such a lovely day.why is everybody so damned crazy? me included.
i chose to do what i didn’t do yesterday and that was to ride my bike and get things done the old-fashioned way. i got a mail sack and made a plan to fill it with things i
needed from the island of manhattan. there’s all sorts of stuff on the island of manhattan. the last time i was on the island of manhattan, i ran into my dear-old friend rai, a woman i mentioned a while back who was in the record business and gave me early cassettes from bands like king missile, ween and bongwater. she was a cassette-making
genius, her mixed tapes along the lines of my own dreams of freeform-cross-genre-twisting-where’d-that-song-come-from? sort of musical art.
she was among the first friends of scrap bar, but that was an earlier time this week when i was with car and maxx and drove back to brooklyn with her.
today i was rolling along with the wind in my hair (or what’s left of it). i had a night of limited sleep. i drifted in and out of an anxiety i last felt in october of 2007, the night before that surgery. i’ve become a friend of someone who was going through a similar episode this very day, so last night i felt all the things i thought she might be feeling, sort of “sympathy anxiety pains.” i would drift off, i’d sleep a moment like a dope nod and spring up unaware of the time gone or where i was.
i couldn’t center my thoughts. it’s funny how this moment of “dopeness” would rear its head now, days after running into rai. we shared alphabet-city adventures. we courted the decaying stairways of second and C, lined-up with junkies, professors, suits, students, rockers, “funny meeting you here”-s; plumbing leaking from floors above, trickling down, echoing against the white hexagonal tile floor below, people in single file, quiet and contrite, hugging the walls ascending the old stairway, monitor-thugs openly displaying holstered, automatic handguns bullying the buyers, reminding them to have their money ready (think seinfeld “soup nazi” episode, sinister) where getting pistol-whipped was a distinct possibility so there was never a laughtrack; just the tingly feeling of adrenaline, dopesickness and fear.
and fun. death is fun in hallways provided you got the twenty.

guess what? this a perfect time to reprise the glossary term i ended a previous note with. i can do this because i never used the term in a sentence, as is my process, so here goes;

this is a good time for another word from the glossary.
17 – Maintenance rehearsal – Repetition of information over and over to keep it “fresh” in working memory.
Reprising this glossary term is a perfect example of maintenance rehearsal, and if i do it again i’m sure to piss someone off, maybe even myself.
there, i used it in a sentence.

it is also a wonderful way of digressing, of getting away from the point.
for a moment, i’ll think that the point is me.
me me me.
but it’s not. it’s my friend who haunts me. it’s my friend who makes me look far. it’s my friend who, after sending me her home address would chime in, “hey, wait a minute….are you a stalker?”
and i don’t get the opportunity to say “of course! i learned how to be one from that doo-wop song “silhouettes” ”
i want to tell her that it’s one of the scariest songs ever written but i can’t.
i want to share stalker stories with her. i want to say “hey, i got a few myself.”
i want to tell her how much i need to continue this conversation and how right now i’m wandering in a field of monologues and it’s all well and good because i never grow tired of my voice but then i’d have to admit to a lie because there are voices i need to hear in this world and she’s one of them. she’s “a contemporary” of mine.

i am forever whistling past graveyards then running out dodging traffic.
i don’t want to talk about anything. i’m cycling around the east village, rolling past where “the world” used to be, where i found myself living for a few months because i was a successful homeless bar owner, where i’d be purchasing “extra power” a year or so later with rai.
there would be a few too many projectors occupying the same screen as i try to not think about my need to know. worse, all i have is this anxious sketch from decades ago and this clear voice, though i’ve never heard it.
i’m a sucker for a kind word. i’m a sucker for a heart full of knuckles who punches the canvas.
i try to put this uneasiness into perspective, and all i can put together is this;
the apollo 13 would have to circle the moon in order to slingshot themselves back home toward earth and for that time, there would be no radio contact.
i’m mission control and with all the radar and computers and gee-gaws, i got nothing.