Last day of my New York junket and I knew I wanted to do this task before heading back to SF. It's taken me this long to acclimate myself to the point where the subway has become an extension of my feet and I can drift freely in the pedestrian currents without misstepping, but today I felt ready to open myself up to this city's raw data flow and see what it would give me.

I limbered up with a dérive through Brooklyn, which I am tempted to document here except that it is not a part of this task. After a good long wander and a nourishing dinner of smoked brisket, I asked the city to show me a corner to stand on, and it responded, ley lines pulsing directions into the primitive part of my brain that can hear these things, and which I can hear in turn only when I am very quiet. D train to Manhattan. West 4th. Cross here. Follow. Go. Look. Stop.

I stopped in front of Christopher Park, whose existence I had not known of until that moment. Good place to stand, and at a chaotic intersection of several streets. I resolved to wait for an hour, and try to remember anything noteworthy that happened. Maybe the most fantastic thing out of all of it was that I spent an hour doing nothing but observing, and I was never bored enough to start fiddling with my phone.

For about fifteen minutes there was a youngish guy standing on the same corner, looking at everything and nothing in particular, just as I was. Was he doing what I was doing? Or just looking for someone to sell drugs to? After a while, as if on a signal, he strode off without looking back.

As people walked by I caught odd snippets of conversation. "Are you saying my friends make you feel old?". "The computer says what comes out.". "Fuck fuck FUCK."

A group of European tourists bolted across the street at an inopportune moment, narrowly avoided traffic, and laughed as they caught their breath on the safety of the sidewalk, grateful to be alive.

Two men in the park got into a heated argument. One wore a bright yellow jacket, the other bright purple. Complementary colors. "Don't call me your friend," I remember one of them shouting. Yellow Jacket stormed angrily out of the park, wandered around in front of the Stonewall Inn as if in a daze, then walked behind a group of trees and I lost sight of him. Purple Jacket engaged other park visitors in animated and friendly conversation. Local celebrity?

As darkness began to fall and it became time for the park to close, one of the parkgoers, a gentleman missing most of his front teeth and smelling like stale beer, engaged me in conversation for some fifteen minutes. I told him where I was from, we exchanged a few jive handshakes, he complimented me on not being full of bullshit, and we got to talking about the music of the 1990s. Turns out we're both CAKE fans; he did a decent a capella rendition of "The Distance". He then segued into Blur's "Song 2", which he couldn't remember the title (or artist) of, and I pleased him greatly by helping him out on both counts. When he discovered I hadn't seen the music video, he admonished me sternly and said that when I did, it would melt my face off. (I'm paraphrasing best I can here.). Also on my required watching list now is the movie "Bright Lights, Big City", which has a scene that (if I caught his drift correctly) my interlocutor claimed to have been present at, standing in the exact spot I was standing in, as Michael J Fox ran across the street and into the subway station. Moving smoothly from this to other important points in history, he said that he had once sold crack to Rich Ashcroft's guitarist, who drove a white Jaguar, and that this had some bearing on the eleven years he'd spent in the pen. It was around this point that he excused himself to go take a leak in a trash can, and as I'd already been looking for a way to gracefully exit the conversation, I made tracks before he finished.

Time elapsed on street corner: a bit over an hour.
Fantasticness: unquantifiable.