Tuesday Fades Away

01/12/2010

Tuesday Fades Away

This morning the sky was striated in pastels of pink, orange and blue.

I left for work and walked to the subway as parents took their children to school. This is one of my favorite times of the day in Washington Heights, before the drug dealers and 'corner huggers' have managed to get out of bed.

I took another shot because I feared the first might be too dark.

In the subway, I pondered the advertisement for a new play with little enthusiasm. Ever since I heard an interview with David Mamet on NPR, I've felt a vague desire to throw up every time I see his name, this an involuntary reaction to the excessive degree of 'macho bullshit' in which he likes to revel. I'm not saying these things shouldn't be explored, but it can be disturbing when you get the sense that a writer really takes this kind of ethos to heart, so that you have no choice but to conclude that, like so many of his characters, he too is a macho asshole.

Still, I felt I would prefer to watch David Mamet for 1000 days straight rather than suffer through the 'rom-com' advertised on the adjacent panel. Are there really any couples that look like this IRL and would you want to be friends with them? Hollywood says yes, apparently! (I should note that I know absolutely nothing about this movie besides the above-pictured poster and it's entirely possible that it's the greatest exploration of male/female relationships since Godard's 'Masculin/Feminin'?)

I arrived at work, where time passed until it was time to leave.

On the way to the subway, I decided to take a picture of the Empire State Building as I waited for the light to change at Fifth Avenue. After crossing the street, I noticed that one of my eyes was blurry and even rubbed it a few times before realizing that I had managed to knock out one of the lenses. 'Fuck,' I thought, certain that finding it on a crowded sidewalk at night was pretty much a lost cause. But then a woman about twenty yards behind me yelled out: 'Hey -- did you lose a lens?' and miraculously it had fallen on top of a heating grate where it precariously rested but had not fallen through. After thanking her profusely, I managed to retrieve the lens and resumed my walk to the subway. (I put my glasses away because wearing only one lens gave me an instant headache.)

But if my faith in humanity had been restored en route to the subway, it was quickly eroded in the subway car, where a person next to whom I was obligated to stand due to the rush-hour traffic felt the need to ingest a candy bar only inches from my face; worse, he chewed with his mouth open, so I had no choice but to inhale his smelly candy-bar breath on the entire journey from 59th Street to 125th Street, which is probably the longest stretch between stops on the entire MTA. Needless to say, this prevented me from focusing on Proust, which annoyed me all the more.

To calm myself, I tried to remember the beauty of the setting sun that I had enjoyed only minutes earlier.

Posted at 07:39 PM in Expression | Permalink

Comments

you know, these posts make me miss living in nyc! but then I remember the weather and Mt Tam and I'm okay. But, thanks!

Posted by: Dana | 01/12/2010 at 11:13 PM

Thanks Dana -- NY is nothing if not a place to develop a love/hate relationship! xo Matt G

Posted by: Matthew Gallaway | 01/12/2010 at 11:21 PM

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Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine

Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.

Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past

Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.

Video: The Chaos Detective

The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.

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01/12/2010