission accomplished I intended to walk Flatbush Avenue toward downtown Brooklyn. I encountered a Little Free Library which included books and dog biscuits. I’d never seen dog treats or any type of food in a Little Free Library.
I talked to a psychiatrist a few days ago. This was not a “session,” just a conversation with someone who happened to be a psychiatrist. She told me a I really need to start seeing a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. I’ve tried that a number of times. It goes nowhere. She said my anxiety levels were palpable, and that whatever meds I take are not very effective.
