I blame the heat from yesterday for the unstoppable desire to just keep sleeping today. Normally I wake at 4 or 4:30 but today it just coasted and coasted. At 7am I bolted alert, remembering a 9AM appointment in Elmhurst to get my eyes scanned for macular degeneration. I’d given up on this ritual years ago, when a LensCrafters employee’s questionable diagnosis led  to several years of getting my eyes scanned, scooped, poked and dilated, only to find no progression at all in the so-called symptoms. I contend that it merely looks like MD but that it is in fact scars or burns from when I looked straight at a solar eclipse when I was 10 or 11 years old. Only presidents are supposed to do that. 

I got to the Elmhurst medical facility on time but it was no thanks to my skillless transit planning. What made me think the 7 train played any part in getting to 55th Avenue and Queens Boulevard? Why didn’t I just walk to the Steinway Street R/M station, as I do most work days? Instead I ended up on an N train to Manhattan, where I will admit I did wield some transit planning acumen by knowing the R train to Grand Avenue would be across the platform at 59th Street/Lexington. Smooth. 

On the subway a young woman sitting across from me was utterly absorbed with whatever she was listening to through her headphones. When she was not reacting to the audio content she did not look disturbed or mentally unstable. But if you only saw her reactions to what she was hearing you might think she was a lunatic. Is that an acceptable word in 2025? I don’t know, but I wanted to hear what she was hearing. 

The oversleep and, I suspect, the heat itself had me feeling like a bucket of butt. This would have blended well with the expected ritualistic gouging of the eyes. But there was no gouging. No digging in with spoons or the threat of needles in my eyeballs should my symptoms have worsened. Just two rooms in which 7 or 8 photos of each eye were taken. We don’t know if MD symptoms worsened because this is a new facility for me and I don’t think they have records from previous doctors. But they called a couple of hours later and simply said to come back in October. No alarm or concern. 

I took a surprisingly huge dump at the bathroom there, with another even more surprisingly huge bowel evacuation a couple of hours later at home. Was I constipated without realizing it? The toilet at Elmhurst self-flushed. Magical.

When I left the facility I stumbled over to the Queens Place Mall across the street, where I discovered the LIDL store downstairs. A sandwich I sometimes buy in the FiDi is ½ the price at this place. I bought 2. When I enter Queens Place I always see the ghost of  a payphone that used to stand outside, and my memory of how it seemed to almost always be in use when I spotted it. It was owned by the only real friend I ever made from the hardscrabble world of independent payphones service providers. The phone, of course, is gone.

Neighboring Queens Center Mall used to have payphones on every floor, owned and operated by Interstate Telecommunications, based in Cumming, Georgia. I did not enter that mall today but I seem to remember lingering detritus of the mall’s payphone past. There may still be signs pointing to public telephones on the 2nd or 3rd floor, and signature metal plates probably still occupy the space on the walls where the payphones used to be.

I don’t know why I am writing all this. I never write from home anymore because I can’t stand doing it here. Nervous energy, fear of the heat, hear of the feat. I also attribute the oversleep to having a very successful air conditioner. It just works, after not having a working A/C in the bedroom for a long time. 

I just spent about 45 minutes at the piano, untangling a couple of Bach Fugues I played years ago, and relishing the all-too-brief Prelude in B Major from Book II of the WTC. Some musicians I know say Bach is the most overrated composer of them all but I disagree. It’s true that some of his passages basically write themselves thanks to Buxtehudism but he is never a lazy slacker. We can only imagine what flourishes he may have added to the passages that seem like filler.

I am finding WordPress to be incredibly annoying, as always. I try to paste a paragraph in between two paragraphs above it and that one paragraph I paste in replaces the entire content of the post. WP’s block logic is blockheaded sometimes. In the time it took me to copy and paste a paragraph in the spot where I wanted it I could have rewritten the paragraph 5 or 6 times over. Is web editing really supposed to be like this in 2025? I switched back to the classic editor, which I never should have disabled to begin with.