There should be a name for that phenomenon where one is standing at a busy intersection waiting to meet someone they have either never met before or who they have not seen for many years. Hundreds of faces approach, becoming clearer aas the distance lessens. One after another the faces fall away as  you realize it is not who you are waiting for. You are waiting for a white male in his 40s and you think you see him 2 blocks away, checking his phone among a dozen other pedestrians waiting to cross the street. He looks up from his phone and you see that he is a she, a dark skinned woman with hair short enough to be mistaken for a typical male but the rest of her unmistakably feminine. You are waiting for a tall Swedish woman with long blonde hair and you think you see her through a window, standing outside the same uilding as you but aroun dthe corner. You peek around the cornern and find a teenage boy with longish hair and very tall for his age, his features warped out of proportion by the mirror effects of the windows and other reflective materials that had been between you and him. 

I remember once standing at 72nd and Amsterdam Avenue with Wayne and his female friend Jodie. We were waiting for her mother. Jogie was black, or so I thought. I later learned she was half white half black, something of a badge of honor at the college that all three of us had attended and graduated from a few years earlier. 

I later explained to Wayne that while we waited at that busy intersection I came very close to asking “Is that your mother?” any time I saw a black woman walking our way. The question would have been innocent enough but Wayne laughed, saying “Man, I am so glad you didn’t say that. Jodie’s mother is white.” I don’t know if it would have presented tension or just amusement. Jodie (who I never knew beyond this encounter and maybe one other conversation) took her mixed race status seriously enough to establish her identity around it, and she might have taken umbrage at my assumption that her mother was black when everyoneknew about her mother being white and her father black. I obviously was unaware, and was duly unimpressed when informed. But if a needless altercation was avoided then all the better.

At the Sony Public space. What is most in my mind today is my mind, and its connection to my body. Walking over the Queensboro Bridge I used, for the first time on that span, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones that I’ve had for a buunch of years. They are starting to show their age. The wire with the plug on the end has a tear, so the wires insidde are exposed. I could just tape that over but the headphones themselves are wearing away on the inside. The soft stuff is showing yeloow fabric underneath. Very depressing when the expensive things I bought while I had money start to fall apart. 

What was remarkable about the noise cancelling on the bridge was just how effective it was. Most of the noise up there is steady, and that is the type of noise that these headphones are best at erasing. With earplugs I could probably achieve complete silence. Only the loudest din of traffic noise got through, possibly on account of that falling apart of the headphones mentioned earlier.

With such relative silence I felt my feet hit the ground, and my body responded with sympathetic vibration. I never notice this when surrounded by swirls of noise. I walked straighter, not lurching as much, and I think the lack of a head filled with noise is to credit for that. 

At first wearing hedphones to listen to music makes me a little dizzy. I do not wear headphone in Manhattan or most anywhere I need to have wits about me and pay attention to traffic and the general unpredictable chaos of so many people and vehicles competing for freedom of movement in a most concentratedly shared space. On the bridge I feel safe enough just walking forward with no worries of being intercepted by something coming from a 45 degree angle. 

The calming of the noise is welcome but it feels like I am inside a container, where I know the noise rages in all its usual might and which shall not slow its inexorable appetite for eating the souls within its realm. 

On the brige I confronted that annoying pedestrian trap in which someone ahead of me was walking just a smidgen of a mile per hour slower than me, but he was lurching about just slightly enough that I could not pass him without stepping into the bike lane, risking the provocation of needless vitriol from someone in that stage of combat. 

Waiting long enough for bikes to pass I accelerated my pace to get past him quickly, remembering a strange piece I saw on a local news channel about the correlation between how fast one walks and how long they will live. Evidently there is a formula which takes a person’s age and the average pace at which they walk and calculates how long they can expect to live based solely on that information. On that news program the woman with the formula put a pedometer or GPS gadget on the reporter and had her walk around for several minutes. They then went to a table where the woman with the formula did her thing, taking the average pace at which the reporter walked and plugging it in to an equation. 

She happily announced “You’re going to live to be 82!” She said it with a huge smile which struck me as oddly morbid, and the notion that this formula was reliable or to be believed seemed preposterous. 

Still, any time I walk past someone, walking faster then them by a considerable margin, I want to turn to them and say “See how much faster than you I walk? That means I get more life than you. I get more years. You’re gonna die and I’m gonna be up here walking around. Stick it, bitch.”

Or the opposite will occur. Someone outpaces me, hustling to get past me in the same manner as did I on the bridge today. I see their butt waddle on into the distance and I want to ask them “Do you know that there is a formula which proves you get more years than me, that you will carry on breathing and being consumed by the noise of civilization long after I have vanished into the silence of being forgotten?” 

I think of this frequently, how such a reminder of mortality was so blithely introduced to me by that news segment.

Another reminder of mortality that has consistently struck me as tasteless is the requisite round of applause that follows the announcement that so and so has reacched an incredibly advanced age. “Meet Mable, she’s 102!” (Round of applause). Whatever the intentions of this gesture I find it morbid. It is tantamount to going out to a cemetery and booing the dead. “You didn’t make it! Mable beat you! She got more life you. Look at this guy, he only made it 47. Pfft! BOOOOOOOOOOO!” Walking from tombstone to tombstone you continue your applause for Mable, chanting her name, interrupting your ovation to ridicule those who failed.

… This is a beautiful space. Enough tables to seat an army, skylight roof/ceiling, and I happen to have landed a corner seat which allows me ot stash my bag full of trinkets in a spot that makes it impossible for a casual thief to smoothly snag it. 

A sign on the entrance door said “NO BAGGAGE”. I guess that means suitcases and giant travel things, seeing as everyone here has some kind of bag. I’ve got baggage but that’s another story.

I told myself I would type for an hour straight.About 17 minutes to go. I only stopped once to check e-mail. The noise cancelling headphones are certainly giving me added silence, which I relish. Stray pointed noises come through but even those are muted in their harshness. Dude just sat down and pulled the chair from the table, making a brutal noise at which others winced and turned their heads to see what the hall that was. To me it sounded lik distant thunder.

I’ve written the Mable story a million times, but never thought to combine it with the speed of walking : mortality equation, which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen on television. I wonder if the equation is suullied by those who in
tentionally walk faster all the time, faster than they normally would, with the expectation of longer life. Or is your lifespan only determined by your actual and in fact genuine average walking pace? 

Looking up I see a video screen. The pianist Lang Lang is performing. I am watching his hands go, trying to tell what piece he is playing, but I can’t get it. That kid can thrash the gentlest piano music into sounding like a machete bivouacing through jungle thickets. His Don Juan Fantasy is enough to give me a fucking migraine. He could make the Liebestraume sound like a fucking buzzsaw.

i woke up today and stepped on the scale. I weigh 164. I’ve held steady at that weight for a long time now. I put on clothes and packed the bag and as I got ready to leave I tried the scale again. I weighed 180, just short of my magic number. That means clothing and other accoutrements weigh 16 pounds, a majority of that in the bag and weighing heavily on one side of my body. I didin’t bring the DSLR today, but when it is present I assume that adds a few more pounds to the tonnage. I can take that out of the bag to distribute the weight more evenly while walking but that’s really an option with the tablet and keyboard.

Thinking again about that idea of taking back my childhood bedroom. It’s something to think about doing in 5 or 6 years, or even beyond that. Just a calm at the end of the road.

There is no piano at this public space, though my memory of the pianist I saw here is not called into question on account of that. I noticed another public space that had a piano… It was the BlackRock space, which I visited on Sunday as the one and only person besides the security guard. Seating is pretty limited there, maybe due to construction, so I don’t know if I’ll make it a destination. This space is cool but I’ve known of it for a long time, and want to grace other public spaces with the joy and wonder of my presence.

So far I have to say that any concerns I had about winos and hooligans camping out at these spaces has been forgotten. Iin the past I inhabitedd these spaces on weekends and holidays, when such elements seemed to bbe in the majority, though that might have just been my ignorrant perception.

I watched the debate last night. Trying to read Trump and finding it odd that he was starting to fit in, or feel like he was priviliged to be in such esteemed company. High fives with Jeb Bush and others also seemed a little too chummy for politics. Carly Fiorna sounded like a catholic nun school marm.

OK my hour is up and I really gotta find a bathroom. On the the next public space.