In the bigger city than the one I live in there were people walking with purpose and aim. I was seeing the city for the first time. I did not have purpose or aim. The market smelled like fish and dirty dishwater. Sometimes it smelled like dog shit. I noticed that people were wearing business clothes. The people in this city had modified their business clothes for walking. They wore white sneakers with their suits, or they wore those shoes you buy at REI that have thick soles and leather uppers. Some wore clogs.
There were places in the bigger city created for people with no purpose or aim. They were on the “things to see” section of the tourist map. When reading the list of “things to see,” I felt a mild panic. I felt that this was expected of me. I wanted to simultaneously “do something significant” and to “waste time.” I felt a compulsion both to take photographs and to leave photographs untaken.
In the art museum, at the top of the escalator, hundreds of figures wearing tribal masks were arranged in sitting and standing positions. Videos of people wearing the masks and dancing were projected on two of the large walls. The moving videos made it look like the figures were also moving. I thought that if I made a horror movie, everyone in the movie would wear tribal masks. In the contemporary section of the art museum, a guy had hung a whole bunch of white Ford Tauruses from the ceiling with flashing lights coming out of them. Another guy had made a sculpture of a giant black mouse standing on top of a person in a bed. A girl had made a video of a snapdragon singing a Cat Power song. It felt like all these people’s ideas should have been put in their own building – that they were all too close to each other, and the interaction of their atomic particles might cause an explosion.
At the cheese factory, I ate a cheese sandwich. While I ate the cheese sandwich, I watched some guys cutting up blocks of cheese curd and turning them over. A guy next to me said, “Let’s give this sandwich the Cheese Challenge.” Another girl said, “I could do that job. Just flip cheese all day.”