Something unintentionally weird and even eerie happened last night. I was mucking around with AI video creation when I found a picture of me as an infant, taking my first steps, or what I have been led to believe were my first steps. It is a photo I’ve shared with others a number of times just to show how fucking cute I used to be before it all went to hell. I thought it would be fun to animate the image and show me actually taking those first steps, as if the still photo was recorded as a video. It worked well enough at first. I guess. I expected the animation widget to show me walking across the grass. But no. They Hallmarked it, and instead of letting me walk on my own I was instead met with the warm embrace of some AI-generated “dad” who was there to encourage me and congratulate me for walking all that way over to him. Where the hell did he come from? I did not summon another person for this little amusement, and in a gut-wrenching way I felt like a little bit of history had just been rewritten, or that history is now extraordinarily easy to rewrite. This was a trifling incident in the reality of things. A baby’s first steps. My first steps. I bastardized the moment by dumping into a machine that sanitized and embellished.
I’m at the workplace possibly the earliest I’ve ever laded here, just after 6am. It is very quiet and I see my reflection in a window that looks down onto John Street. I slept well and showed up today with a certain whiff of anticipation thhat a connection made on Monday will develop into something for Friday (today). There’s this crazy beautiful woman I’ve noticed for a long time now, and we had a bonding moment on Monday when we discovered the first-floor doors were locked, as is routine for major holidays. We made the rookie mistake of forgetting about this little custom, and it was curses to the forces of oppression that delivered us to this situation.
We made our way back to the elevators and to the Plaza level, where we were free to exit. As we left the building she started looking me up and looking me over in ways unmistakably flirtatious and inviting. She is someone I’d had an eye on now and again but when it comes to this sort of thing at the office I tread very carefully. I know virtually nothing about her except that she always seems to have a sly smile and she just has a calm, calming presence about her. And a beautiful body. Can I say that? With my luck she probably already forgot about our little encounter. 3 days is a long time. But I’m keeping my eyes open and my senses sharp for this one.
I paid a visit to the Kingston-Throop C train station yesterday in search of — what else — a payphone. There it was, mangled and manicled. I spotted this one on social media and, as often happens, I have no idea where or how I found it. It is gone now, whatever posting I thought I ./././//.
I just have to interrupt this reverie to comment that someone in the bathroom now sounds like they are throwing up. Loud, gut-spitting and coughing and now he’s at the dry heaves, unrolling paper towels or toilet paper, I can’t tell which, just to keep up with what I imagine is the instant cleanup job. That’s harsh, the sound. I don’t know this guy but I see him around once in a while. Hope he’s alright. Nothing really I could do to step in even if I was on any kind of friendly terms with him.
I nearly vomited myself last week. It would have been the first time in many years, but it didn’t happen, as close as it came to. I blame it on a delivery order of a cheeseburger. Something was off about that burger, not least of which the fact that I ate it almost immediately before going to sleep. This burger had all kinds of carbs and even sugary shit in it. The closest I came to barfing was when I actually knelt at the porcelain god and waited for the expulsion of the cheeseburger to begin. I remembered my mother, when I was a kid and got sick, she would see me sitting in front of the toilet, waiting for the barfing to begin, and she’d comment that she didn’t see how anyone could sit and stare into a toilet without vomit being induced. She would say that like an incantation, and next thing you knew the humiliating horror of being face to face with the space of air in which my shit and piss had passed through earlier that day made me cross the tipping point beyond nausea and all the way in to full-bore vomitus evacuationus. This memory, summoned again this past week as I sat prostrate before the shitter, got me as close to hurling as anything that night. But it never happened. Afterward things settled down and I got at least a few hours of quality sleep. Between that and a fistful of pills I felt perfectly fine the rest of that day.
I feel for this dude, who has returned to his office but stillhacks up an occasional cough that could be a dry heave. Some people just keep working through episodes like this. I know I would, too.