2 January, 1996 7:28:43 PM What a drag. Last night I wrote this long, paranoid blabber about police, and how police are everywhere you go in life, in every discipline and in very place, and how there will always be Sin Police, Comma Police (KommaKazis), HTML Police, Posture Police, Tip Police, Dream Police, Pinball, Good Taste, Etiquette, Names-of-Presidents, What-Is-He-Thinking, Dirty Laundry, Lampshade and Instant Replay Police. The computer froze, and the police frenzy went unsaved. What a loss. Get Bill Gates on the horn, Immediately. I'm laughing at myself for even caring, though, maybe that's the funny thing about it all. Garrison Keillor once wrote a forward to one of his books, maybe it was Prairie Home Companion, where he talked about a time he lost a briefcase filled with the pages of his unfinished first novel. I always suspected that he was making that story up - there was just some crack in the narrative that I couldn't quite get a fix on - and any time someone loses a story or a book or whatever I just wish they would get over the "pain" and write the damn thing over again. I like Garrison Keillor, but I really hate it when he lets his bitterness show. Like he did in a piece he did for Time Magazine late last year. Last week came word from J.D. Heilprin: Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 15:04:05 +0000 From: "J.D. Heilprin" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: phones you know, either i have too much time on my hands, or reading your pages inpires me to deviousness that latently exists within my being anyhow. . . . but the phone thing. . . i mean, i started thinking about all the different phone numbers and then went to lunch because i was craving a turkeyburger at Swingers. The payfone in Swingers (On Beverly Blvd. near Fairfax in l.a.) is 213/951-9518. This is always interesting because swingers is filled with both posers and giggers on the l.a. scene. that is, some people there are actually reasonable cool, while most of the others have various versions of acquired cool (which is readily trasparent to anyone who's been around for a while). Today, the place looked like the morning-after afterparty for the premier of KIDS. i also, on my way home from the turkeyburger (which is really a poor excuse for a burger) stopped by fred segal, the boutique ala l.a. of moneyed coolness, where two booths stand adjacent to various statuesque beauties, many of whom i know a little, but rarely can mutter any real cleverness to. I would like to think of them as vacuous (sp?), but that's only a defense against their height, and hair, and fake boobs and noses and perfect things, etc. Anyhow, any shmo should be able to call one of these numbers and speak with one of these legitimate beauties, or at the vary least some Persian or Japenese girl who stops by fred segal to check out the Prada or Dolce and Gabanna. 213/951-9722 or 213/951-9522. (can anyone get these to work? I didn't have any luck    -MT) I will promise you in the coming days two additional numbers: i have always wanted to know the number at this booth on Sunset boulevard where these hookers are constantly hanging out. second, i have to remember to grab a number at the Southwest Airline payfones at LAX. Nowhere else on earth, other than the Southwest terminals at other southwestern u.s. airports, can one find a greater amalgamation of white trash. i'm talkin big hair, trailer park, gut mongers, who seem to migrate toward the SW skies. its a'comin. . . I immediately called these numbers, and was only able to get through to the first one, at Swingers. The results of this call are here (418k .au file). I think I might do this routine a little more often. Call payphones and ask for myself. I know I'll never be there, because I'm right here and not in any place that I choose to call. Unless I utilized some kind of automated calling system, where I would get tickets to a Mets game at Shea or a Paul McCartney Concert at Giants Stadium and I could be sure to be somewhere near a specific payphone at a certain hour, at which time my automated call-generator would call that payphone, let the phone ring up to 35 times, then someone would finally answer and since it would be a baseball game or a rock concert then the person who answers is probably drunk and "in command" of everything, so they'd turn around right away with a poisoned, cockeyed grimace, hold the phone up into the air like a putrid trophy and shout "MARK THOMAS? ANYONE HEAR KNOW MARK THOMAS?" Then I, having studiously busied myself with a newspaper or the salting of a bag of popcorn, would snap out of my feigned business and rush to the phone, commanding the clearance of hundreds of people who gathered near the phone, all of them inadvertantly but with unconscious hopefulness trying to bond together into an instant community of the moment and somehow try to share credit with the drunk hollerer for the vanquished tension which had finally been snapped by ringing public phone had created. Volunteers are very power-hungry, I find, and if the situation in the above paragraph ever does come to pass, I suspect that the person who answered the phone will suddenly feel themself to be a very powerful person, and when I reach the phone and say that it's me, I'm Mark Thomas, the person will demand proof, "Lemme see your ID, asshole. Any pinhead could come up here and tell me they were Mark Thomas. You got a driver's license?" Come to think of it, maybe I'll arrange for these automated callings to occur, and maybe I'll hang around somewhere near the phones, but when someone yells my name I'll wait a little while before deciding whether or not to answer. I wonder if there would be any imposters in the crowd, people who were so curious about the ringing phone, but not gutsy enough to answer it, but whose anxiety was quenched by someone else answering, who would seize the momentum of that answered anxiousness by saying "Yeah, that's me!" Then the whole business of demanding identification would happen, the interrogator would become vaguely aware that my automated recording had begun to repeat, but would nevertheless maintain the role of finding the right party for this call. Oh Idunno. It's all kind of dumb. It might be worth doing if I could get the automated recording mechanism to also record the conversation. That actually would probably not be too hard. The plot thickens . . . 3 January, 1996 11:28:37 PM Was at the Broadway Arcade last night, and I noticed that the entire place seems to be slightly off-balance. I never noticed it until I played a lot of computer pinball games, which of course have perfectly balanced tables whose orientation do not cause the pinballs to lope toward one side or the other. The strenuousness of playing real, or maybe it's called Analog Pinball, was kind of disconcerting. I just corrected myself, having typed "disconcreting" originally. That's how it felt, though, like pouring concrete. Wow, a couple of cats are fighting in the alley outside, man they're fuckin' screaching at each other, sounds like how an electrified tornado might sound. Ah, now they stopped. No sirens or concerned neighbors rushing to the scene or anything, just a lot of quiet. Too bad about the police rant getting lost. It can not have had much merit, but on the other hand I don't think that anything in particular prompted me to compose it at that particular moment (a couple of hours into New Years Day, 1996). So maybe it would not have had the weaknesses that essays almost always have when they are composed out of the piss and bile of one's daily experience. Maybe instead it would have possessed all the weaknesses of those things written from the piss and bile of one's entire life and existence. It's a mystery, one which I am now too tired to figure out. Good night, now, and Happy Birthday Joe (I knew it was Monday, I didn't forget, I was just really busy that day).