Stuff from my Cell Phone

Friday, May 18th, 2012 6:56 pm

Costumers

Thursday, May 17th, 2012 6:23 pm

Pray

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 1:05 pm

NOPRKIN

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 6:13 pm

head lice on the highway

i just heard elton john sing “count the headlights on the highway”,
reminding me that as a kid i thought he was saying “count the headlice on
the highway.” as a kid it made sense enough. now i imagine a dude driving
along on the interstate, plucking lice critters out of his hair and
keeping count of the number of plucks, singing about this particular
episode of headlice because “it’s been a busy day today”.

i guess i’ll have a busy day tomorrow. not on account of lice or scurvy or
crabs but jury duty. i don’t mind going. i have nothing else to do, as i
spent the day lamenting. nothing useful, that is. my main worry is setting
the alarm clock. i haven’t done that in 10 years.

i do not consider myself a weather whiner but this so-called summer has
really been getting me down. the weekend heat was a seductive respite, but
here we are again back to days of clouds and rain and temperatures in the
60s. it’s just so fucking wrong.

i listened in to Nebraska radio this afternoon. it took me a long time to
warm up to the Sangen DDR-63 WiFi Radio that i bought last year, but i’m
getting as much out of that beast as i could reasonably desire. it is an
internet device, of course, so it shares the same Internet connection used
on the computers in my apartment. but i like the separate device. i have
never warmed up to using a $3000 computer as a radio, and i know that this
Sangean is but an extension of the computer in a way, but it can operate
fully without the computer being on and it is a radio, not Winamp or Real
Player or Spotify, all of which i like just fine, but as a faux
traditionalist of sorts i still prefer the actual table top device for
listening to radio stations. and a device that brings in thousands of
stations is pretty cool, even if it doesn’t bring in local obviousnesses
like Yankees baseball or Bloomberg Radio. the Sangean DDR-63 is not the
“all-in-one” it bills itself to be, but it is a pretty impressive
“lots-in-one” device.

its chief flaw is its lack of AM tuner. that, as mentioned before, makes
it impossible for this New Yorker to hear local broadcasts of Yankees
baseball and Bloomberg Radio. Bloomberg Radio has no advertised public
Internet stream, though it is available directly from their web site,
suggesting that Bloomberg Radio may be accessible through
some not-so-crazy URL hack. but Yankees baseball is only available
for pay over the Internet. So your $400 radio comes with an additional
pricetag if you want to use it to hear some local AM radio.

is that even legal? to sell a radio device that would force buyers to
purchase additional services to hear content that the FCC mandates should
always be available locally? and why do these radio makers give AM such
short shrift?

in the modern world of HD radio one could expect to get AM stations on the
FM band via HD3. WCBS 880 AM (which carries the Yankees Radio Network in
NYC) has 3 HD channels, including its HD3 station which is simply the AM
station. (i’m going to double check this when i get home. i have a
Sony HD radio that gets all the local HD stations, but it’s possible that
even their carriage of WCBS’ HD3 station does not carry live Yankees
games.)

i like listening in on local AM radio from faraway places. they talk about
hog futures and sand hills on Nebraska radio. they also talk about the
same shit they talk about on talk radio everywhere else in the country,
since the same nationally syndicated shows echo in Lincoln as rattle
through Queens, Brooklyn, and all the rest of this righteously
self-centered town.

you can’t be too much of an audiophile if Internet Radio is your thing.
some stations sound hearty and full, others sound like butt, and surfing
from station to station can be jarring. thus, the DDR-63′s greatest
quality — its sound — is subject to squalor as an internet radio. local
FM sounds awesome. the iPod sounds as good as it can, depending on the
source of the recording. CDs sound as good on the DDR-63 as any device i
can remember. the network music player, which plays FLAC and MP3 and OGG
off my RAID (look all those up), sounds great but exhibits evidence of
some strange product-development decision-making-processes (so does the
CD player).

blahblahblah. words that will linger unread on the world wide web.

Monday, May 14th, 2012 10:49 pm

by L. R. Pitts (speaking of Lazy)

Perhaps, too, you have been told that talent is the sine qua non of
successful musicianship. “Many men of many minds,” runs the old,
alliterative proverb, and this is one of the queer notions they harbor.
Talent is helpful, certainly, when used in connection with other
attributes, but talent is not necessary. Talent is lazy, as a rule, and
scorns the drudgery of art.

Monday, May 14th, 2012 6:15 pm

lazy

i don’t know much about my family history or genealogy, and i’ve sometimes
regarded myself as a genealogical sociopath for the void of interest
in the matter that inhabits me. one word, though, that stands out in my
memory is the way my great-aunt described the Thomases. “You Thomases are
good people, you’re just lazy.” When seh told me taht I accepted it in a
folksy way. She was, I thought, 140 years old, so everything she said must
be golden. In time I disabused nyself of the notion that old people are
righteous an d wise just because they are old. And as regarded that
particular comment I didn’t have an opinion on its veracity. No one in my
immediate Thomasian orbit was particularly lazy, as far as I could tell.
The great-aunt was probably referring to earlier generations, those
forebears I never knew or about which I knew nothing. Most of the stories
I know from my father’s side of the family are grim. A lot of suicides, a
lot of deaths under questionable circumstances, and a lot of death
by alcohol. I’ve never known drinking like they did it on my dad’s side.
The only real exposure I had to it was in Atlanta, when I stayed with my
aunt and uncle for a couple of weeks. The uncle (my father’s twin brother)
drank, but he knew what he was doing. It was the aunt (not a blood
relative) who drank morning noon and night, waking up sharp and likeable
but disappearing into invalid-level incoherence drunkenness at the mere
smell of bourbon. That’s the only full-scale drunk I ever spent time with.
i have no idea if she was lazy, though, she had spent 30-something years
as an executive assistant to one or another CEO, or so it was described to
me. she may have been like the administrative assistants i knew at
corproate. if so then she spent 30-something years mastering the art of
pacing herself, of doing as little as possible, or working harder at not
working that at working. or maybe she worked like a slave all those years
and her retirement was her time to let it rip, let it wash away under
the blistering lava of pension-paid alcohol. (i have a pension coming. if
i make it to 63 i think i get about $300/month. i laughed when i got the
letter telling me this. i told my mother “I’ve got beer money for my
retirement!”)

i lay in bed this long morning,
impatient with another painful erection,
thinking about that word.
lazy.
i am lazy.
laziness has filled my hours.
we spend our hours the
way we spend our days, which is
how we spend our weeks, our years, our lives.
when the most recent ex and i would
wake up at 2pm i would say
“welcome to my lazy life.”
i said it with pride,
confidence,
a dull braggadocio.
now i mutter it to myself with disdain.
by some standards i am living a fantasy.
by others i am wasting the dream.

Monday, May 14th, 2012 2:32 pm

Fix your stupid alarm

Monday, May 14th, 2012 12:53 am

tumbling down

it’s all unethical. the business. the model. you drive around. you see a
“for sale” sign. you index it. your algorithm determines its relevance.
you rank. you slap ads on it. you make a few cents per year off that “for
sale” sign and you move on to more “for sale” signs. you find “for sale”
signs with extra information. lists of items for sale. phone numbers.
names and numbers. you index that. you add that to your pile of mastery.
with a billion “for sale” signs you make $10 in a month. your
computerized trolls sort and sift. you don’t know what is happening but
you slap ads on the pile of “for sale” and garage sales and flecks of
text inhaled from drive-by excursions. you don’t know what the
fuck you are doing nor does anyone else, but the ads work, and you drive
on, you pile on. you build on an empire of accumulation, an Everest of
“We index first, you use the lawyers (at your own expense) to ask
questions later.” it’s all coming down. the next empire is akin to the
last: no advertising robots tickling your fingertips. it’s a house of
cards. tumbling down. tumbling down.

Sunday, May 13th, 2012 7:59 pm

pass

that was freaky. at Queens Boulevard and Albion i seem to have lost 4 or 5
seconds of my life. i don’t know where they went, into what clutches of
obscurity that snap of time evaporated, but at least i know what happened.
this wasn’t mysterious as are other of my current health travails. it was
the heat that got me. i very nearly passed out right on the sidewalk. i’m
lucky this happened on queens boulevard, where i could catch a cab home.
something like this happened last year on the triborough bridge, and that
was flippin’ scary. in that episode i needed water badly, my throat was
closing, and i was a little bit dizzy from the heat. but the real trouble
was the need for water. and up on the triborough there is nothing for
emergency situations. no emergency telephone, no way to wave anyone down
(at least not from the upper level of the walkway).

today i was just walking, my flesh and subcutaneous inaards gorging on the
sunlight. i had no plan but as the walk progressed i chose the queens mall
as a destination. i had my Outback Steakhouse gift card handy and planned
to treat myself to a porterhouse or maybe just a cheeseburger. i had eaten
nothing, consumed almost no water, and i should count myself lucky that i
did not fully collapse on the sidewalk. i managed to slink into a payphone
enclosure for some shade, and i dumped some of my tiny bottle of water
over my head. my only real concern is that it wasn’t really that hot. if i
can’t take this then i’m not ready for any more of this cruelly-delayed
summer.

i called it in. “called it in” is my ongoing project that i
started in September. when a thought strikes or when something
happens i find the nearest payphone and call it in to a Skype voicemail.
once in a while i cheat and call it in from the cell phone, but that’s
only when i have no other option and don’t want to wait. i usually end of
calling it in again from a payphone. i’m assembling the calls into
something that i hope will be meaningful. when i started the project in
September i had in mind that i would introduce it with a long, pre-written
story about why i was doing this. i did write the story up, and i did
deliver it a few times from a particularly beloved payphone. but i’ll
never use that speech. it’s too grandiose and pretentious for the nature
of this endeavor. i’m guilty of that top-heavy advance planning in other
pursuits when it makes best sense to let things evolve on their own.

today was the 2nd cab i’ve taken in the last few weeks. those are the
first cabs i’ve hailed in years. cabbies never want to go where i need to
go and i’ve assumed the habit of letting them go about their business
without me.

but a couple of weeks ago i had a doctor’s appointment, and i
misunderstood the address of the place, landing me a couple of miles from
where i needed to be when i needed to be there. had to find a cab, and i
was surprised to find one that agreed to my demands of destination. it was
a minor confrontation to start off, with the cabbie locking the doors
before evaluating my offer, before agreeing to drive me to a certain
intersection, before deciding if that destination suited his broader plan
for the day.

i knew a cabbie for a long time, and i sympathize with those guys for how
hard and long they work and how little money they make. but if they don’t
want to take me where i want to go, as is normal, then fuck ‘em. they’ll
do fine without me, i’ll do fine as well, and everyone’s happy.

today i didn’t have to get through that little layer of illegal
bureaucracy. i just got in and announced my home address, prepared to
threaten the driver if he refused. i was that fucked up and tired from the
heat.

i tipped well.

i am sheduled for an MRI next week. there may be something very wrong in
my system, or it may be nothing but poor nutrition and an encroaching
sense of depressed resignation. who can say… it’s probably not as
mysterious as i like to imagine myself. nothing about me ever is.