Remembering the KILL Payphone

I posted this picture to sorabji.com in December, 2002. It shows a payphone outside of Carnegie Hall on which someone attempted to capture the zeitgeist of the post-9/11 era, summoning presumably rhetorical calls to kill everything from Islam to fear to the Bali bomber and even chicken pox.

Chicken pox?

I’ve been rambling through my 23 years of website content. I find so many pages I forgot I ever put out there, some of them interesting, much of them not. It feels like a lifetime ago when I created a website optimized for Netscape 1.1’s HTML extensions. Was it Netscape 1.1, or 1.2? Ah, who knows, but it was fun. Today that landscape I created is littered with broken images, errors that occurred while processing a directive, links to other sites that fell off the WWW over a decade ago… I am thinking of wrapping all of it up but I can’t. I’ve put too much of my life and energies into this and other websites to just pull the plug.

The problem is the accumulation. I am not a physical hoarder but digital? Yeah. I amass mountains of photos, text, video, you name it. There is too much for me to process. With payphones in particular I find not just that I’ve gathered more content than I’ll ever have time to share, but that the subject matter is so personal and even intimate to me that talking about it in public is like talking about brushing my teeth or other more personal details of my diurnal routines. That’s been my dilemma with payphones and this website for almost as long as it’s been online. I know way more about this stuff than I post here because posting that stuff here is like giving away secrets I should save for lovers, off-the-record journalists, even the confessional.

For the past several years I’ve been writing and posting almost every day to a site I’ve made more-or-less invisible to search engines. That site essentially does not exist to anyone except those who are genuinely following me. I don’t know who they are but they are out there, checking in on me. Given certain things I’ve said over the years I suspect some folks just want to make sure I am still alive. I am. If you are reading this then so, too, are you.