Observations-NYC

At 10:37a.m. on March 11th 2009 I was traveling at a speed of 492 mph, 37,502 feet above Georgia. 

March 10th, 2009

Billy's Bakery - There is a horseshoe hanging above the doorway, and I can't take my eyes off it. Mint tea, buttercream cupcakes. A man is sitting in a window seat at his table singing an 80's song playing above us all. He has his knee up, holding his iPhone. A much younger man of asian decent is seated next to him. Are they dating perhaps? There is an elderly man at the other end of the table.

The window seat man, in his 50's from the looks of it, is wearing a brown fedora with a matching brown strip of ribbon with off-white piping lining it's brim. 

He changed position and is now leaning all up in the window. 

The asian and I just made eye contact. 

They are both leaving now.

"It sounds like that is even a stretch for me" says the older man as he leaves the table. I could not make out the asian man's response as they exit. 

Here I tune into the friends that accompany me at my table. They are discussing how specificity has been the word of the month. 

Out beyond the doorway there is a red van that reads "Doro's Annex, Inc." parked on the street. A man entering Billy's Bakery just blocked my view and I shift my eyes to the elderly man who remained at the table as the brown fedora window seat man and his asian friend got up and left. He was not a friend of theirs. 

The old man is reading. A 400 page book by the looks of it, about a hundred pages left. He just lifted a chunk of his red velvet cupcake into his mouth with a metal fork. He has yet to take his eyes off the book. 

I can't help but take notice that his head bobs. I am not sure why this happens to certain elderly persons. I decided their neck muscles are straining greatly to support their head, these muscles are weak, deteriorating due to the process of aging and having gone through so much. These muscles, now so close to the end. I've heard the human head weighs 7-8 pounds. 

My attention returns to the book he is staring down at. The napkin holders on our table are blocking my full view of the book. He is using his hand to support his forehead as he is lost in the pages of his mysterious reading material. 

He just started a new chapter. I can tell because of the formatting of the text on the left page he is currently reading as I peer over the napkin holders praying my spying goes undetected. 

He is gone now. He flipped through his index and got up, pushing his chair in. I missed the scene of his exiting through the doorway out onto the street. I was distracted by a conversation I over heard my three fellow friends were engaged in. 

It is so sweet smelling in here I could throw up.

March 18th, 2009

"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering." -Carl Jung

Dominique Nahas has very distinct hands and forearms. These pairs are so delicate, their gestures so whimsical? Pristine? Dainty? You get what I'm getting at. His voice is almost just as gentle. His collared button up long-sleeved tinted blue shirt is too large for him. I know this because of that seam that connects the arm of the shirt to the shoulder part, that seam that makes a band around the end of the shirts arm and dives into and back out of the armpit area, you know the one... anyway this seam should lie just on the angle created by the meeting of the shoulder to the upper arm. Instead, if the shirt is too large, the seam falls somewhere too low, resting on the upper arm and not up at the shoulder where it should be. Larger men and women often wear shirts in this fashion. I never find it benefiting to their appearance. It only emphasizes the fact that you are large. I wish he'd wear the correct size shirt. Perhaps he usually does. The only other time I have seen him was in Florida giving a lecture, wearing a suit jacket that could have been hiding the same problem. I'll never know.

I am still entranced by the femininity of his hands and arms. Unlike his reddened face, the skin tone of these parts is fresh and glowing, completely flawless. There are no signs of immense amounts of dark hairs spread across his arms. In fact from where I am seated maybe 4 feet away, I notice no arm hair at all. There is so much youth captured in those hands and arms that is lost in his grayed diminishing hair and the wrinkles that branch out from beneath his eyes. Eyes magnified by the sharp rectangular lenses of his dark brown frames, a combination of metal and plastic supporting glass. 

"If artwork isn't pulsing with vitality, it isn't art. In fact it is dead." -Dominique Nahas

The Inanimate Object.

I was at work. One of the duties on the list we follow to close up the store each night is to restock the spoons. I grabbed the bucket used to hold the spoons, the same bucket that was once used for our famous "Vermonster Sundae". We don't make those at this store anymore, thank god. Scooping 20 scoops of ice cream for one group of costumers while I've got a line out the door is wretched, so to avoid this scenario we retired the Vermonster. I've never made one.

I stared down at the layers of upright spoons crammed into the half full bucket and on this night, at this moment I became intensely concerned with the ones I could make out at the very bottom. They never get used. Will they ever get used? A spoon's purpose is after all to aid in the process of eating food. Will these spoons ever be paired up with any consumers? Feelings of sorrow and depression overcame me, and then an uneasiness towards these feelings. How odd was it that I would be showing sympathy for a non-living man made object. They were nothing more than plastic eating utensils. Disposable ones, to make it even more ridiculous. No! But the spoons at the bottom will always be buried each night over and over by new spoons! Spoons that I am responsible for placing over the old ones. How long have they been down there!? I mean the spoons are restocked every night by an employee. I have never seen the half full bucket below half full, before being filled tot he top with more spoons.

Then one night not too long ago, it happened. I actually witnessed the spoons dwindling. One by one they were snatched up by costumers and stuck into a serving of freezing cold ice cream. The supply truck hadn't come in yet, and when I searched the cabinets looking for the box of new spoons I was informed we were out of them. There was a box coming in the next morning.

I surprised myself in recalling the night I felt emotional over the spoons eternally resting in the bottom of the bucket, and was now overjoyed. I felt rather childish and silly, but the very thought of even a few of those spoons finally leaving the dark confinements of that bucket was too good. Come on, those spoons I had been feeling sorry for were finally meeting their match in the line of costumers who grabbed at them in need of a plastic disposable spoon to cut out bite size portions of their purchased ice cream.