2.1.07

i think sometimes i get overtly defiant and like to project the fact that i think i need only myself to get by. in new york, i would often cut off from the group and just ride the subway around the city on my own, walking the streets of manhattan by myself. i was eating a 15-dollar salad at a little deli in manhattan in the back, and i managed to eavesdrop on a conversation between two men, one who was fat and in a wheelchair and another who was also fat yet free of a wheelchair. the men were talking about potential people that they might be able to hire or cast for something. i think they were talking about a broadway show, or an off-broadway show, because it really sounded like they were discussing cast-members. maybe they were casting for a TV show. regardless, i listened to the conversation and became more and more afraid of the men, because they were huge, and because they came off as assholes. i finished my salad quickly, and then went to throw it away. as i was standing at the trashcan, the fat man in the wheelchair, some TV-producer or broadway casting director or something, said "excuse me" and passed me to go get a beverage or something. i went to get my stuff and leave, and as I was leaving he passed me on the way back. he smiled a HUGE smile at me and said "thanks sweetheart", then went back to his friend, who was also smiling at me. I smiled back at them and then left the building. new yorkers have this amazing ability to come off as total pricks and then shock you with random, unneccesary kindness.

this is a sidenote, but it reminded me of another time. i was sitting at the train station in emeryville or martinez, i forget which it is, but it's one with a large interior and then a big back area where you can sit and wait for the train. there's a big snack/coffee bar inside and rows and rows of old-fashioned benches that made good waiting-for-the-train backdrops. i was sitting outside, and a woman came up to me and asked me if i was a model. i told her that no. she said, "are you trying to be?" and i said that no, i wasn't; and that i'd gotten a couple offers but that i had never really delved into the idea. she said, "i was a model when i was seventeen. i was hot", or something to that effect, and walked away. it was weird because i became aware that she didn't really care what my deal was... she just wanted to evoke the past through another (me), as if in doing so it would be nearer-at-hand for her.

the most incredible thing i saw in new york was this:
an old black man, with only about two teeth and with a feather stuck in his head, set up shop and began playing guitar in the L-line station at Bedford. he had a cellist to back him up, and he sang so without hesitation that everyone in the subway terminal turned towards him to watch. i think everyone there just stood watching him, and i think they were afraid to look at one another, as if in making eye contact they would be giving away some hint of the vulnerability that had been exposed by the old man's voice. he started playing the fleetwood mac song, "landslide", and the lyrics are so strong and hopeful - proud, even - that the fact that they were being sung by a man who looked like he'd seen hell closer-up than any of us ever had and probably ever would made me kind of choke up a little bit. there are certain moments where you feel like the blanket that is reality is just kind of slashed with a knife, and then you see through that fabric to something on the other side of it. something totally within reality but of an importance that surpasses it. the busker in the subway was an example of this kind of moment. our train showed up, and he piled on the train, coincidentally getting onto the same car as myself, and then without hesitation began playing another song. i tried to record a video of it on my phone, but my battery was so low that it would record two seconds and then die. so i have one two-second clip and one that is just a fraction of a second. to make some grandiose social comment about the matter would be to undermine the incredible simplicity of the moment as an example of what it is that constitutes being a human being.