Work was. Bit harried in the last quarter of the day yesterday. Jimmy Chile stepped up with some information that should have been commonly known but wasn’t. I had a meeting online with my employment counselor where she once again admonished me for posting ‘darned if I do, darned if I don’t’ in an online forum. I mentioned to the counselor that I spent time going back and forth as to actually posting ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’.
Neither was satisfactory and feathers were ruffled nonetheless.
After Jimmy Chile helped me out, there was not much else to do. I stayed a few minutes later than usual. I was meeting Bill on 59th Street at 6:00 pm and wouldn’t want to be too early. d been a couple of years since I had been to this area, the last time was with Bill once again to see a friend of his in a play, where there was more drama backstage than there was on stage.
The NYC subway has a new method to get through the turnstiles, involving smartphones. You have to tap your smartphone to the turnstile and before leaving the office I set up my smartphone wallet, or so I thought. I proceeded as I should and was stopped. My secret. Code was requir3d and being me, I was not 100% sure and I knew that one only has a small window of opportunity to enter the correct number.
Being underground I was blocked from getting the correct information. Eventually I got the right number and tapped the phone but it came up red. Green is for go and red means stop. I wound up being charged twice but was glad to be able to get uptown. I also remembered why I am not too fond of riding the subway, at least by myself, with Bill I just have to follow hi s lead.
And there was Bill outside the building and we had about a half hour before we were going in, so we sat across the street and talked. It was a nice evening for it. We made it into the screening room and sat in the last row. I saw Issac Ferry and waved hello.
Bill did not know anything about the subject of the documentary, Ron Delsener but enjoyed it very much. At the end, it turned out that Ron Delsener was five seats away from us, and we made it a point to shake his hand and thank him for promoting so many great shows and various venues.
There was a plan to walk down to the bus terminal after the screening but I was tired and just wanted to get home so we took a train to Herald Square and caught the Path train.
Bill went to the supermarket and I went home. He was soon in bed and I was to follow shortly thereafter.
Now it is a gray day in Manhattan and I would rather be in bed. Having slept well last night, of course I would rather be there. But here it is hours later and I’m looking back at 12 hours ago. Doesn’t do me or anyone else any good.
A Google Gemini Gore Vidal essay
It is a curious features of our current, rather depleted republic that even the standard mechanics of earning a living now require a performative deference to bureaucratic delicate-mindedness. Yesterday, as the afternoon wore into its final, fretful quarter, I found myself indebted to a fellow named Jimmy Chile, who kindly supplied a few obvious facts that ought to have been common knowledge among our mid-level functionaries, but predictably were not.
Shortly thereafter, I was obliged to appear before my employment counselor—a virtual audience, naturally—who took the occasion to scold me for having ventured the mild observation in some public forum that I was *darned if I do, darned if I don’t*. I admitted to her that I had vacillated between that sanitized colloquialism and the rather more robust *damned*. The counselor was unimpressed. In the modern American theater of moral management, feathers are effortlessly ruffled regardless of the phrasing, for it is the heresy of dissatisfaction itself that offends, not the adjective.
Having survived this modest Inquisition, there was little left to accomplish. I lingered at my desk longer than usual, largely to avoid arriving prematurely on 59th Street, where I was scheduled to meet Bill at six. I had not set foot in that particular quarter of Manhattan for two years—the last occasion being an excursion with Bill to witness a theatrical effort starring a friend of his, a production in which the intrigue backstage vastly outstripped whatever drama managed to leak onto the stage.
Getting there required navigating the New York City subway, an institution that has recently introduced a new species of electronic gatekeeping requiring the passenger to press a digital wallet against a turnstile. Before departing the office, I believed I had configured my smartphone for this ritual. I was mistaken. The machinery demanded a secret code—a sequence I was not entirely confident I possessed, aware as I was that the apparatus grants only a fleeting moment for accuracy before pronouncing judgment.
Deprived of signal in that subterranean vault, I was forced into a brief, frantic exercise in memory. Eventually, the correct digits were struck; I applied the device, only to be met by a sullen red illumination. Red, as we are taught in primary school, signifies stop. The system punished my hesitation by charging me twice, though I counted myself fortunate simply to escape uptown. The episode reminded me why I view the subway with such limited affection, at least when unescorted; when traveling with Bill, one simply follows behind him and lets the city wash over someone else.
Bill was waiting outside our destination with half an hour to spare, so we sat across the street and conversed. The evening air was surprisingly civil. We subsequently made our way into the screening room, securing seats in the back row, where I spotted Isaac and waved a distant greeting.
Bill had arrived entirely ignorant of the subject of the documentary—the music promoter Ron Delsener—yet found himself thoroughly entertained. By a pleasant stroke of irony, Mr. Delsener was seated merely five chairs away from us in the dark. At the conclusion, we made a point of shaking his hand to thank him for decades spent staging our public diversions.
There had been some vague, ambitious plan to walk down to the bus terminal afterward, but fatigue intervened. I desired only my own bed. We compromised by taking a train to Herald Square, transferring to the PATH, and returning to our respective quarters. Bill made a brief foray into a supermarket before turning in; I followed suit shortly thereafter.
Now, a gray, indifferent light hangs over Manhattan, and I find myself harboring a profound desire to be back under the covers. Having slept unusually well, it is precisely the moment one feels most entitled to indulge in sleep’s continuation. Instead, here I sit, peering back at twelve hours that have already vanished into history—a habit that serves no particular purpose for me, nor, I suspect, for anyone else.