I can plan for Friday afternoons, when between 15:07 and 15:35 the same guitarist plays for some three hours. Mostly when the first notes arrive it’s the gentle but prolonged reminder that I’ve been on the same corner for so many week’s ends which irritates; his unfailingness has been a source first of nuisance and lately of commendable integrity. However and alas a particular singer arrives under conditions you might come across in a passive aggressive, mild difficulty LSAT question: mostly under clear skies, usually by 11am…although sometimes when cloudy, if the temperature is sufficiently pleasant, and if it is a weekday.
How I have developed for these Fridays and sporadic mornings what I’ve come to refer to as “escape tasks”, which, I feel it’s in the name.
This metro singer is part of a block of restaurants, cafes, markets, businesses, and apartments’ continual now, but it’s not something you’d take stock of together. Ergo we’re sharing senses without that leaping into communality. (Witness and isolation: if you were the only one who heard the tree fall, will anyone believe the account of its sound—your alibi isn’t airtight).
The maybe fairly niche experience of living in proximity to such metro performers, where home is steeped into the site of a public sound.
Opera occasionally, for a bit over an hour, this usually on weekday afternoons by low light. Not fully audible, only the genre-distinguishing bits.
The oddly aseptic communal history of it. This singer does renditions of ballads—“All of Me”, “My Girl”, “I’m Going Home”. Their backing tracks are sometimes mis-mixed, his key is vague…but either the performance or my acquiescence dampens conditions. Whether he’s doing them for the first or third time—the repertoire always repeats during six hour stints—is as immaterial as the fact that these songs exist independently, well before this time and space. Their recognizability seems only to confirm to me that existence is empirically verifiable, not animated.
I suppose partially what I’m thinking about is the…status, process, moment of belonging to anything: a claim you settle on, a decision you exist within the laundry-tumbled afters with. It’s in a name, and that name is whatever community you (want to) wholeheartedly stand in and among. The appellation’s ability to contain your commitment to a life, with all the ambition, care, innovation and intent that should leave you uneasy if you find yourself unable to point to them. The shirt, place, or circle you wear, cite, or loop together with such certitude that no one—yourself included—would think to scalpel out their details. The weighty pleasantness of being able to know your time under the sun found lastingness or reason, or whatever the opposite of incertitude is.