Yesterday was supposed to be my planned day of idleness, of sitting here at this desk pecking out thoughts and making plans for future days. No real agenda or declaration, just time not walking 18000 steps whilst accomplishing less than nothing, less than an empty set.<\/p>\n
Sitting in this place makes me fidgety. I’ve been here too long but cannot afford to move. Everywhere I look I am obstructed by myself, my selves, and the selves of those who passed through here. Everybody is still here, eternally, rent-free.<\/p>\n
I landed, only partly by chance, on a social media profile of someone I used to know. He’s a former friend who now considers me a common asshole, not even worth commenting on. I knew him for many years, got him many jobs, introduced him to people and places he would never have considered. It’s meaningless to put it this way but I\u00a0 put him on the career\/professional path he has stayed on to this very day, 35 years on. That’s all I gleaned from him sparsely worded public profiles, which he appeared to have crafted begrudgingly. I don’t miss his company or his time. If he owes me anything those are debts long forgiven. He had often said he was going to grow up one day and be a boring, boring individual. I believe that is what he became. We used to talk about grown-up things. He laughed imagining what my kids would be like had I ever bred. I remember him mimicing me talking to my imaginary child “Hey, Billy, did you practice your Sorabji today? How’s the Alkan coming?” He seemed to imagine any progeny of mine would be some kind of twerky freak. I believe the last time we met in person was not long before 9\/11. He had already moved to another city.<\/p>\n
This was the guy who came to New York in the early 1990s and when he met a woman at a bar he asked her where she was from. She said “Tampa.” As a joke, and I mean totally as a joke, he asked in a “yeah-right” kind of voice “You’re from Tampa? You must know a guy named Mark Thomas.” To their mutual shock and awe she grimaced and answered “He lived right across the street from me.” It was true. This was Anne, who I barely knew but who certainly did live right across the street where I grew up.<\/p>\n
They were both so shocked by this bit of kismet they spent a full minute verifying they were talking about the same Mark Thomas. I don’t know if incidents like this happen to me, or happen in ways that involve me more than other people but it seems like it does. Either that or it happens to everybody all the time and most people don’t think it’s anything remarkable.<\/p>\n
I am having a lot of trouble sitting still today. It’s this place, this atmosphere, this me-o-sphere I can’t stand anymore. What happened yesterday to drive me out of this place involved a lot of noise and the fact that there was no heat in the building. I think it was 20 degrees early in the day and my whole body was chattering from the cold. The landlord is not someone I want in my life any more than absolutely necessary so instead of contacting him, and because there was a tremendous amount of noise coming from an absurd looking project involving a double-parked van from which a hose that must have been 200 feet long pumped something into the roof of a building across the street — because of these two factors and also because I felt the same restless, fidgety, useless then as I do now — I just said to hell this place and I got to a train where the next thing I knew I was in Sunset Park, chasing after memories of payphones and the ephemeral presences some of them left behind. I did the same in Midwood the day before. finding some blunt and also not-so-blunt reminders that not all payphone removals are created equal. Some leave behind carnage, others leave smooth cement smears. If I’d already followed the saga of NYC payphones to the bitter end I guess this next phase takes it even beyond that.<\/p>\n
Yuck, it is after 10:30am and I have accomplished nothing. I took a stab at the piano a little bit of minutes ago. I’m weak but the muscles have memory should I ever want to try again at making the piano a defacto part of my life. I don’t think I do but I don’t like to think about the past, the wasted time, the wasted waste. I keep turning around, looking around like there’s something to see here. There’s nothing here. I should walk. I will walk. That is my religion, my catharsis, and my occupation.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
Yeah, I went outside alright. Too much wind and cold for an unnecessary display of walkmanship. I can’t stand being in my body today. This place is swallowing me, this apartment. Today there is heat, unlike yesterday, though it can go away at any time. I remember the landlord claiming, years ago, that heat during the day was unnecessary because “everybody works at an office.” He was talking like this all the way through the pandemic, when he knew as well as anyone that many of us were working from home. He;s a guy I want in my life as little as possible. Which reminds me…<\/p>\n
I had a somewhat troubling encounter a couple of weeks ago with a person who is pretty famous. I suspect he’s better known in NYC than other places but no question this is an A-list celebrity. I was on Broadway in Manhattan, between 9th and 10th Streets, when I turned around and saw him standing there, his hand on the doorknob of a coffee shop, his eyes fixed squarely and unmistakeably on me. He looked old, and mean. I thought You’re ___ _____. I don’t care. <\/em>His stare lasted just long enough for me to consider asking the only question I could: Why are you staring at me?<\/em> But I said nothing. I know this man to be exceedingly unkind, belligerant, and and randomly hostile to complete strangers. I did not want this person in my life for one hot second. I would still like to know why he was staring at me like that. Had I done him wrong somehow? Did I not hold a door open for him? There was nothing I could have done in these swirling seconds to offend him so what was his problem with me?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday was supposed to be my planned day of idleness, of sitting here at this desk pecking out thoughts and making plans for future days. No real agenda or declaration, just time not walking 18000 steps whilst accomplishing less than nothing, less than an empty set. Sitting in this place makes me fidgety. I’ve been […]<\/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":true},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47610","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-cnU","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47610","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=47610"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47612,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47610\/revisions\/47612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}