Today is Tuesday, May 12. An awful night of sleep. Woke up around 3 AM and thought I saw the clock that said 8. That messed up my sleep since I kept thinking it was time to wake up. This has been happening more and more lately and last night was the worst example of it.
Jimmy Chile has stated he’s had similar problems lately. This could be a coincidence or perhaps something larger. Who knows? Since no one reads this here blog, I can’t reach out and ask for your experiences with this. I will have to see what I can do about this tonight when I prepare for sleep.
Mike is coming over tonight since he has to do something in Hoboken early in the morning. I told him to ask Bill and Bill was OK with it. And Bill is going away for a few days again so Mike will be doing a few overnights this week I suppose. No one mentioned it to Mike so anything is possible.
Mike is not known for turning down a stay in Hoboken. And as usual, it will be good having him around. I was alone for a day or two over the past week and it was lonely. Not the end of the world, but not much fun either.
I am playing Help Me Rhonda by the Beach Boys since the 14th St Path train station is managed by a woman named Rhonda, and every morning I see her name, I think of the song.
Now I think of I Heard Her Call My Name by the Velvet Underground and that is now next in the queue. I do not have much self-confidence, and to combine that with self-doubt, leaves me somewhat crippled.
I will be at the big fruit stand tomorrow and it’s nothing I haven’t done before, but I am always set back by fear of making a mistake, fear of Yancy, my supervisor, who has the power to release me from the fruit stand where I presently work.
I’d really rather not leave the fruit stand, but in the back of my mind, it is always a possibility. Working for Barry McGarry did my head in, and the Algerians weren’t much help either.
The Velvet Underground are playing. As I showered this morning, I was thinking of The Orange Juice, the third album by Orange Juice. Yes these thoughts go through my mind as I shower and curse my misbegotten sleep.
Mike will not be coming over tonight. He’s taken care of things on his end so therefore no need. We had a good call regarding people (guys) befriending on the social media. I sometimes accept the overtures of friendship.
One particular guy seemed to be OK. After a few days, his tale of woe is shown. He needs $500 for a new car battery. Though I have not had a car in 40 years, I know a car battery is not $500. I sent him a link stating that.
Then a sidestep, his ‘aunty’ was loaning him the money. Then came the roundabout way of asking for money. I told him things were tough enough loaning money to friends let alone sending money to a stranger hundreds of miles away. He insisted he wasn’t a stranger but by then I had had enough and blocked him.
Mike related to this since he has over 11000 friends on social media.
Ysmael Villanueva says:
Smartphones + Internet + Artifical Intelligence = Catastrophe
I think I agree with Ysmael Villanueva though it was something that Ysmael Villanueva would never, could never say.
Google Gemini rewrite as a David Rakoff essay
Tuesday, May 12. I emerged from the tangled sheets of a night defined by a special, frantic kind of exhaustion. At 3:00 AM, my trepanning brain decided the digital clock read 8:00, a cruel neurological prank that effectively poisoned the remaining hours of rest. Once you have mistakenly invited the morning in, she refuses to leave the foyer. This noctural glitch is becoming a recurring feature of my existence, a glitch in the hardware of middle age.
Jimmy Chile—who occupies a space in my daily orbit—claims a similar affliction. Whether this is a localized psychic disturbance or a grander, cosmic alignment of the chronically restless remains to be seen. I would poll the readers of this blog for their own tales of pre-dawn hallucinations, but since the readership currently hovers at a statistical zero, I am left to conduct my sleep-hygiene experiments in a vacuum of one.
The social calendar, much like my circadian rhythm, is a series of bait-and-shifts. Mike was slated to stay the night, a logistical convenience for an early morning errand here in Hoboken. I brokered the deal through Bill, who remains the grand adjudicator of our domestic space. But as it turns out, Mike has sorted his affairs, and the guest room remains unoccupied. Bill is departing for a few days, and while I nominally value my independence, the recent bouts of solitude have been less “Walden” and more “The Shining.” I find I am not particularly good at being my own only companion; the silence eventually starts to judge me.
My morning soundtrack is dictated by the mundane puns of the commute. Because the 14th Street PATH station is managed by a woman named Rhonda, I am legally and spiritually obligated to play the Beach Boys. “Help Me Rhonda” has surrendered its slot to the Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name,” a transition that feels appropriately jagged. My internal landscape is a precarious architecture of low self-confidence bolstered by a foundation of pure self-doubt. It is a crippling combination, like trying to run a marathon in shoes filled with wet cement.
Tomorrow, I return to the big fruit stand. It is a task I have performed a thousand times, yet I approach it with the quaking anxiety of a Victorian orphan. I am haunted by the specter of a mistake—any mistake—that might provoke the ire of Yancy, my supervisor. Yancy holds the power of professional life and death over me, and the thought of being cast out of the fruit stand is more than I can bear. My tenure with Barry McGarry was a psychological demolition derby, and the Algerians provided no sanctuary. I cling to the fruit stand with a desperate, white-knuckled fervor.
As I stood in the shower this morning, cursing the ghosts of my 3:00 AM delusion, my mind drifted—inexplicably, inevitably—to the third album by Orange Juice. These are the artifacts that float in the brine of my consciousness while I scrub.
Mike and I spent some time on the phone dissecting the modern tragedy of social media “friendship.” I recently entertained the overtures of a stranger who, within forty-eight hours, revealed the inevitable “tale of woe.” He required $500 for a car battery. Now, I have not operated a motor vehicle since the Carter administration, but I am reasonably certain a battery does not cost half a grand unless it is gold-plated or sentient. I sent him a link to a retail price point, an act of petty factual aggression that I found deeply satisfying. He pivoted to a story about a loaning “aunty” before eventually circling back to his hand-out. I informed him that the economy of lending to strangers is a closed market. He insisted we weren’t strangers; I disagreed and hit the block button with the grim efficiency of a guillotine operator. Mike, who boasts some 11,000 “friends” online, found this particularly relatable.
I found myself pondering a quote from Ysmael Villanueva: *Smartphones + Internet + Artificial Intelligence = Catastrophe.* It is a sentiment I find myself agreeing with, despite the haunting realization that it is a sentence Ysmael himself would never, and could never, actually utter. We are living in a world of digital ventriloquism, and I’m just trying to get some sleep.