Anomalies

There are almost no norms left. Everything today is an anomaly.

In Munson, NJ at the sandwich shop called Brennan's, for example, the bathroom door SLIDES shut and then there is a sliding bolt shaft at the joint where the door meets the hinge. In the same bathroom to get paper you have to pull a bar down.

In the busses from La Guardia into Brooklyn, you had to have a yellow Metro card. You had to put it in vertically, with the stripe to the right. The bus driver expected me to know this. To get out of the bus I had to push the doors open, because they wouldn't open by themselves.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art I asked a guard where the bathroom was. I was finished with the Francis Bacon show, and couldn't find the bathroom. He pointed it out to me behind a glass wall. The toilet flushed itself when I walked in, and again when I walked out.

On the train home, I tried to push the doors open, but they wouldn't open. There was a silver knob to my upper right, and you had to push on that. The people in the train looked astonished that I didn't know this.

Every hotel has different breakfast hours, and different breakfast foods. At one hotel you got a choice of six items from a list, but first you had to present the breakfast voucher. At another hotel the breakfast ended two hours earlier, and there were no choices. You helped yourself. The Raisin Bran came in a glass stack next to Oatio's. You had to put your styrofoam bowl beneath the bin and turn a glass knob, which gave you about enough Raisin Bran to feed a bird.

All over the city I met such anomalies. Different prices at different museums. Different modes of payment at each green grocer's. Some wouldn't take cash. Some wouldn't take credit. Each one acted as if this was the normal and natural way of doing things and had been since Adam.

Don't get me started on churches, and denominations, much less on different faiths.

Every person is a walking set of anomalies, each convinced that this is the only way to go.

I don't want to leave the house for a week.