Friday nights are lit up with screens and sometimes colleagues as we wait for our new work to air.
October 11th, 2013, 11pm
It was 19.4°C with broken clouds. The breeze was light.
As the time slot approaches, I fall silent and watch the grid of tags move columns of text. This one should recirculate, that one receives a nod. Is this format correct? Are there characters remaining? Off and out the words gallop to meet each other, jumping columns like little acrobats or players bumping bricks with their heads for extra coins in an old video game. Up the words bound when lobbed by others! But the new sinks the old. Such is the rate of refresh.
Still, everything else falls away when I face this swift wall of ephemera on Friday nights. Happier here adjusting language, clarifying context than angling for cabs and chasing reservations, the external messages on other screens go unlooked at and unanswered. Finite parameters are exhilarating in this elastic city.
Groups gathering and taking actions at the same time are bound together in the shared experience of those acts. Seven of us sat near each other tonight, creating an event with the sum total of our small motions. This is how we find a measure of closure in the accounting for the week. We impose an artificial distinction to mark a pause before the tallying begins again, in earnest.
Filed Under
Other moments in New York
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