{"id":45290,"date":"2024-10-17T08:30:04","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T12:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2024\/10\/17\/secret-museum.html"},"modified":"2024-10-17T08:30:04","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T12:30:04","slug":"secret-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2024\/10\/17\/secret-museum.html","title":{"rendered":"Secret Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I felt like I was building a secret museum yesterday. A collection of content so secret that no one will ever see it. It&#8217;s not scandalous, at least not by my reckoning. But it is what I envisioned when I started accumulating the content a couple of years ago. It&#8217;s me showering. I point a surveillance camera at my bathtub and record everything I do, from the mundane and expected to the stuff that keeps the museum a secret. Watching myself is not something I do much, nor do I intend to now that I have months worth of documentary evidence showing how I shower and perform other acts in the bath. Sometimes I pee. Most times I masturbate, sometimes twice. Shocking, isn&#8217;t it? Single man lives alone and masturbates. Film at 11. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Speaking of being single again one of the shower captures had me talking to the then-girlfriend on the phone. I don&#8217;t think I told her I was naked in the shower as we had this conversation. I could have. She was safe for things like that, even encouraging at times. But this recording reminded me that I just discovered two days ago that she&#8217;s been calling me, sometimes multiple times a day, without leaving messages. I thought I had blocked her phone number, which felt like a mean thing for me to do, and I am not a mean person. But it seems I only blocked her number from ringing my phone. Calls come in I just don&#8217;t get a ring or even a vibration. So now there&#8217;s this call history of ignored\/missed calls and I have to ask what she&#8217;s even thinking at this stage. I&#8217;m guessing she regrets ejecting me from her life. She said as much the very next day. But she said what she said and when I saw what she said I said &#8220;FUCK THIS.&#8221; I was never anything but decent and kind toward her but, as always seems to happen with me, I summoned abusive tendencies from her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t even want to think about this. I&#8217;m feeling sad and vulnerable again, as the season changes and I was not prepared for that. What concerns me this year, and for the last couple of months, is how late I sleep on days off. I simply do not want to get out of bed. Yesterday I was there almost until 11am. I normally rise at 5 or 5:30, so these kind of variances are not good sleep hygiene. The difference has been that I take my fist full of pills and then go back to bed, feeling the calming effect the BP and anxiety meds have on me. Normally I don&#8217;t really feel that. I breathe serenely, but every minute that drips away feels like waste incarnate. Normally I&#8217;m in motion after I take the pills. I gues the effects actually are felt just not as explicitly or beautifully. In the early days of taking these pills I&#8217;d feel a certain down-ness, like a sinking, almost dizzy feeling. That does not seem to happen anymore, although I typically pop the pills while seated in the shower, where such a sensation would not have much impact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t feel good, though. I feel numb, and stupid. I take some joy in the new-fangled commute. I don&#8217;t have to cross Broadway anyore. I hated that part of the journey, and find that all along it was never really necessary. A stairwell leads to a passage connecting to the Fulton Center, which sends me up an escalator where I emerge at the John Street exit\/entrance to the Fulton Center, a location typically inhabited by scowling, howling vagrants (do we still use that word?). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yesterday, restless and disappointed with my existence, I took a train to an undetermined location, which ended up being Woodside\/61st Street. I looked for a winter jacket for myself, finding nothing satisfactory. Pockets are key in this decision making process, and nothing I found had pockets even big enough to hold my phone. And thrifying is not cheap anymore. New jackets at a shop on Broadway in Astoria are less than what the Salvation Army in Woodside was asking for used, visibly worn articles. I am very close to running out of money and reentering debt for the first time in well over 20 years. I do not feel good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I felt like I was building a secret museum yesterday. A collection of content so secret that no one will ever see it. It&#8217;s not scandalous, at least not by my reckoning. But it is what I envisioned when I started accumulating the content a couple of years ago. It&#8217;s me showering. I point a [&hellip;]<\/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-45290","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-bMu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45290","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=45290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}