Science says we don’t know why people dream. I say why even question it? It’s a miraclespace in its ways, turning anyone’s head into a surrealist hellspace of strength, saga, and sassafrass-stromboli. Sometimes they grip me asleep, refusing any acknowledgement of the reality that awaits. The reality of 4:30am or, as today, 3:33am. I had no reason to rise early except that I may have been feeling OK after a too-long telephone interview with a documentary filmmaker. This is where I get into trouble with these things. I give too much, feel good doing it both during and after, then the annoyance smolders with time as nothing happens. Work is done in dribs and drabs. Our topic of documentation is PRAY. It’s all been pretty straightforward, I guess, except yesterday some unexpected drama quietly intruded upon things. It was 30+ years ago that the store manager at Tower Records introduced me to PRAY, describing her with a mix of awe and trepidation as one of the great legends of New York. His enthusiasm mixed with subtle disbelief was memorable, and sparked my interest in such a way that suddenly I was seeing religious panegyrics rise up from every payphone I saw. As due\u00a0 diligence this filmmaker contacted that store manager, now in his 70s and retired. His response was as I might have expected. Enthusiastic and nostalgic, he had barely thought of or remembered PRAY for decades. A few web searches and his memory was fully jogged. But here’s the weird part. The woman I was with for much of 2024 also worked at that record store, and she had dated this guy off and on, including much of 2023, before calling it off and moving on to reconnecting with me. I don’t know if he knows this but he could. And it’s also likely that the filmmaker mentioned my name to him in this context, seeing as his enthusiasm for PRAY from decades ago has partly fueled the making of this documentary. The filmmaker also had some other interesting researches. He found people who recognized her from the one known photo of her at Washington Square Park. But no one spoke to her or knew anything about her. No insights into her identity or if she had family or anything. Just a figure passing through. But the interview went too long, cut into my dinner-making time so I took the low road and ordered delivery again, this after the air fryer I’d used basically every single day suddenly crapped out. Is it salvageable? I don’t know but I’d gotten a little weary of it’s size. I could get by fine with a fryer half that size. Yeah, this matters. I was on a train today. Sat on a seat. Trains were messed so I took the longer walk to the R for the sake of not making 2 or maybe even 3 transfers. The beauty of the R is that it goes directly to my stop but weekends are unpredictable and one other person here who takes the R sometimes ended up in Brooklyn before realizing the route changed on weekends. I’m rambling because I’m suddenly surrounded by people talking loudly.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Science says we don’t know why people dream. I say why even question it? It’s a miraclespace in its ways, turning anyone’s head into a surrealist hellspace of strength, saga, and sassafrass-stromboli. Sometimes they grip me asleep, refusing any acknowledgement of the reality that awaits. The reality of 4:30am or, as today, 3:33am. I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"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":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47675","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-coX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47675","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=47675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47726,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47675\/revisions\/47726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}