My friend Surya once found a pen drive on a bus from Amherst to New York. She pocketed it, partially because she felt wild and crazy and partially becase she reasoned that it was already lost to the owner who was probably never going to find it anyway.
When I went to visit her when she returned home, she showed me her little secret gleefully, but informed me that it was blank. A while later, I wanted to transfer some files to my computer, and used the Stolen Secret.
Surya was wrong. There were files on the USB drive.
I felt a bit guilty about poking into someone else's life, but I found several logical explanations as to why it wasn't a total sin in the grand scheme of things.
There's something about strangers. I, for one, have always been fascinated by experiences with strangers, having read stories and heard songs and seen photography projects themed "strangers".
When I clicked on the little icons, I tried to piece together who the memory stick belonged to. There were pictures of a family at Christmas time, of school children in a park, of someone doing a hand stand...
I felt as if there was a light shining on me; a heavenly beam. I didn't know what to make of it, but I do know that I was smiling widely the entire time I was looking at those pictures of strangers smiling at the camera, with the captions that explained nothing to me.
I sometimes think about whether the owner who's probably all the way in New York contacted the bus agency and tried to track down the USB drive. Maybe it contained some vital documentary evidence, or maybe someone had been promised the pictures of Christmas at Luke's. I wonder if they'd ever think that it was sitting on some stranger's desk, half a world away, in between the glue stick and the box of 0.7 lead.
I did try to track down the owner of the flash drive, but I eventually gave it up, mostly because it was way more fun to guess and make up stories.
In 'The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song', Jeffrey Lewis sings about how he happens to come across some stranger talking a Leonard Cohen song, and his delight at the fact that they have a two minute conversation about it. Obviously, it seemed like a lot more than two minutes to him, and it had a really big impact.
That we really only talked/
For a minute or two/
And i never got her name/
And she never got mine/
But in this couple short minutes/
We had a pretty good time
This song always gave me the tingles because of the stranger angle to it. The thing is, with strangers, you can believe anything you want to; you can dump all your expectations and hopes onto them because it won't matter if they're not true - you will never know them. I think these kind of strangers I'm referring to, you can make them out to be like, a physical manifestation of your dreams. You can fall in love with a strangers so easily, like in Tom Wait's 'I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You' .
What's pretty exhilarating is thinking of yourself as a stranger to someone else. Think of all the people who wonder about you, who build up stories upon your face or the way you treated the bus conductor.
Honestly, I've had this fantasy for the longest time in which I'm wearing a t-shirt of my favourite band and roaming the streets, and someone will recognize it (you are right in assuming that this person is a person of the opposite gender whom I find attractive) and we'll start talking about it and then we'll move on to albums that changed our lives and then we'll move on to religion and we'll live happily ever after. Every time I o out, I practically send out these "come find me" waves in the hopes that it will actually play out. These fantasies are proliferated by movies and books I've read, one perfect example being Before Sunrise (1995).
Yes, it's totally unrealistic in the sense that it's all way too convenient, right? I mean, IRL ,if you got off a train with a stranger, you'd be holding a pen knife in your bag, or you would have contacted someone and told them where you were. That is assuming, of course, that you were convinced that the guy wasn't a serial killer.
My dad told me this story of an Afghani Pathan he met on a train once, and how they got talking, and how he still remembers him. I feel like conversations with strangers could very well be an important part of personality development.
One time in a store this lady who was looking at the same shirt I was, looked at me and said, "It's a lovely colour, isn't it?". I did a double take and nodded a scared 'yes'. So that's my actual experience with strangers.
A lot of people say that it's very therapeutic to talk to strangers because they don't know you and even if they are judging you, it honestly doesn't matter, because you'll probably never see them again.
I think that's partially the beauty of it - you're never going to stick around to find out their flaws (unless you're Lizzie Nichols from the Queen of Babble series), so you can literally make up anything about them and believe it.
Isn't there something incredibly nice about not knowing everything about a person, and getting only one, tiny fragment of them without having any intention to have everything of them?
I recently read Tell The Wolves I'm Home and The Spectacular Now. Both were quite good.
I'm also pumped about the new season of Girls starting and the new Sherlock season.
