Sweater Weather

What I think is that I’m a guy playing Yahtzee on the crapper. I’m drinking something draught and eating french fries, watching UFC on mute on the smallest flat-screen at the bar. I’m in a dress shirt and black briefs in a hotel room; I’m wearing the same socks for the third day in a row and I’m holding a tiny bottle of water. I barely notice myself in the mirror.

What I think is that I’m a guy who can’t see the tops of buildings. I’m a guy who notices hats (I notice every hat). This is what I think I am, when I think about who I am. But I’m just grinding pepper onto a pile of peppercorns. I only taste the seasons of one thousand floating turtles on night-fishing videos. One thousand lost ladybugs. One thousand singing hips. I’ve remembered the flavors but forgotten the meal.

It’s been a hot September and it’ll be a warm October. If I could just control the way I feel about temperature, it’d be sweater weather already.

An uptown N and R arrive at the same time at Union Square. We'll take the N. Now watch, because by the time we get past 23rd street, the people on the R will be gone forever, and if you shared any intimacy with them--eye contact and a half-smile after noticing some quirky detail, then that was your entire relationship, and wasn't it perfect?

Pushers and Squeezers

When I got to the L yesterday, it was after 8 PM but the platform was quite busy all the same. I assume it had been one of those situations where some logistical anomaly forced a ten-minute wait during a moderate-traffic period and caused a big build-up of people. I’m not much of a pusher or a squeezer. If the train is full, I am usually cool to wait for the next one. I do however, like (by “like” I mean “employ as a commuting strategy”) to get in a good position to hop on immediately and let myself get pushed further into the train by the pushers and squeezers.

The platform being as busy as it was, I was unable to get right at the yellow strip to take this approach, and after glancing at the ETA, decided that the 4-5 minute wait for the next train would be fine.

The point is, once the train filled up, and the waiters had resumed an at-ease posture and taken their half steps away from the platform edge, there was a girl who caught my attention, standing in the most-proximal-to-the-closing-doors position. If you ride trains, you know this position: not yet surrounded, but shoulders slightly scrunched with your back perfectly straight, in anticipation of the doors spring-loading you in. What I noticed though was the way she glanced briefly at the floor in front of her, maybe a square foot and a half of floor space. I recognized it as being the opening for a pusher or squeezer, and I think she did, too. Was she worried about a pusher making a last-second effort? Was she considering inviting a waiter to become a squeezer? Was she merely remarking to herself that, in a town full of pushers and squeezers, this was remarkably rare real estate?

I always think it’s important to point out when I am not attracted to girls, especially in this town where everyone is just looking for a piece, so I place this detail here. She was not attractive (though not ugly).

Now, why I thought the following, I don’t know (perhaps my acute awareness of her made me think she was acutely aware of me) but my main hypothesis was that she might be about to invite me to squeeze in. There were other waiters there, so I don’t know why this would happen, but in the instant, I was questioning whether I would accept.

The doors closed. Her jacket—just a tiny bit of it, was pinched between them. She noticed, looked at it and tugged a little bit. It wasn’t coming loose. She glanced up at me, I smiled at her predicament, and she smiled back with an understated eye roll and invisible sigh. Before the train left, the doors opened briefly and she freed herself. The doors closed again. As the train departed, she looked at me again, and we nodded to each other.

I live for these moments.

The Forest For The Trees

If you walk East from the BDFV toward the Fifth Avenue exit at the Bryant Park/42nd Street stop, you will pass through a hall lined with tile art depicting what appears to be the roots of trees in the ground. Visually, it is interesting because while viewing it, you yourself are underground, so it intimates a more natural and organic subterranea than would a grimy white-walled hallway. This is all well and good but there is an aspect to this piece that confuses me completely. There are three quotations emblazoned upon the walls throughout it, all of which refer to (though I will not say are about) water.

The first that you see, from West to East, is attributed to Ovid and some years BC. It is in Latin but parenthetically translated to English as something akin to "Dripping water hollows a stone". I noticed this for the first time today and looked again at the art. Is there something visually here that represents water? It still looks like roots. Maybe it is supposed to be trickling water? But the Ovid quote itself is not really about water any more than it is about unhatched chickens or a rolling stone. Is the visual more about the gradual but severe effect humans have on enviroment? Are the drip of water and grip of roots one and the same? I really liked these questions and thought they complemented the aforementioned visual force of the piece phenomenally.

But my credit may have been overwrought. The second quote is the first couplet of the well-know nursery rhyme, "Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a pail of water." This puzzled me. "Jack and Jill" in its less-well-known 4-stanza version has some narrative quality and discernable meaning, but even the whole first verse (in which Jack breaks his crown) is arbitrary out of context or Icarian at best. But even if we acknowledge that the Jack and Jill verse warns of flying too close to the Sun (so to speak), this quote is still very loosely related to the Ovid quote. At best, a separate commentary in the same installation. But why then insist on tying together the element of water?

There is finally a third quote, I believe from James Joyce, the diction of which in passing I refuse to bother to interpret. I can only assume that it muddies the picture even more and confirms that this whole piece of art is completely arbitrary. Am I missing something?

Literary Breadcrumbs

I am currently reading The Names by Don DeLillo. My copy is an old used paperback I bought online several years ago and have toted around unread and abused. The cover and the first several dozen pages have fallen off since I began reading it. I like the idea of the pages of a book falling like petals behind me on the subway or discreetly (and discretely) in bathroom stalls as I read. Or maybe more like literary breadcrumbs, swallowed up by the creatures of the forest and obscuring the path back to where I began. I'm not literally abandoning the pages, this city has enough litter, but I like the idea anyway. It also makes me read with greater frequency, struggling to keep ahead of the wake of abatement.

In Vino Veritas?

Last night, Lindsey and I discussed the legitimacy of the theory that we (people in general) are more truthful--that more truth is revealed, when we are drunk. Our conclusion (I think we agreed) was that while more things are said when drunk, and that everything that is said (ever) comes from somewhere (a real emotion or thought), it is not always more truthful. There is a deep and serious honesty to our inhibitions, possibly more prevalent than the "truth" inherent in the things we say and do when our inhibitions are diluted or eliminated outright.

What is the significance of this? I guess it is that there is no real truth or real honesty or real simple black-and-white way of knowing what is and what isn't about somebody. It reminds me of a great Virginia Woolf quote:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.

We'll never pinpoint anything, about each other or about ourselves. I guess that's probably the fun in life, isn't it? We have to live it, together, constantly, in order to try to clarify what resides within these halos.