Category: Digital Hoarding

2014’s 9/11 Spike Was Weird

This bar graph showing the spike in web traffic one of my sites got on September 11 and September 12, 2014 somewhat eerily evokes the profile of the old Twin Towers.

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Bread

Someone dumped a bunch of bread on the sidewalk. I took a bunch of pictures of it.

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iSpy On Myself

I’ve tried countless webcam and surveillance softwares. This one was called iSpy, an open...

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“Games Women Play” (1970) (Sanitized)

A long time ago, an a Usenet far, far away, I downloaded a shit-ton of porn from the so-called “golden age” of the 1970s and 1980s. One of them turned out to be Games Women Play, a 1970 film which includes an...

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Aawwwwww

What does a man like me need in a circumstance such as this? One word: ASSURANCES. Thumbs up! From 2007, a seeming lifetime ago. Lifetimago.

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Email. January, 2001.

it’s good to see new stuff from you, a.k.a. man-who-is-responsible-for-the-phrase-‘crazier-than-you’-being-stuck-in-vari ous- nooks-and-cranies-of-my-head-for-the-past-half-year-and-turning-up-when-i’d-...

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The Desk In My Bedroom on Main Street, Oberlin Ohio, USA, 1989-1990

I might have kept that upside-down “PERISHABLE FRESH FRUIT” box because of its sturdiness. And the cassettes. Might still have those, too. That’s a silver double-cassette boom box (Magnavox?) on the far bottom left. That thing rocked. I remember blasting Paganini, Alkan, Pabst, Busoni, and the gratuitous 19th/20th virtuosi, ghetto-style, across the firmament of Main […]

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Anything To Say? Incoherent Rambles.

Strange moment of kismet the other day. A friend emailed a link to a story about Frank Sinatra’s habit of carrying 10 dimes everywhere he went in case he needed to make payphone calls. Moments later I went downstairs and...

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Can’t Stop Accumulating

This is the third day in a row I woke up thinking I’d buy a 7-day unlimited MetroCard and spend the week bolting all over town. I do this a few times a year. Today I planned to canvas parts of Throgs Neck and neighboring...

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Driving to Coney Island. September, 2006.

Found this random, forgotten video of a friend and I driving to Coney Island in September, 2006. It was a spontaneous thing, as my friend driving the car was prone to indulge in and sometimes get me to go along. It’s rough...

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Coney Island Revisited. From August, 2002.

The previous post about the found photo from Coney Island and subsequent rambles inspired me to dust off a series of shots I got on the boardwalk there in August, 2002. I pared it down from over 200 to exactly 100, which is...

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181 Everywhere

One photo accumulation I started but lost track of involved sightings of my magic number, 181. PO...

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Unrecognizable

I got hung up on taking pictures of myself in mirrors and reflective surfaces around this city...

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Missing Masklessness

I don’t get nostalgic, at least I don’t think I do. But for some reason this video, from 9 years ago, makes me realize how much I miss masklessness. I never would have thought I’d get sentimental for seeing people yawning, or...

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Filtered Faces

Rummaging, again, through my oceans of scans, photos, and other digital detritus, when I found...

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A Waltz I Think I Wrote, But Not Sure

These two takes of the same short piece are from December, 2004. I find nothing else on them, but feel reasonably confident this is something I could have written. If you the composer to be someone else please let me know....

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Industry

Sometimes I find evidence of work performed, industry exerted, and mental ignition lit over...

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Force of Nature

Here’s audio I made describing a woman I spotted while talking on a payphone yesterday. She paced back and forth outside a doughnut shop, drinking from a bottle of beer she carried in a black bag. She had a steely,...

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Family Tree

The family was having a good old time when dad decided to bring things down to earth by reading the family tree. He had a late-life interest in genealogy, suddenly becoming best friends with distant cousins he had never...

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Indent

The red-inked bloodbath teacher in these scans, Ruth Allyn, is, as far as I know, the only person...

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A Found Piano Playlist

I know I posted one of these before, the “Incantation”, but I’m not sure about the rest. Some of this is pedantic yet has its moments, while the “Song Without Words” is ace. Prelude, August 25,...

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Frames Madness

Some said that frames, an innovation from the labs at NCSA Mosaic, were and abomination, akin to...

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Record Everything

I am letting myself be recorded 24/7, or at least attempting continuous documentation. In this pursuit I finally did what I’d been curious about for years: I watched myself sleeping. I’ve have long wanted to explore...

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The Things We Keep

Since last year around this time I’ve been surrounded by my past, present, and possibly future. The past returned to my space in the form of handwritten and typewritten papers from as far back as grade school that had been lurking in a storage locker for as many as 15 years. I once again have […]

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Hyenas and Elephants, Oh My

Strange discovery. I spotted a 4gb .WAV file on my phone, and figured I had left the voice recorder running by mistake. That’s happened a few times, and when it did I just deleted the file. Not this time. What happened was I was trying to record Joe Frank off the radio in the kitchen. […]

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Shower Talk: I’ll Never Know What Happened

I’m not proud of what I am discussing here, but I’ll move on. Going to try and dump some of the shower talk tracks into a Shoutcast stream. Such a daunting seeming task with so many hours recorded, and so much to edit out. This sounds OK to me, how’s it sound to you? These […]

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Fun With the Muze Machine

I would never have remembered this without finding the scrap of paper shown below. At Tower Records it was kind of a thing for the employees (and customers as well, for all I know) to look up 4-letter words in the Muze database machine. We must have laughed and laughed at this one, which I […]

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TimeOut NY First Ever Issue

Holding on to the first-ever Time Out New York issue like it is going to make me rich some day. But also because Mira Sorvino looks hotter than a midnight cup of coffee.

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JACKHAMMER

The dude in the pictures is not the person or persons running the jackhammer in this audio. He is from March, 2000, or at least that’s when I first posted the pictures of him. The audio is from February, 2011. This jackhammer racket was right outside my bathroom window, which is close to my bedroom, […]

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Happy Mousepad!

I don’t remember from whence I procured this ludicrous mousepad but it is no longer in da house. As is my wont I find that I cannot throw something away without photographing it, adding to my ever-increasing accumulation. I am a digital hoarder, and it has come to a point where my mind is drowning […]

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Caught Up

Soooo, caught up on some payphone calls from the last few weeks. That’s maximum entertainment value, I say. I find the payphone calls eerie at times, and I suspect others would as well. Who do I think I’m talking to? Who do I think is listening? Why am I saying these things, and in this […]

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October 19, 2000. First Day of the Truest Form of Wealth.

Rummaging through old papers I found this bit of scrawl on the back of a money.com business card, from when I was Director of Technology. I remember this day, on which I once and for all paid off the student loans that had hung over my head for about a decade. I know now relatively […]

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PLaza-8-2272, and a Woody Allen Autograph

It’s been a scanning day here. I am feeling somewhat reflective since the brief hospital stay, reflective enough to scan away some ephemera and detritus, discarding the paper but scanning it away into the mountainous digital remains of my eternity. Here is a photo that has been in front of me for months. I only […]

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My First Webpage

Just found my first-ever website, or webpage rather, moldering away on an old drive. It was last updated 9/9/1994 but had been online from early 1993 (I think), sometime after Mosaic came out. The original version of this magnificent webpage was at Panix, and had a picture of Yoko Ono’s butt and just a few […]

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New Years 1994

I remember this. I don’t consider myself a sloppy, stupid drunk in public, at least not anymore. But when I hung out with a certain friend from college (unnamed but present in this little story) I think the behavior was contagious. Yeah, I remember cartwheeling straight out onto 6th Avenue and then pissing out of […]

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MEMOS, and Apology Remarks From 1993

I just found a document called MEMOS.doc, 83 pages and 39,989 words I wrote while not working at my first real job in New York. I was some kind of coordinator at Avon Products, the cosmetics company, and from the looks of this I had all kinds of time to burn while soaking up what […]

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Queens Map 1922, Rand McNally

Found an enormously huge JPG of a 1922 map of Queens on the RAID tonight. I’ve looked for this a few times and was never able to find it because I could not remember the year or the publisher or anything except that somewhere in my downloads I had an old map of Queens. A […]

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Broadcasting, and I Remember Me

My piano music was playing on as many as 10 kiosks earlier, now it is down to 4. This is what I guess is called getting back to my roots. I cannot hear the kiosks from here, of course, but I could earlier when I turned them on outside. This has every possibility to be […]

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Receipts in Retrospect (RiR)

I guess it’s been 3 or 4 years now since I started taking pictures of my receipts and using an app to send them to a company in Florida doing market research into what people buy. I haven’t cared much about my data being accumulated and monetized, though it has started to bother me just […]

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Mother and Daughter

Well, I thought this was a beautiful picture, and I am glad that 59 others on Tumblr seem to agree. This photo is love. https://sorabji.tumblr.com/post/170126882235/mother-and-daughter-1950s-kodachrome-slide

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Ramble Hoarding/Hoarding Ramble

Digital hoarding. The documentary team that came calling a couple of years ago, or its director at least, wanted to focus on that aspect of my online existence. It’s not out of a sense of missed opportunity that I find myself reflecting on that possibility. It’s just that I think the director was after something […]

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Reading, Writing.

Last night I randomly found myself looking at words I wrote about 4 years ago, when times were bad but also conflicted. I don’t know how the cursor landed at that particular block of text, which is somewhere in the middle of 60,000+ words that comprise Part VI of The Road To Elvis. It’s interesting […]

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Rachel

Here’s an IRC log I mentioned in the previous posting. It’s from 23 years ago. [LOCAL] CHANNEL LOG ON [rachel] i had a nap. i think maybe i feel a little better [rachel] but i’m not sure. [rachel] and i still wanna get laid. <sorabji> i hope you are. <sorabji> i hope you do. <sorabji> […]

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Old Chat Logs

I have known these files were lurking, but I never thought I’d actually look at them again. Oceans of text, mostly inane prattle and sallow gossip. It is the IRC chat logs I automatically kept from 1994 onward. I am looking at a lengthy conversation with Keri, reminding just how much she and I used […]

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A magicJack Playlist

Here is something I’ve intended to assemble for a long time. It’s a selection of some of the random wrong numbers and misdirected calls that have arrived at my old landline phone number, which I transferred to magicJack a number of years ago. There are a number of calls from what sounds like the same […]

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That Cheap Hotel Around Union Square, and Other Random Stuff

Most of these are from a hotel around Union Square. A friend from college stays there when he passes through town. Other photos are from my glamorous apartment and around Astoria. These are from a bunch of Kodak Picture Disks, which were floppies that I think were included when I got film photos developed. The […]

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Typewriter

It is the Smith-Corona I believe but cannot prove my father used to type his suicide note. This contraption, its memory erased, was safely (?) dismissed to a thrift shop.

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Strange To See, At First: A Swastika

Here are both sides of a deposit for the Citizens National Bank, in Lebanon, Kentucky. Stamped May 12, 1910 I found that the date took away my brief astonishment at the symbol seen in the top left corner of the check. It is a swastika. Until the Nazis made the image of the swastika synonymous with […]

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Studio Building, Boston, 1865

I just found these cool bits of ephemera from the Studio Building in Boston. These are room rental receipts for one Mr. Thayer, who paid $30 for one month in Room 7 and $1.47 for what looks like 4 days in Room 44. I find the dates on the second scrap of papyrus a little […]

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When Hoarding Fails

I am looking at a book of poetry. When it was published the author said that certain of the poems were about me, my websites, and some of the people who used to inhabit them. Dated from 1972 to 2015 I can only guess which pieces from 1994 onward might have made reference to sorabji.com […]

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See your…

I saw this commercial where a dentist walked out of someone’s teeth. I thought he was walking out of a giant butt.

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Busted Telephone, Big Allis, 1999 or 2000

Looking through old things, looking for old things, was not looking for this but it’s a couple of cool shots from the obsolete Canon APS film camera that sits in my closet, useless or, at best, a collectors item. These photos should be on 38th Avenue and Vernon, near the Big Allis power plant, unless […]

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Artless 80s.NYC

These are my favorite kind of shots, save for those with payphones, of course. 80s.NYC is like an artless continuum, something that would inspire a lengthy dream sequence in Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.

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More Ugly Tampa

Never let it be said that all of Tampa is like this. That’s not the case at all. But the area surrounding the subdivision where I grew up has plenty of eyesores for the ugly hunter. I’m not saying Tampa is ugly in general, but this particular area is.

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Tampa: The Things I Thought I Knew

Last night I started looking through the pictures I took in Tampa back in May. All I can think when seeing some of these pictures is wow, that was a butt ugly part of Tampa. I mean, I hope that doesn’t offend anybody, but so much of the structures around there look like architectural roadkill. […]

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Sounds From Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta. September 20, 1997.

I uncovered this interesting specimen from the bag of cassettes I digitized a few months ago. Sounds like me ordering a tall coffee at about 2:00, though at first I thought I had said “telecopy” and I was trying to remember if that word meant anything back then. It’s not magnificent but it’s mildly mildly […]

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Sundays in Atlanta

Listening to tapes I made in Atlanta in 1997. These might have been my first ever “walking around” recordings, and from the sound of the first few minutes they are not very good. It’s the same problems I try to deal with today, in isolating or preventing altogether the sounds of my physical movement from […]

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Listening to Myself

So today I commit to a full day at the desk, at the wheel, at the helm of this great enterprise that is no enterprise at all. Listening back to audio from 6 years ago, the Kosciuszko Bridge captures. They seem inferior to me now but I don’t think I have yet reached the ones […]

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