The Dimension of the Infraordinary
City-Watching Field Notes January - April 2023
In her new book Saving Time, Jenny Odell references the birding practice of a patch: a self-defined space one regularly observes. “On eBird, ‘yard lists’ are a subset of ‘patch lists’, examples of patches being ‘your local park, neighbourhood walk, favourite lake, or sewage plant.’ The idea of a patch is instructive. Unlike roads, property lines, and city limits, patches often exist in the dimension of the infraordinary, being unofficial spaces delineated only by attention… A patch is as small as you want to make it. The smallest one I have had is a single branch of a California buckeye tree in a nearby municipal park, a place I visited or passed through hundreds of times during the Pandemic.”
A woman with hair in two levels, like an animal’s fur. Patches of longer strands— guard hairs— over a shorter undercoat, like animals who live in the snow. She is sitting outside the café window, so I see the back of her head as she rises to leave.
The mystery takes me half a minute. Chemo, but she didn’t shave her head. The long hair is her old hair. She finished the chemo, and her hair grew back in. Months ago: four, six.
Three young women, variations on a stylistic theme: tight-fitted dark leisurewear on the bottom, t-shirts / singlets in neutral colours, baseball caps, sunglasses, ponytails. I don’t have to see their feet to know they are wearing running shoes. With three identical babies, small, fat, fair, fuzz-headed, sitting in three matching highchairs. Coffee-groupmates.
(No doubt, to each other they are wildly individualistic and distinctive. Like chimpanzees.)
I look down to write, and when I look up again, all six have disappeared, like a magic trick, poof, gone. The table is empty but for a seagull eating their scone crumbs.
At the Covenant one-year party all the little Goths are discussing in outraged tones how you are supposed to carry your Ritalin prescription with you at all times— the actual piece of paper! “A controlled substance.” Meanwhile people are getting diagnosed all over social media. In the end, does it matter if it’s structural, personal, chemical? They have no bread, let them eat Ritalin and weed gummies.1
The man sitting to my left has a chunky gold ring on the wedding finger of his brown hand, heavy dark-framed glasses, and a lovely jacket, blue silk or nylon with slightly gathered seams, so that these valleys catch the shadow, the un-fadedness. (A jacket I would wear.) He’s writing in a lined notebook, filling in the lines with orderly stitches of black writing. He pauses, bows his head, searching inside his mind. Writes, pauses, throws his glasses on the book.
The three young people at the next table are talking about animals. “They got this gorilla and taught it about its own mortality, like showed it pictures of dead gorillas and shit, and it got, like, really depressed.” “Wild.” says the young man.
In the jungles of East Asia, the influencers were the worst. “There was this German girl who refused to believe that leeches were everywhere, and she came out in like, tiny booty shorts. The guides had to convince her to get changed.”
Talking about non-vegans: “I feel sorry for all the animals that get consumed by like, that one person.”
Girl: “In America, the portions are so big that they give you the same amount again in a doggy bag. I was like, ‘I didn’t order that! I’ll be eating carbonara for a week!” Other guy: “Did you take it outside and give it to a homeless guy?” Girl: “No. I ate carbonara for a week.”
A girl in shorts and sneakers, with tan-lines halfway up her calves like a farmer gets from gumboot-wearing: white skin-socks.
A pregnant woman in a green dress the colour of the Thoth Fool’s armour. Her belly is like an ancient burial mound covered with green grass, earth-fur. She removes her surgical mask to reveal the pregnancy mask, a moth spreading its wings across her cheeks.
The red-headed man from the old days who I see around town. A familiar face out of the crowd-mass. There are dozens of them: people I know well by sight but only sometimes acknowledge, and never speak to.
The man with the red hair is a twin stranger. Wellington survivors: we stayed while others left for lusher pastures, Melbourne, Berlin, London.2 Somewhen he pushed a pram. I see our age in his face, the marks of the decades. I think that once I knew his name, but I can’t now remember it. At what point does acquaintance become strangerhood?3
Celebration Day. Cubadupa.4 Hills Hats abounding. Wellington’s love affair with hats is a dangerous one. Hats are the attractive bad boy, and the wind is the girl’s heart. Or something. A few people are wearing my exact hat.5 We touch the brim at each other, not quite a full tip of the hat; as a head nod is to a bow.
Words said to me by randoms at Cubadupa: “Abracadabra!” “Congratulations!”
Man in Arapaki library, bent over the newspaper, reading it quietly aloud.
A seagull with a black beak and baby feathers still showing in its wings gobbles down someone’s cold eggs.
Graffiti on a Cuba Street lamppost:
kill your land lord <3
A plane over the city trailing a banner, like it’s fallen through a time-hole from last century. I can’t read the message. I ask the woman next to me at the lights what it says— she’s wearing glasses— but she can’t read it either. It banks away towards the mountain, carrying its mysterious exhortation.6
A young beggar with a stick he’s tapping on the pavement. As I scoot past he fixes me with the blue gaze of a zealot, and declaims “Rosie might need to go to Antarctica to stop the pirates from whaling.”
That can’t be right, though. I must have misheard.
I scoot on, puzzling. After a few minutes, it comes clear. “Raising money to go to Antarctica etc…”
Because of the fanatical look in his eye, the absolute conviction, it takes me a few more minutes to even wonder if he’s lying.
The electronic sound a smartphone makes when it takes a photo is an imitation of a mechanical camera shutter, like when a bird imitates an alarm clock, except the other way round. An anachronism, a leftover, an artefact unmoored from its original meaning.
Broad wet tracks across the carpark, where the divers have come up out of the sea and crossed the road to the Dive Shop: like the first lungfish, like errant mermaids.
The modern-day whisky and amphetamines.
Like the eel that ignores the siren song of Tonga and stays, growing fat on cat-food.
When your eyes don't meet.
The Russian tells me that dupa = arse in Ukrainian.
I later heard that the conspiracy theorists have taken to this mode of sky-comms to share their forbidden-by-the-MSM memes.
One of your sections - the red headed man. This phenomenon was given a name by Stanley Milgram; he calls the people we see like that "familiar strangers". He was also the psychologist infamous elsewhere for his obedience experiments in the 1960s, I think it was.
!!green dress the colour of the Thoth Fool’s armour!!