I am speaking this post. Dictating. This used to be extremely onerous, and maybe it still is, I don’t even know. It always involved going back and basically rewriting as if from scratch. You have to speak very carefully. That is one thing that has not changed.
I used to spend hundreds of dollars on software for this kind of stuff, and it never really worked. I was talking to a gastroenterologist, he was bragging about his new Dragon software that was going to allow him to fire his medical transcriptionists. He said the software got all the technical terms right, all the 20-letter technical terms. But it failed to get the in between words, like “if” and “what”.
I don’t know, what did I do yesterday? I got my 10000 steps in for a perfect month of March, I got as many as 20000 steps in every single day of the month. Big deal, right?
I walked up to 51st street to check on the missing pedestrian signal I reported a week ago or maybe it’s been 2 weeks. It is still not there and I don’t think it’s going to come back anytime soon. It is a difficult signal to report because it is in the middle of a block. Most signals are at an intersection. This one is not, and the reporting mechanism for communicating this to DOT is very primitive. So the contractors take the easy out because their contract, as strict as it is, allows them to do that.
From 51st Street, I went over to 31st Avenue to see if the Underdog payphone was still there. It is still there up at… I believe it’s 60th street, more or less. Just standing there, dumb and useless. From there, I tried to take a left on 60th street, only to discover that 60th Street is marked as a private street. I never knew that until yesterday. It is a dead end anyway, so I would not have been able to make it over to 30th Avenue as I was naïvely expecting.
Continuing east up 31st Avenue would have sent me into that kind of quixotic quagmire where Astoria transforms caterpillar-like into Jackson Heights. I thought about 69th Street as a destination, but instead of passing through that area I turned back south to 32nd Avenue.
The disconnect between Broadway and 32nd Avenue always puzzles me. Through Astoria, Broadway is what would have been 32nd Avenue, and the building numbers and street addresses reflect that. But Broadway after Astoria continues on about its way, and then 32nd Avenue just kind of appears over on the other side of the Woodside Houses.
I consider that patch of 31st Avenue beyond 60th Street to be mercurial, a mix of Astoria, Woodside, and transforming into Jackson Heights, three neighborhood identities struggling to prevail. I’ve always hated that word: struggle. It sounds like itself. It sounds like what it means. Onomatopoeia can be comforting in some cases. But not in the case of struggle. I don’t like that word, why did I just use it?
At 32nd Avenue and 57th street, a distinctive font typeface on a business’s sign reminded me that I had reported a fallen stop sign at this intersection. I turned around and there it was, standing upright. The last time I saw it, it was flat on the ground. Stop signs are supposed to be a priority for the Department of Transportation. It took them about a week to fix this one. But the funny thing was that I took a photo of it, and the very moment I took that photo I got a text message from the Department of Transportation saying that my report of this fallen sign had been closed. It was right at that same moment I was taking a photo.
I sent a Before & After sequence of photos of the fallen and upright stop sign to a woman I’ve been talking to, but she did not respond.
Last week, I also reported a pothole at Queens Boulevard and Skillman. Today I will go see if that pothole is still there. It is a bigass ugly pothole. What else did I do yesterday? I walked past the stripper’s house again as I do almost every day that it is reasonable. I went to the thrift shop that she and I used to go to. It is right near her place. This is why I end up passing by her house so often. I go to the thrift shop regularly and her place is right along the way. It was last week or maybe 2 weeks ago that I actually saw her passing by that thrift shop. First time I’d seen her in probably a year. She looks very different. She has aged quickly. As have I, I assume. She looked at me nervously with that same stupid lying smile, that lying smirk behind which she hides countless lies. That smirk is meant to maintain her control over our former situation, but it is not like that and not so deepdown she knows it. She has too many lies to keep track of. As she looked at me, I could see her steps falter, reminding me that she claimed to have retired as a stripper around the time we finally got together but this was almost certainly a lie. That faltering step seems like it might have happened to her often when she was on the catwalk. Every lie manifest as a physical misstep.
There was nothing of interest at the thrift shop yesterday but last week I bought a copy of American Photo magazine because my late friend Joe Gioia’s name appeared on the masthead. Joe was a contributing editor and founding member of the publication, and he would have been very happy to have found himself in this manner. He used to lament that after living in New York for 25 years he returned and could find no trace of himself, no evidence to prove that he lived a meaningful and productive life here. He finally found a book at The Strand, a collection of Polaroids that someone had solicited. Joe contributed at least one Polaroid to that collection, and there it was, at The Strand, his contribution to society. He would have loved finding his name in that magazine in this manner.
I’m not dictating anymore. It stopped working. I guess I hit a limit on how much speech-to-text one can do in a day? I was in the bath/shower. I did go back and edit, as expected. I never imagine that speech-to-text will miraculously capture every nuance. It did not know to put the double-dots over the I in “naïvely” but on spelling it nailed “Onomatopoeia” on the first try. I as a human would have required multiple attempts.
What else happened yesterday? As long as I started this narrative I may as well continue with it until the stories run dry.
I found a woman’s debit card. This is, strangely, the 2nd debit card I have found in a week. The last one had a very distnictive name on it and I was easily able to identify and contact that person. She ignored me. I sometimes forget that being neighborly in New York is usually considered a threat or a scam. I made it clear I could return it to her by mail or in a safe public space but she did not reply. I tossed the card into a sewer, which you’re probably not supposed to do but I wanted rid of the situation that I should not have created. I found a debit card some years ago and did the same thing, to the same outcome: Ignored and left asking myself why I even set myself up to look like a possible scammer when my intentions were genuine. Not that I intended to try but I don’t think you can do anything with a debit card unless you know the PIN. Anyway, I found another debit card yesterday but was unable to locate the person whose name appears upon it. Into the sewers again?