The Sandwich
There is one guy here who is my favorite. I don’t think we’ve exchanged one word of conversation. When we pass in the halls he decisively and demonstrably turns away. He looks down, to the side, anywhere but in my...
Read MoreThere is one guy here who is my favorite. I don’t think we’ve exchanged one word of conversation. When we pass in the halls he decisively and demonstrably turns away. He looks down, to the side, anywhere but in my...
Read MoreAn art magazine (online only) lightly rewrote and published the New York Times article from last month about the alleged “last payphone” of New York. I was quoted in the piece, but not really. My comments were...
Read MoreI remembersitting at a bar once, typing away with abandon. The bartender came over and asked “Are you writing a novel?” I laughed, somewhat uncomfortably and I’m not sure why of that. I said “I’m...
Read MoreAbout this morning? Clips of time. Clippings. Yesterday’s meet with a PCP/Psychoanalyst caught me all the way off guard. I left feeling mentally orgasmed. I went in feeling guilty, like a junkie asking for a buzzfix. That...
Read MoreI’ve had some concerns about Saturday’s checking out of work early. I was told “documentation” was required. I might be able to get my old PCP to back me up, but he’s not my PCP anymore. So far,...
Read MoreA tour guide directed us to the highlights. The earth’s core comprises billions of unconceived fetuses, the arc of their unwanted lives accruing in the minds of spontaneous, unprepared lovers. Their anxieties and...
Read MoreThinking about what difference, if any, having a full-time job for the first time in 20 years has made in my life, in my days. I knew it would be an adjustment, and it was. But almost all those adjustments felt good. I like...
Read MorePayphone Radio got a little weird last week. Some folks found it again, just a few, not the mob scene that tried to call into it back in January.Someone was talking like an Apologista, someone who knew the old Apology Line or at...
Read MoreI encountered another waterfall last night. Avalanche. Ocean under which I drown. I may never know how many of those I have. Moving everything from google docs to ms365 seemed like it could be simple. Maybe it will be, but my...
Read MoreHah. Got the corner suite today. I don’t usually type into my personal void from the work spot but no one is here and no one cares what I do off the clock. I took a panic pill just now, and a BP one as well. I don’t...
Read MoreThe place I usually get a cheese omelette and a banana every morning decided to stop giving out plastic fork and knife packages that include salt and pepper. I must now request salt and pepper packets. The plastic utensil (now...
Read Morepointy words garbageboard buns buggy peanuts stun ape (eap!) 10 hours in the short life of a hemmeroid beestormers too ticklish on the taco truck instant stratification seedful salads she walks with a batter waddle sticks in...
Read MoreSeems I got a rare gift. 2 days paid leave. Not consecutive days but they end up being that since they precede my usual Wednesday day off. That’s good information, right? Feeling waves of pitifulness today. Pricklings of...
Read MoreYesterday was fun. Impromptu. If I really wanted to watch low-flying planes I would have gone to Flushing. In the Main Street and surrounding areas it’s like you can see the whites in the eyes of the passengers, the planes...
Read MoreI made it out to the Calvary Cemeteries today. All 4 of them. It was not planned, and the decision to dip into New Calvary was guided by the presence of low-flying planes approaching LaGuardia. They made for interesting video,...
Read Moreall that shit I just deleted. Nobody reads this shit anymore so my secrets are safe here, hiding in plain sight. At a coffee shop, after a day spent bolting up to Mott Haven for what turned out to be no good reason. I rarely...
Read MoreThere are other reasons to take the panic pill and the bp med. if it stops me drinking i save money. well duh, right? i’m not making enough money at this job. in fact i’m losing money. i expected that but it still...
Read MoreMy goal had been to make this a 6-month gig. Working from the belly of the beast, Lower Manhattan, I hear the voices scurry through. Voices of the concerned, the melancholy, the stranded. A city filled with agonies of all sizes....
Read MoreI’ve been here about 3 months now, in the belly of the beast. Lower Manhattan. I spend my days talking to New York. I did not expect to fall in love with this job but that seems to be what has happened. My plan had been to...
Read MoreOne day to the next it’s something different. Shakes, anxiety, even panic one day. Serenity, peace, even happiness the next. I’m on the latter lurch at the moment. Payphone patrol turned up mild intrigue. Someone...
Read MoreIt has not been the only continuous thing in my life in New York. In fact it is not even the oldest thing. But the 181 has been my permanent and public address since `~1991. Back then I think it cost $24 a year. The price has...
Read MoreI never think there will be enough time. 10 minutes is not enough. But then 10 minutes feels like too much. Time is frustratingly elastic like that. At my job I’ve reached a point of virtual rapture. I love the sounds....
Read MoreToday I went all in, every pill in my arsenal, to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s snot frenzy. Some kind of mud-dust was rolling in through an air conditioner vent. I sit at this desk frequently but never experienced this...
Read MoreStarting to love this job, then hating myself for fucking it up at times. Was doing well today until a sinus event and a cough intruded on my performance. Took a break to blow out gallons of snot. I’ve been sleeping with...
Read MoreWhat have I learned about my fascinating self after 2.5 months at my first full-time job in 20 years? I don’t know. Is it even worth asking? I knew I’d be good at this job, and I am. I remember one lifer, when asked,...
Read MoreI’m willing to bet that most people I work with here do not spend any portion of their break time carousing lower Manhattan for payphones and LinkNYC machines. Is “carousing” even a word? Today was a rare...
Read MoreZany dream last night. An ex from many years ago, who has not entered my mind in I don’t even know how long, made an appearance. A bunch of people had gathered by a swimming pool. Context is everything but to make a long...
Read MoreSomeone messaged me at my radio FB page. I don’t know what they said. Not yet. Listening to humming and whirring of the vending machines in what they call the “vendeteria,” so-called because there is no café,...
Read MoreTook my time with a panini today. a lingering problem here had been heartburn and feeling like my...
Read MoreAt the ghetto coffee shop. Have not been here, to sit down at least, since pre-pandemic. It is Feb 23 2022. I stayed away from here on account of nobody ever wearing masks, and considered staying away for good just to make a...
Read More7:57am 2/19/2022 Sitting at Hestia, Maiden Lane… or is it Liberty Street? 7:57am, February 19, 2022… Yesterday was a first time I’d posted like this, from the small keyboard into the small screen of the aging...
Read MoreI have not done this in many months, I don’t think. It’s been long enough since I did this that I might find that this email-to-website thing does not even work anymore. Sitting in a coffee shop, pecking into a...
Read MoreSometimes I hear signals. See them, at least. I hear nothing now but whirring from the freezer behind me. I grew up in a freezer. It was on the top rack, with ice cube trays and three other children, where I learned to...
Read Moretyping this at the piano, with no spell check, because i am such a manly man in that respect. 10:39pm as i start. an ongoing epic correspondence with the author of a sheet music reading program has me ready to throw in the...
Read MoreDead walked among me. So it felt, yesterday, every day. Daylight. Sleepness. Eyes of strangers. A woman with no ass crossed 21st Street, eastward, momentarily turning around for no obvious reason. Her lipsticked mouth opened....
Read MoreSaturday, all at once, I downed 60mg of Nifedipine and 2½mg of Lorazepam. This was my first intake of either drug in probably three months. I had felt strung out, excitable, directionless. I felt like walking the day away, as I...
Read MoreI’ve done little of this typing away from home thing. It used to feel so free and...
Read MoreThought I might have something to say this day, this gift of a day, after waking at 5am. But no. Instead I got to deal with the monotonous, tiresome chore of cleaning up log files and freeing space on this web server. I should...
Read MoreI was just remembering, yesterday, a time I played piano for a bunch of singers at a Christmas concert in Brooklyn. With rehearsals and practice time I was involved with this production for about a month. Every step of the way...
Read MoreIt’s amazing what a difference even a smattering of contact with a new-to-me human being has on my disposition. A couple of YT comments had me bounding from this place, facing the world like a conqueror. Just as abruptly...
Read MoreI think it was my 12-letter words and big ambitions. She’s a simple sort, poor (like me), with no desires to do anything but sit at her desk 11-12 hours a day. Her voice is oddly shrill for such a timid creature. We did...
Read MoreMade it through to another morning. Cloudy, overcast, a bird squawking outside. I crushed my first spotted lanternfly a couple of days ago. I thought I got it on video but I did not. I first spotted one on Amsterdam Avenue,...
Read MoreA few weeks ago I spotted an odd-looking shiny object on a sidewalk on 28th Street, by the basketball courts at the Dutch Kills Playgrounds just north of 36th Avenue. It was an iPhone, but the way it had landed on the sidewalk,...
Read MoreSession Start: Wed Sep 03 12:06:01 2008 Session Ident: #philosophy 15[12:06] * Now talking in #philosophy 04[12:06] * Topic is ‘Neff Log Cabin Republican: Neff no, you are. [21:01] maybe there’s alcohol involved in...
Read MoreIt’s all about John Ashbery in this one. Summer, 2009.
Read MoreStrange 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...
Read MoreI let sorabji.mobi, one of my favorite domains, expire a few months ago. .mobi is a failed top level domain originally intended for use by websites that were designed for mobile devices. That was before seemingly everything was...
Read MoreA couple of curious alignments of the 181 took place this week. Someone contacted me about doing an interview for their podcast. The email included a link to their YouTube channel. The channel had 181 followers. I later got this...
Read MoreShe mentioned it twice, both times driving the car whilst circambcombanducantortadillaybewildered, saying it was always/only a woman’s right, not any man’s, a sentiment with which I never disagreed, on instinct,...
Read MoreAwaking to the usual expectation of expectoration, that I must produce, must create, must continue to fill oceans with mountains, mountains of text, intellectual cardboard, impossibly forgotten photographs, mental effluvia of...
Read MoreWhatever you can say about things here at peak 2020, how we got here, who got us there… the President of the United States should not be seen hauled off to Walter Reed in an Air Force One Medevac. Or should he? And also, I...
Read MoreI had to clear space on my phone, and wound up deleting, among other things, a bunch of screenshots I made last year and the year before. I can find sadness in all things, even the best, most inspiring news. But some of these...
Read MoreI cannot seem to stop aging. One new thing for me as I age is the intensity of the nervous shakes when I enter a new situation or place. I’ve always had these shakes but lately they’ve gotten positively disruptive....
Read MoreI experienced a couple of unnerving incidents the past few days. Yesterday, on 5th Avenue around 50th Street, with sidewalks still relatively sparsely populated compared to pre-pandemic days, a thin, derelict-looking woman...
Read MoreDear Bob, Hello. How are you doing? I was thinking of you last night when I ordered a Cape Codder at Kennedy’s Restaurant & Bar on West 57th Street. They made it exceptionally strong, I think, which may have...
Read MoreI knew her through the Minitel, available in New York as “Aline”.
Read MoreAnother Gothamist story appears to be brewing. A journalist there tweeted to someone who posted a video over the weekend, to get a quote from him about the kiosks. He seems to be a skeptic of the kiosks, from what little else he has posted, questioning the pat response that it is an “old-fashioned phone […]
Read MoreMight have just taken too huge of a chance on things, but I did it intentionally. A well-dressed dude with a professional-grade video camera and tripod was shooting video on Third Avenue, I think at 52nd Street. There was a kiosk right in front of him. I stepped into the frame and dialed the number, […]
Read MoreI have had this thought before, but never chronicled it. I have to ask if it is possible that people get paid to go around neighborhoods asking for directions to certain places. I was just approached by a woman walking the other direction with what I assume were her two kids, a young daughter and […]
Read MoreI just gave someone pinpoint and accurate directions to 33rd Avenue in Astoria, the little sidestreet even native Astorians do not think exists. I have, in the past, given inaccurate directions to that street, even though I pass it very frequently. But it is, even on repeated exposure, not a street to take note of. […]
Read MoreMore day. Up early. Getting up early just gives me more time to waste. I think, no I know, that this sentiment turned a certain correspondent against me. I guess I can’t blame her, though the conversation was getting rather long in the tooth anyway. I have not missed it. Interesting crowd last night. One […]
Read MoreWho has time for anything? How does anyone have time to do anything? Certain words and concepts give me more and more trouble as I keep them in consideration. So much of our civilization relies on phenomena and behaviors that cannot be proven to have occurred. You say you see something. Prove it. Disprove it. […]
Read MoreAt Rockefeller Center in what might be the most perfect spot in terms of air conditioning. I am directly under one of the vents, and Rockefeller Center has air conditioning that is, if anything, a little over the top even on very hot days. I had a conversation about that with one of the post […]
Read MoreThe ripple effects are subtle, yet morbid once you key into them. At 40th Avenue and 29th Street I saw and waved hello to someone who lives in my building as he was walking the other direction. I smiled some, thinking that the relative unlikelihood of seeing this person so far from the building (6 […]
Read MoreDon’t know what to know, what not to know, what there is to know. I know nothing, I know everything, but all else I know is that something exists in between nothing and everything. At the library for the first time in a long while, save for just idly passing through. I don’t see any […]
Read MoreAt the coffee shop, using a new bluetooth keyboard for the first time since getting it a couple of weeks ago. This Logitech K380 replaces a previous K380, which developed an annoying habit of switching some keys around. So if I want to put something within quotation marks it would come up as being with […]
Read MoreOK, since I don’t think that last payphone call worked and because I’d rather be anywhere but at home, I am at the coffee shop, reprising what I attempted to report earlier. I seem to have finally achieved the success I thought I had reached a few days ago, with regard to getting a radio […]
Read MoreAlright, then, back on the ferris wheel of life, or rather the trampoline, the Weeble that can’t not wobble. Feeling fine now but guilty, and undeserving of anything. Wrote some stuff from home, now writing again at the ghetto coffee shop, which isn’t really all that ghetto except once in a while when someone walks […]
Read MoreToday felt accomplishful. I listened back to some recordings I forgot all about. It’s from February 20, the day I walked to the Unisphere and back, a trek which must rank among my most epic. At a certain point it felt like I was abusing myself, as I now recall from listening to the tracks. […]
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