11:48:04 PM Was able to stop myself before spending a whole lot of time developing what I am certain would have been a fiercely boring story. The first line of that story would have been "Satin Doll was the name of a pinball machine, and the name of a song I was never quite able to hear over Voice of America." God, that sounds like a boring story. Thinking, though, that what I should really do is force myself to write it, to purge myself of this one sorry tale in hopes that I will never again deceive myself into thinking that every goddam thing that ever happened to me is just so fucking interesting. You know what I think would be interesting, I think it would be really cool in like 200 years to get a copy of the password file for Panix. Maybe not Panix, though. Actually, I don't suspect that Panix would produce very interesting insights, since it's not a very tight community. But I think that a list of a family's CompuServe passwords could be fascinating, especially if it could somehow be a list which included every password each family member had used at different times of their lives. I have found that peoples' choice of password is almost always something surprising, and almost always something very, very revealing. I would like to see a list of what passwords my classmates in grade school and high school used, although now that I think of it I don't think that in any of the time I was in school in Florida any of us would have had anywhere to use passwords in the communal sense that I have in mind. But a list of all the passwords of all the kids in a certain grade at a certain school at a certain time. The password my ex-girlfriend started using the day I suspected she'd been seeing someone else. Or the passwords of the rich and famous. I think history would be deeply enriched if Jesus and the Pharisees and Pilate and the Apostles had all had e-mail accounts, and if one day it was discovered that the internet service provider which serviced the Holy Land had never made it a practice to discontinue unused accounts, and that mail for all these people had been collecting there for 2000 years; the quest to figure out The Lord's password and to see e-mail from God would drive teenagers and lost souls like myself to the breaking point. Passwords would provide compelling insights into private life. Why is this starting to sound like some kind of business proposal? When I was a kid I'd always get really jealous of people who received phone calls. Back then I would always think of it like "Wow, that guy gets phone calls. I wonder what he talks about." I think people are suspicious of telephone conversations the way they're suspicious of locked desk drawers and all those pornographic bulletin board systems. The telephone itself is such a volatile opening to me. It is such a private device, and the depth of the mysteries that haunt its dark and empty wires will never stop fascinating me. What can they be talking about? What is he laughing at? What could she have said? Why hasn't she said anything for so long? Who are they talking about? Once I picked up the phone at our house in Tampa, while the phone company was doing some kind of work on the phone in the neighborhood, and for a couple of seconds I could hear what sounded like thousands and thousands of people talking. All of the lines for some reason were coming through onto our phone, and I was so terrified I pitched the phone right onto the floor, feeling like I'd accidentally uncovered some long-ignored nest of angry rats. I think the sound of all those voices strangling each other like that lasted for about one second, but I still sometimes think of it when I pick up a telephone. What can all those people have been talking about? I remember, during that one second, thinking that I might be able to hear what just one person was saying, that I might be able to get just one word from one person and then from that maybe I could figure out what their conversation was about. I often pick up ringing payphones. I've had a lot of exhilarating, brief conversations that way. I've also dialed up a lot of public phones and just let them ring and ring and ring, having gotten the numbers of the phones by calling my own answering machine at home and leaving myself a message which was just a recitation of that payphone's number. I once lost an empty Gevalia box in which I had stashed dozens and dozens of slips of paper on which I'd written the phone numbers for a few hundred pay telephones in Manhattan and in Queens. No real great loss, I don't s'pose; strangely disappointing, though, especially considering how I'd never had any idea what I intended to do with this collection of phone numbers or when I thought my collection would be complete. I remember that many of the slips of paper had other writing on them indicating where that particular phone was located. I know I got a lot of numbers from the Chelsea section of Manhattan, and I had numbers for every payphone at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. I had a dozen or so of the numbers from Shea Stadium, and the number of a payphone inside the mens restroom at a catholic church in Woodside. I would call these phones sometimes, just to let them ring. That sound, the sound of a telephone ringing, is something that positively chews into my mind, goes squirreling through my brain and down my head into some hot zone of my life about which I have no understanding. I've known this, you know, for years now, but for some reason I keep calling numbers where I can be pretty certain there will never be an answer. And when someone does answer, I never say anything. Sometimes I call the corner of 54th street and 5th avenue, because there's a man there who answers, says hello, and then drops the receiver, letting the call stay open so I can hear the sounds of the cars and the people and the ambulances in the street. I don't know who that person is, but I think he understands. I think he's a hot dog vendor, and that I may have even communicated directly with him in person at some time or another. If I have, I don't remember thinking at the time that it was he who somehow knew to answer my call and just let me listen. I don't think that I had any particular thoughts whatsoever about this matter, I simply purchased an iced tea from him and thought nothing further about it, and thought nothing further about the ringing phone and the many hours I'd spent listening to the voices outside. The first few times I called that phone, I remember the sound of his voice, it was distressed and worried that someone on the other end of the line was not speaking. He hung on for several minutes, saying "Hello, hello, hello" over and over. It's miraculous now to think of how powerful was the line of communication suddenly opened between us, neither of us having any idea about the other. Over time, and during the next several days, when I would call he would sound resigned, knowing that whoever was calling was not going to say anything, but that this person was calling just to be there with somebody in the quietest, least obtrusive way possible. Man, listen to me chew the brain like this. It must be Sunday. I was going to turn this into an HTML free-for-all, with spiralling columns of text and assiduously placed .gifs of the inside of my desk drawers to help punctuate the droning, but now it's late and I'm just too damn tired.