My mind boggles while I listen to this, and can't catch some eye shut last night, so I just re-scan and re-read From the Murks of the Sultry Abyss. So I just wanted to share you this [my] favorite very short essay of him from that book. :) It just kinda good that it makes you feel a little less weird and a more relatively normal person when somebody writes the same thought you have or at least such not so important stuff you appreciate.
Elevator Mysteries
There's something uncomfortably fascinating about riding in elevators with strangers. I say this in all seriousness because I have decided today that I actually like that awkward silence that occurs directly after the clinking of the shoes and high heels come to a halt and the new vertical riders find their respective places for that fated 15-45 seconds aboard!
Some elevators carry "Muzak" in their walls and unfairly distract the passengers from the potential experience of awkward silence. Fuck those elevators, they are selfish, unfeeling machines that don't care about "MY" good time. But then there are others that, once the doors close, offer me that chance to not know where to look. Eyes thrusting towards my wrist for the time though I don't need to know and, shit, I don't even wear a watch. To concentrate on the luminescent numbers creeping up and down eternally, and a host of other clever distractions to divert my attention away from the cold, hard truth of the fact that I am riding, by myself, in a box on strings with another human being whose name I don't know!!! It's a comfort disaster waiting to happen. And in a culture so hell bent on comfort it seems to me to be a nice, weekender way to exercise my subversive side! I've even taken a liking to uttering gentle murmurs of faux-flatulence whilst descending and ascending with my copilots on some of these journeys. No one seems to appreciate that, though none have dared accuse me, a stranger, of such barbarism! And that makes me feel good.
Even when people who know each other ride, it creates a dense quiet that can make one not want or be able to look his or her friend in the eye! It's a mystery worthy of a Leonard Nemoy voice-over with creepy, late seventies Moog music beneath! What I need now is a friend who can appreciate such things and we could traverse the country, riding in elevators, feeling wonderfully unsettled...together.
