Suddenly everyone here knows me. Knows my name. I didn’t have that in mind when I took this gig. Wanted to sneak in, sneak out, none the wiser. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I took a strange survey last night. Questions could have been skipped but I took them anyway. Have you experienced an existential crisis? How did that work out? <\/em>I indirectly, while answering another question, remembered how my very existence is a bit of an existential quagmire. My mother considered aborting me, and my father was gay. Why am I even here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday was hard work. I didn’t know what to expect. I was shooting photos for about half the day. They look good. I was uncertain since I’d never used a Nikon DSLR but all told the buttons are where they’re supposed to be and auto-everything did what it does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been organizing 30+ years of email, remembering romances and dalliances that had been summarily wiped clean from this memory hole. I don’t know who said it but someone once told me that you never forget a woman you’d been intimate with. I defy that assessment. I found a correspondence with… I’ll call her M… a Staten Islander from 1996. Much of the email chain is gone but apparently we met through a phone chat service. That would suit my profile. My latest dalliance was from a phone chat line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All I remember now about M. was how she was way more into me than the opposite. She seemed a little desperate, even, and I never knew why. I think I’ll return to bleeping her out of my memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The strange survey came to me from a poster on a post on the street. In fact it’s not all that strange. Likely a college project. Other questions were “What do you think of feminism?” and something about how many friends you have. I’m not certain I finished the questionnaire. There was a submit button but I may have left it wanting.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is little for me to say. I feel calm and clean. Eating strawberries and drinking water. The clerk at the shop where I bought the strawberries was sound asleep behind the counter. I paid the $2, imagining his reaction after waking up. Would he be confused at what inventory was missing? How would he tally up the purchase? He wouldn’t necessarily know it was strawberries, unless that happens to be the only $2 item the store hawked at the time. Would he wake up, see the $2 on the counter, and sing praises for the honesty of people? I could have just walked out, although cameras probably would have captured that little bit of criminality, resulting in hard time at a Russian penal colony. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t like strawberries. I prefer blackberries. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suddenly everyone here knows me. Knows my name. I didn’t have that in mind when I took this gig. Wanted to sneak in, sneak out, none the wiser. I took a strange survey last night. Questions could have been skipped but I took them anyway. Have you experienced an existential crisis? How did that work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","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":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34147","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-8SL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34147","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}