about that last picture, the visually hoarse image of a chandelier, well, that was taken from grand tier, row b, seat 31 at the metropolitan opera house. i thought it might sparkle a little more like the actual object hanging there, but i guess the little camera phone lens couldn’t handle it. the opera (Tosca) was lackluster, in my opinion. i think this is the production that got booed a few weeks ago. it’s a great opera but this performance and production didn’t do much for me. my friend who came along seemed to think it was ok. for me finding a payphone in the basement was worth the price of admission.

after the opera i got a burger at the Brooklyn Diner on 57th Street. holy crap it was good. it wasn’t worth twenty bucks but it was mighty fine. i chose Brooklyn Diner over P.J.Clark’s, in the building which houses the infamous HOTEL EMPIRE. that hotel is infamous to me because of the discovery i made when my mother and i stayed there in 1985 or 1986 (when i auditioned for Juilliard). i was reading the room service card when i turned it over and found a hand-written note from Ruth to her customer, Peter. the note read “DEAR PETER. I HOPE YOUR SHIT IS COMING OUT REAL GOOD. WHEN YOU COME OUT (AND ON MY FACE) I WILL CLIMAX TO THE MAX.” i think there was another sentence or 2, and the note was signed “YOUR CUNT, RUTH.”

it was, i later discerned, a note from a hooker to her john. Ruth must have slid the note under the bathroom door while Peter was taking a dump. so romantic.

i brought that note back to suburban Tampa and showed it off to my high school friends, showing them that i’d been exposed to real New York City grit and depravity. i was proud.

somehow i lost that note, though i swear it must still exist somewhere, in a storage closet or a box somewhere.

…..

i’ve had further thoughts on the Sage of the Mundane, the character i assumed in a dream i had a few weeks ago. in the dream i was being interviewed by Sixty Minutes and a relay of news and cultural institutions on matters of great importance: how to pour a cup of coffee. how to use soap. today i added to the repertoire of my master knowledge an explanation of how to make a sandwich. this description came in response to a question from one of the interviewers, describing a food product that her mother used to make but that she bever knew how to make for herself. she described it as 2 pieces of bread with edible things in between. i quickly and triumphantly informed this woman that she had been eating a sandwich. i dutifully explained what sandwiches are, how to create one for yourself, and certain things that people do to either improve or enhance the experience of consuming the thing. “some people will take a knife, a sharp knife, and cut the sandwich in half. this has no negative affect on the sandwich. it loses no flavor or nutritional value if you cut it in half. it simply makes the concoction easier to hold in your hands.” this information was of such import to the questioner that she wept. at last, she said, a mystery of my childhood is solved. now i can go to the supermarket, purchase sliced turkey, cheeses, and bread, and i can make a sandwich.

i was being questioned by these august institutions because i was president of a school which teaches mundane behaviours. more than just teaching students how to sit in a chair or open a door i also inculcate them with explorations and question-and-answer sessions in which i explore their reasonings for doing what they did in some public situations.

a man walked into a park, intending to sit at a picnic table and eat a sandwich (which he learned how to make in one of my freshman-year classes). he reached the picnic table and found a plastic cup about half full full of ice, with a straw sticking out. he placed his lunch bag on the table and, before opening the bag and before sitting at the table, he picked up the plastic cup and took it 5 steps to his left, where h deposited the cup into a garbage can.

i asked him why.

“i didn’t need the cup. it appeared to have been used earlier by someone who sat at this picnic table. there was no beverage left, only ice that had been used to cool a beverage that appeared to have been consumed. the straw may have had saliva and germs from that person who had been here earlier. the ice was of no use to me. the cup was no use to me. the straw might have been contaminated with germs and saliva. i saw no reason to keep the cup there whilst i enjoyed my sandwich.”

“did you have a beverage of your own?”

“no.”

“you said the ice was of no use to you. did you not consider letting the ice melt, and drinking the water to wash down your sandwich? or did you consider even chewing the ice and, in the same way, using it to wash down your sandwich should it not easily be chewed and ingested into your body?”

“i did consider using the ice in both tthhose manners, but the possibility of contamination with the germs of the prevoius user of the cup made me choose to simply dispose of the cup.”

“and all of its contents?”

“and all of its contents.”

“the ice?”

“the ice.”

“the straw?”

“yes, the straw, too.”

“how did you decide to properly discard the cup, and the ice, and the straw?”

“i saw a cylindrical vessel about 5 or 6 steps away from the picnic table. the vessel seemed to be made of metal, and there were small flying animals circling around its top. i picked up the cup and the ice and the straw from the table and stepped toward the metal vessel with the small flying insects. i looked into the vessel and saw several other cups, and straws. other objects, as well, such as paper plates and plastic eating utensils, filled the vessel. i saw no ice such as partly filled the plastic cup in my hand, but by my observation it seemed that this vessel was a designated recepticle for plastic cups.”

“you deposited the cup and the straw and the ice into the vessel?”

“yes. recognizing the primacy and the importance of enjoining discarded materials like this with similarly discarded materials, i felt i had little choice but to deposit the plastic cup and the straw and the ice into the vessel which was partly filled with similar objects.”

“how much time did you need? from the moment you arrived at the picnic table and placed your lunch bag thereon, how much time was required for you to pick up the plastic cup and ice and straw and deposit it into the metal vessel?”

“4 seconds.”

…..

such are the teachings at the institute for the study of the mundane. no decision making process is immune from exploration. it is not scrutiny or interrogation, it is exploration.

i remember back in 1992 or 1993, when i had my first real corporate job in New York. the job was in a distinguished/distinctive office building on 57th Street. i never learned too too much about the innards of the corporation, and that sense of remove from the logistics of corporate from one who was, in a small way, contributing to its machinations, let my mind run amok with alternative realities that could be deposited into the corporate mold of offices, pods, conference rooms and conference calls. i imagined a pornographic corporation, one where men and women dressed in standard business attire sat at desks with prepared scripts of what they believed was the most intense erotica ever crafted. a fat business man with 40 years experience sat blithly at his desk, reading from a printout about how much he craved the hot cunt of the woman sitting in the chair before him. she responded with corporate staidness that she, too, craved his throbbing cock more than she needed air or water. the 40-year veteran of the company explodes with lust, and the woman returns the passions.

then they go back a few pages. they ask if the part about “fucking the dogs” was over the top, or even grounds for litigation.

in short, i imagined a corporate sex machine.

sometimes i still do.

…..

i watched every last second of “Independence Day” the other night. It is great entertainment, but hardly a great movie. Just good fun.

It aligns, however, with my current belief that human history should be obliterated, and a small sample of random humanity that survives shouild be allowed to start over. the communi/cations technologies that make us all naked, the abnormal technologies of aircraft and architecture which lift human beings off the ground to which we belong, the constipated and conflicting systems of government and law which serve no masters but themselves — these things need to be erased and human history should be granted a restart, a re-do.

that is the profundity i gleaned from “Independence Day.”

i thought along these line on the day of the earthquake last year. it was, of course, but a ripple on our shared earth. but the idea of natural cataclysm washing New York City into the washtub seemed, suddenly, inevitable. someday all this will be gone. all these towers, these pillars of concentrated wealth, these idiocies of conspicuity, Manhattan will one day be a common island, Queens a forest, Brooklyn a series of valleys, Staten Island a farm, and the Bronx a wilderness.