.:Colter:.

I know I’m not a New Yorker yet because I still notice things that no one else seems to.

• I’ve found USB flash drives on two separate occasions. The first one was a few months ago. I found an email address inside one of the documents, and sent a message, but never got a reply. The second one I found yesterday. I Googled the owner’s name and connected with her on Facebook[1]. I got it back to her last night.
• Leaving the office a few weeks ago, I saw a large Post-It note attached to the bottom of a lady’s purse. I walked along with the hastily moving crowd of folks, figuring someone would mention it to her. No one did, so I had to. She was relieved; the note contained important info she would likely have lost had I not intervened.
• Also a few weeks ago I found a debit card at the E train turnstile. I thought about announcing to the riders that Mr. Lopez had left behind a personal item at the turnstile, but wasn’t sure if that was the best course of action, so I just called the number on the back to tell them it had been found. It had already been reported lost.

1.) Something that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

Here are a few brief videos of things I’ve done and seen in the last few weeks.

• John Hodgman and former Daily Show head writer David Javerbaum at Barnes & Noble. Woefully under-attended due to crappy rainy freezing weather. There were like 10 of us there. I got my picture taken with them. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3A.
• Super-guitarist Steve Morse playing one of my all-time favorite tunes of his.
• Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s music and video presentation, Artificial Afrika. Part 1, Part 2

All year I’ve been saying that by October I’d have some clearer idea about whether or not I would stay in New York. Here we are halfway through October and I’m still at an impasse. For me, Little Rock and New York are essentially the same in terms of net appeal. There are things each has that the other does not. I guess my only option is to give it more time and see if something comes up to pull me strongly in one direction or the other.

That said, I had a great time being back in Arkansas. I caught up with a few friends, had a small family reunion at my uncle’s birthday gathering, and attended a wedding (Jessie and Tiffany’s pictures are better than mine).

One side effect of being stuck on where I belong is that I haven’t been motivated to write or play guitar much. Limbo does not lend itself to creativity. Most days when I get home from work I just watch a DVD and goof off on the web[1]. I haven’t even gotten much reading done.

As of tomorrow I will have been working at American Express for one year. I don’t want to procrastinate on a decision, because time is moving ever faster these days. One thing I can say is that I should stick with the job until I’ve paid off the heating/cooling unit that Trey had installed earlier this year. I’ve got a few more thousand to go on my Amex card to do that. Then I’d like to have something saved up for travel if/when I move back, so really, I’m going to put off a decision until early next year.

1.) I actually spent an hour or so last night looking at photos of streetlights, traffic lights and power lines. I find this level of esoterica endlessly fascinating. I think I’m becoming addicted to information.

So my division has moved up to the 43rd floor, and the views are amazing. But my new cubicle is half the size of my old one. Contractors are assigned smaller cubes because the assumption is they work part-time, but I’m a full-time contractor, so we’ve put in a request to move me to a larger space. There’s an empty one right across from me. I’m thinking of moving in and seeing if anybody cares.

I’m also excited to have a new computer whose processing speed doesn’t make we want to drill rusty nails through my eyelids, even if it is a smaller laptop. I can now run Photoshop, Excel, Firefox and Lotus Notes at the same time without generating memory leaks or “virtual memory is too low” messages. I’m glad I saw the slow demise coming; it took almost two months to get the new computer delivered.

I’ve lived in New York for a year and a half now and still haven’t really taken advantage of the fact that I live near three major airports. I’ve had to play catch-up on finances, so I haven’t really been able to afford much in the way of vacationing. But that finally changed, sort of, and since it’s been more than 5 years since I was last in the UK, I figured that needed addressing. So I booked a flight with little to no planning beyond the purchase of tickets.

In addition to the many important lessons learned on my last voyage, this trip gave me still more opportunity for informative error. The first was booking a flight out of Newark at 8:00 a.m. I had debated taking the subway to Penn to Newark Liberty, but rail travel so early in the day is fraught with unknowns. So I took a car service. This was fortuitous because, while I had dutifully set my phone’s alarm for 4 a.m., I had neglected to remember that my alarm is set only to go off on weekdays. My wake-up call was the car service at 5 a.m. Fortunately for me, in the wisdom that only comes as one drifts off into sleep, I had decided I should take a shower in the evening rather than the morning. I was up and out the door in five minutes.

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The weather was impossibly perfect. We loaded in at 11:30 a.m. and made our way up to Lincoln Center to set up. A fine day to stand around waiting. Although my search for a quick bite to eat was fruitless (not much in the way of to-go food in that neighborhood so I had to settle for a sandwich from Starbucks), I did enjoy relaxing and chatting with the other 199 guitarists at Damrosch Park. We took our seats around 6:30 and the crowd started filing in. And kept coming. And coming. I did not expect thousands of people.

Fortunately I was on the end of my section, right by the gate, so it was easy for me to catch Amy, Alllie, Caroline and Matt. They took up a spot right next to me. My boss, Marya, also stopped by to say hi. The crowd eventually had to be turned back because there were no more chairs.

Our hour-long composition started around 7:45, slowly building, section by section, into the final climax. Toward the end, the sounds became so huge and otherworldly that people started standing up to receive it.

We finished to a long ovation. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

UPDATE: The New York Times estimates 10,000 people showed up.

As the weather has gotten warmer, I’ve started changing into my work clothes at the office. Fortunately for me, I work 10 to 6, so fewer folks see me do this, and the bathroom is usually empty when I need to change. I’m doing this because my body is not well adapted to walking around in warm weather for long periods of time without producing prodigious amounts of moisture. I ruin shirts in the summer. Getting to the train, walking up and down all the stairs, standing immobile on the hot, stuffy platforms…it’s too much for my Scottish physiology. If I were to do this in slacks and a nice shirt every day I would be a disheveled mess by the time I got to work.

Walking to work in sandals, shorts and a t-shirt still doesn’t entirely prevent me from sweating up a storm, but it’s a definite improvement from the alternative. Plus when I leave work I feel freer, less constricted. I can more easily go do things without having to run home and change clothes.

So I do my dry cleaning near the office, usually on Mondays. I have to remember to pack socks and undershirts for the week in my satchel or laptop bag. I feel a little bit like Michael J. Fox in “Secret of My Success,” carrying a briefcase full of clothing to the office.

And speaking of odd feelings at work, often I find myself looking out the window at the economic epicenter of the modern world and trying to remind myself just how the hell I got here. A couple times a week as I walk home I’m still struck by the strangeness of it all: some fool from smalltown Arkansas works in this building, in this part of the city? He doesn’t belong here; who let this guy in?

I’ve been accepted as one of 200 guitarists scheduled to perform at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park next month. It’s a volunteer position, but it will be really cool to be able to say I’ve played Lincoln Center. Let’s hope the weather doesn’t cancel it like last year.

Details:
In 2005, the New York composer Rhys Chatham was commissioned by the city of Paris to write a piece of music. The result was A Crimson Grail, a work for 400 electric guitars, which premiered at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur for La Nuit Blanche, an all-night arts festival. For its first U.S. performance, the work has been extensively revised by the composer for an outdoor performance at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park, to suit the dynamics of the park’s outdoor acoustics. A Crimson Grail will call on the talents of 200 guitarists (including 16 electric bassists), who will be selected from an applicant pool drawing on the many talents of musicians in New York City and beyond. The piece was rehearsed and soundchecked in August 2008, but inclement weather forced its cancellation. We are looking forward to its long-awaited World Premiere on August 8, 2009.

The link to Lincoln Center’s page is here. Warning: it doesn’t look good on my version of Firefox.

Sorry for the long radio silence. I’ve been a peculiar combination of relentlessly busy and quietly inactive, neither of which lend themselves to regular blog updates. As per usual, I’ve been taking more pictures than writing words, so try my Flickr stream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the various voices in all our heads. I don’t know about your mind, but mine on any given day seems to contain a constantly shifting committee of advisers. I think they’re even traceable to specific people. Here are some of the people who have successfully uploaded bits of their consciousness into mine, and examples of what they tell me:

Mom – Wash your dishes and clean up after yourself.
Dad – Buy that bargain CD or book. You never know where it’s going to take you.
Heather Gunter – Don’t be a chump.
Natalie Griffin – Relax and be good to yourself.
Heath Harrelson – You’re rationalizing. Stop it.
Katherine Whitworth – Eat something you haven’t eaten before.
DeLaine Ulmer – Say “Yes” to the unknown.

I just wanted to take the time to say thanks to those folks for being part of my brain trust.

I feel very fortunate that I’ve never had any serious healthcare needs in my adult life. That said I also have no idea about how that world works, and what the expectations are for everyone involved. Recently I learned a great deal the hard way.

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