\t\t\t\tsometimes i think that this neighborhood is going to hell, and maybe i
\njust get lucky by not getting into any of it myself.<\/p>\n
i just saw a fistfight outside, between a teenage kid and amna who looked
\nto be in his 40s. evidently the kid said or did something to insult the
\nolder guy, who evidently wanted to either just teach him a lesson or fully
\nkick his scrawny ass. it was a pretty ugly scene, with lots of onlookers
\nyelling at the older guy to lay off the kid. “you can’t beat up a little
\nboy.” but others saw it differently, screaming at the kid with “YOU
\nDISRESPECTED HIM! YOU SHOULD GET YOUR ASS WHOOPED!” The kid did not look
\nhelpless, but he looked outmatched. The older guy got him in a nasty
\nheadlock and punched him hard in the chest, shoving him against a car and
\npounding him. onlookers couldn’t seem to decide what to do. i don’t know
\nif the cops showed. i heard sirens a little later, but i don’t know where
\nthey went. i did not have a cell phone on me, but even if i did it
\nappeared that others had already made the calls to 911, so i doubt i would
\nhave contributed to the inundation of calls reporting the same incident.<\/p>\n
and on top of that, in the spirit of thinking that the neighborhood is
\ngoing to hell, i saw that the squeegie guy is back. that’s a relic of the
\npre-Giuliani days, and by some standards is considered a measure of a
\ncommunity’s fundamental ability to deter petty crime. petty crimes lead to
\nmajor crimes, as the logic goes in the “broken windows” theories of crime
\nfighting. i was surprised to see the squeegie guy, though. this particular
\none was pretty aggressive, too.<\/p>\n
is it all going to hell?<\/p>\n
that reminds of what i thought would make a funny satire story. “Locals
\nRemember When It All Went To Hell.” I thought of this years ago, when
\nsomeone at a restaurant was sharing reminiscences about the place with
\nothers, and she shouted “I remember when they fired Juan. That’s what it
\nall went to hell.” Juan was a chef who had a loyal following but who was
\nfired for reasons never made clear, and according to this woman his firing
\nwas “when it all went to hell.” I had other ideas for this conceit, with a
\nseries of one-line zingers from people on the street who are approached by
\njournalists asking “When did it all go to hell?”<\/p>\n
“When they got rid of the payphone on 36th Street and 36th Avenue. That’s
\nwhat it all went to hell.”<\/p>\n
“When they started charging $2.50 for bagel. It was all downhill from
\nthere.”<\/p>\n
“When McDonald’s started making bagels.”<\/p>\n
“The bike lanes on Columbus Avenue ruined my life.”<\/p>\n
“When they took away the blue mailbox at 41st Street and Broadway.”<\/p>\n
“When AOL bought Time-Warner.”<\/p>\n
“When they stopped making Postum.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
aha, real satirists could have a better time with this than I… I think,
\nthough, that the resurgance of the squeegie guy, and the fistfights in the
\nstreets, could signal that it’s all going to hell, if it isn’t there
\nalready. It. Hell. What is “it” that goes to hell?<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
I wrote a short story today, intended for my payphone-related project. The
\nstory came quickly, and completely. I haven’t done much fiction of late,
\nbut I find it’s a suitable creative outlet. I mean, anything goes in
\nfiction, right?<\/p>\n
As I said earlier, writing is where I feel in control, and happy. Why not
\ndo it more? Because it requires interaction with computers? and
\nbecause that is never a good recipe for success?<\/p>\n
Last night commenced two new levels of software- and hardware-inspired
\naggravation. I purchase an upgrade to the OCR software I use for the old
\nmagazines project. I didn’t see any compelling reason to get it but hey,
\nwhy not, right? Well, I’ll tell you why not. I have hundreds of documents
\nthat were scanned into the earlier version of this software. The new
\nversion demands that I convert all of them to the new format, or else I
\ncan’t use them. Conversion takes about 15 minutes for each document.
\nConverting all my previous scans would take weeks. That’s fucking
\nbullshit. And there are other “enhancements” that take away features and
\nfunctionality that I got used to in the earlier version.<\/p>\n
The same thing happened with the identity theft service I use. Much
\nballyhooed “enhancements” to the service amounted to elimination of
\nnumerous useful features that make the “enhanced” service primitive by
\ncomparison, though prettier to look at. Blahblah.<\/p>\n
The other aggravation came from the phat new laptop, which is a mixed bag
\nfor me at this point. Graphics and such are awesome, but it’s too heavy
\nand the device itself is buggy in ways that are incredibly irritating.
\nMost recently I discovered that you can put a Sony Memory Stick into the
\ncard reader but you can’t take it out. Unbelievably aggravating.<\/p>\n
….<\/p>\n
I am at a bar where my newest ex is down the aisle. She came over here,
\napologized for the text messages, and said we’ll always be friends. She
\nlooked nervous and fake, but hey, what do you want? I don’t have any
\nfeelings of squeamishness or regret or anything else about the affair. It
\nended, for good reason, and that’s that. In my more tired moments I feel
\nsome sourness about it, regarding some of the needlessly rude things she
\nsaid and did, but that’s just relationshipiana, is it not?<\/p>\n
(I don’t remember the text messages.)<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
sometimes i think that this neighborhood is going to hell, and maybe i just get lucky by not getting into any of it myself. i just saw a fistfight outside, between a teenage kid and amna who looked to be in his 40s. evidently the kid said or did something to insult the older guy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-um","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}