Flashback | sorabji at WSBJ.com

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.

2:02 PM Sunday, November 20, 2011 I noticed something yesterday, about my reaction to the date. Seeing today’s date provokes a bullet-point of fear, or shock. I am not certain how to describe it, but on some electronic...

Flashback: The Bobby Pages. Roosevelt Island Bridge. March, 2007.

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11/11/11 @ 11:11:11

1:48 PM Friday, November 11, 2011 11/11/11 aha, I missed 11:11:11am. what a moment of masturbational orgiastic frenzy that must have been for one-seekers, for seekers of 1.

Camwhores.com. My only favoritest website ever

When the women was real, and the Internet wasn’t. I loved camwhores.com. Always will. This...

March, 2010.

Giving IG a Try…, and a Flashback

…while also going through this website and fixing all the dead images. Due to changing WordPress themes and importing from other content management systems the hard-coded URLs to hundreds of images are inaccurate. Normally...

Flashback: On Intelligence, Creativity, and My Mother

At present the URL sorabji.com, just the top page, redirects to a random story or image at wsbj.com/sorabji. I love random links, though it’s become hard to find good quality ones with links to the open internet....

Chat With a Friend. I was the First Person She Ever Met in the Flesh From the Internet

kr-@-jh (7/26/2005 1:20:36 AM): how would you describe yourself in 3 words? sorabji (7/26/2005 1:25:57 AM): thir teen inches kr-@-jh (7/26/2005 1:26:35 AM): how many payphones have you answered? sorabji (7/26/2005 1:26:48 AM):...

From April, 2004. The Red Bathroom.

I spotted this in April, 2004, while a friend and I were touring office space around Union Square...

These Kids, Flying a Kite on 29th Street in Astoria, August 2010, Must Be All Growed-Up By Now

Gastro Humor

I found this in the MEMOS.doc I pulled from a few days ago. This was funny, moreso at the time than now but still good for a slight heaving of the lower gut from whence laughter rises. ===== A know someone who works for a Gastroenterologist. All day he takes calls from people who needed […]

Sex As I Saw It, And Mostly Still Do. From October 14, 1995

Window Display

Officecam, 1998

I had a few pretty swank offices at corporate. This was not one of them, but it was still pretty cool and had a view that I actually liked. I shared this room with another production/editor type, who was and as far as I know still is a pretty cool guy. For whatever reason he […]

First Record I Ever Bought

I bought this 36 years ago, when I was 14. I made the purchase at MacDill Airforce Base, which had a WalMart-style commissary that included a record store. Damn if the record jacket does not look good as new even today. I have not played it in a very long time, so I don’t know […]

20 Years Ago…

…I used to know how to write. August 13, 1998

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 […]

From 2006?

This photo was the first thing I ever posted to the original .MOBI, which was not at Sorabji.MOBI but at sorabji.com/treo. I thought this was lost but, what do you know, there it is among other Treo 700p photos from 11 years ago. It is timestamped October 11 2006 but I think that might be […]

“I’ll Always Be Bored”

Finally dug up this drawing, which I thought had vanished into the bytebucket long ago, by my friend Jutta Degener. It’s from 1996.

Pencam

I found this batch of photos I took with a piece-of-crap pen camera in either 1999 or 2000. I took time out of my busy day at the Time & Life Building to grab some photos around the T&L and in nearby Times Square. I guess I thought I was being stealthy, since the camera […]

Cannot Believe I Used To Look Like This

While scrubbing off my “Who Is Mark Thomas?” page I clicked through to this link, which sent me to a scan of an article from the first time I was in the New York Times. I do not remember the last time I saw this picture. I cannot believe I used to look like this. And […]

Empty Chair

My Left Hand, Ten Years Later

Thunderbird Motel, Daytona Beach. September, 2005.

1996. Monster Sale! Lutz, Florida.

He was no MIGHTY OG, which occupied a more-or-less permanent place of honor in the front yard of a home in Harvey, North Dakota. But this temporary inflatable gorilla was no less memorable to me. From a distance I thought it was made of stronger stuff, but closer inspection showed its hot-air innards. I used […]

Biker Dudes. Tampa, 1996.

I’ve been rummaging through old pictures from a Canon ELPH APS film camera I used to use. APS (Advanced Photo System) was supposed to be the next big thing in film photography. Or something like that. I was an early adopter but gave up on it a few years later when digital cameras became a […]

Prabhupada’s Palace Of Gold. Moundsville, West Virginia.

This was an interesting find. About 14 years ago, after I got whacked from corporate, I hit the road for parts unknown to me, including Nebraska, the Dakotas, West Virginia, and other places in these United States of America. My mother made fun of me for these trips, asking “Why don’t you go to Paris or London […]

Joe Gioia: Mark Thomas. My Corporate Youth.

Photographer Joe Gioia is to blame for these pictures of me outside 9 West 57th Street, soon before I left my job there to build things called “web site” for Time-Warner. Everyone at 9 West thought I was nuts. Maybe they were right.

April, 2014: If Ever I Look Skyward.

Lifelong drivel flows safely through the innards of my head, unexposed to scrutiny. I take comfort knowing that human memory has not yet been indexed by commercial search engines.

Scavenger Hunt: Sent Mail from January, 2011

i’ve had this plan for a conspiracy of sorts. it follows up to something i did in 1991, when i overheard a man at an upper west side diner tell his kids that he’d buy them stuff and take them places “if i had $100.” from his loud mouth i was able to glean his name, which fortunately was very distinctive. i looked him up in the manhattan white pages, and mailed $100 in cash to his name at the address in the phone book.

Flashback: Detritus from 1996

“Living far away from everywhere lets you think you have somewhere to go. But in the city you just can’t go out for a spin. You can’t escape to some person’s farm without their consent.”

From My Outbox.

After I got burned so bad last year the first thing I got rid of was my IM and buddy list. I had every messenger ever made sitting on my desktop. So she would always know when I was online.

A Bach Fugue From the Myspace Era

Assuming it had been deleted long ago I rediscovered a bunch of videos I posted to Myspace during that social network’s brief reign of relevance. It’s a Bach Fugue in C-Sharp, from “The Great 48”.

Lucy, and Alice Remembered

Tuesday night an elderly woman approached me at 34th Street and 35th Avenue. She wanted to know where 33rd Street was. I pointed toward the street, one block away. She seemed unsatisfied, or confused by my answer. I asked “Where are you going?” She said “I live on 33rd Street,” adding that Key Foods and […]

My Record of Growth

I don’t remember using the “#” sign as shorthand for “pounds”, but I guess that explains why it is sometimes called “the pound sign”. This is an excerpt from My Baby Book, which my mother evidently stopped updating in 1971, when I was 3½. I saw my sister’s baby book and remember it being way […]

May 21, 2012: The First Brain MRI

For weeks and months during the summer of 2012 I walked into midtown walls and blacked out on Queens sidewalks while cold sober. For reasons nothing to do with that I saw fit to buy a field recorder. I used that recorder to successfully record nature and ambient recordings. I also used it to record […]

Family Photos Smeared Curbside

I have found a large number of old family photos at thrift shops, online auctions, and occasionally even on the street. Photos found on the street tend to be small in quantity, and probably just dropped or absent-mindedly mishandled. This scattered mess of family photos and other items smeared across a sidewalk curb tore at […]

Memories From A Heart-Murdering Day

Flashback: April, 2000. Stuck in Los Angeles Traffic.

The woman in my rental car’s rear view mirror was not a hooker or prostitute working the exit ramp, as this image might make it appear. She was tired of sitting in her car during a typical Los Angeles traffic jam, so she got out to smoke a cigarette and stretch her skinny legs.

Pyramid Oracle @ 29-14 Queens Plaza East

Pyramid Oracle (who signs his name with a K: Pyramid Orakle) covered the doors of 29-14 Queens Plaza East with this drawing of a hoary looking, two-faced codger. I see a resemblance to Lubomyr Melnyk. This enormous, pleasantly glowering face reminded me that this space was once occupied by the Juan Pachanga Discotheque and that […]

DININGROOM HOT FOOD PRINTER

A favorite receipt from 1999, one which I think qualifies as accidental art. This is from a Lincoln Center employee cafeteria, which may or may not still exist at the same 66th street location at which it was located in 1999. I was never a Lincoln Center employee but a friend of mine was. I do […]

October, 1999: 1.3 Megapixels Oughta Be Enough For Just About Anybody

Picture of a man on 6th Avenue, October 22, 1999. Stealth photography was in its dying days in 1999. Today you need a 46-megapixel sensor in your retina to get usable street photography pictures without the publicly paranoid suspiciously singling you out for shame. Even then you’d run the risk of being noticed that your jittery eyeballs are snapping up photographs of public people in public spaces. I said a long time ago: The 21st century will be known as The Public Century.

The Years Pass Like Minutes Now, Like Strangers.

25 years ago today I left home for… Home. I remember so many details of the Amtrak trip to New York, which started with a weekend layover at a college friend’s place in Bucks County, PA, that Updike-ian “Rabbit at Rest” suburb of Philadelphia. In return for said college friend’s accommodational kindness I paid for […]

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