{"id":236,"date":"2004-02-01T00:35:45","date_gmt":"2004-01-31T19:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=236"},"modified":"2004-02-01T00:35:45","modified_gmt":"2004-01-31T19:35:45","slug":"garbage-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2004\/02\/01\/garbage-in.html","title":{"rendered":"Garbage In"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I dreamed the other night that a reader of this web site tried to murder me.<\/p>\n

In the dream I replaced this entire web site with a message “AS YOU MAY KNOW, A VISITOR TO THIS WEB SITE ATTEMPTED TO MURDER ME AT 6:18 PM ON…”<\/p>\n

As I explained to a friend (and before you roll your eyes), this dream was not a product of self-absorbed paranoia. It was garbage of the day dreaming.<\/p>\n

Before going to bed that night I typed in the URL of a web site I hadn’t seen in a long time. Every page of that site was gone, replaced with a note saying “As some of you know, my house burned down and everything is lost.” It shocked me.<\/p>\n

This got mixed in with the loosely associated memory of a time I got recognized as “Sorajbi” by some guy handing out porn club fliers in Times Square.<\/p>\n

To further clutter my evidently peaceful mind (and I forgot to include this in my explanation of the matter to that aforementioned friend) there was the ongoing matter of correspondents who live a few blocks away but would live a full lifetime before meeting for coffee at a mutually convenient place. I do not know what I do to attract this sort of thing, or if I simply exacerbate it, but as long ago as 1994 I have had extravagant correspondences via e-mail and other means with women who live as near as across the street but who would never consider taking our communications outside e-mail.<\/p>\n

When I lived in Washington Heights (and then on the East Side) I corresponded with a woman for over a year, this during the reign of FidoNET and dialup BBSes. She tried and failed to draw me into what the kids now call NetSex.<\/p>\n

After months of correspondence I inadvertently discovered that she lived, literally, across the street. That was 1994. This is 2004 and it happens today just like 10 years ago.<\/p>\n

But recently it’s a little weirder. This is what contributed to the garbage of the day dream. The same day I saw that web site of the person whose had burned down, I got e-mail from someone up the street saying “I think I saw you at the grocery store today. Were you wearing a tan shirt and white pants? Did you buy some rolls from the bakery?”<\/p>\n

The attention whore in me, which assumes the world revolves around my travels through the sidewalks and grocery stores of my life, used to feel a tinge of satisfaction. In my mind it rang like the sound of “a little pin-prick<\/a>” in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”<\/p>\n

But it no longer tantalizes. It bores me. Now I wince at how I still attract this sort of thing, and at how the problem is with me and no one else.<\/p>\n<\/dl>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dt>\n

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I dreamed the other night that a reader of this web site tried to murder me. In the dream I replaced this entire web site with a message “AS YOU MAY KNOW, A VISITOR TO THIS WEB SITE ATTEMPTED TO MURDER ME AT 6:18 PM ON…” As I explained to a friend (and before you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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_feature_clip_id":0,"_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":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dreamland","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-3O","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","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=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}