Late Living
by Hectort Canonge
I wake up late every day, but since I have no schedule to follow, it is only in my mind that I’m delayed. With no appointments, urgent calls or actual work to do, I’ve convinced myself that I’m busy and under constant pressure. Someone in my shoes would actually be happy for not having to do the 9 to 5 thing, but not me. I make myself late just by thinking that I want to be late.
This morning, for example, I was up by ten. Still tired from the night before, I had stayed up watching, actually the right word is staring, so staring at my TV monitor and its flux of images triggered by my ADD thumbnail. They say that men in general cannot keep their hands off the remote no matter what we are watching, I believe that we do it because of some primal need to have the world in our fingers.
Too tired to even enjoy my re-heated Nescafe or my favorite Costco imported Matzo, I sat at my kitchen counter thinking how late I will be. I put some strawberry jam on the hard, kosher cracker, took a zip of my unsweetened coffee, and turned on NPR. Listening to it convinces me that I’m different from my neighbors who by this time, and in competition with one another, have their cha-cha drums blasting the building. I probably sound like an old white man from Jersey, but hell no! I’m from Queens and from a very-working-class-immigrant family whose breakfast was limited to Cheerios –no milk- just because my mother didn’t know what else to buy or how to ask in our “Greek Spoken Here” neighborhood supermarket.
At the gym, I run the invisible track and ride the going-no-where bike while trying to put some order into my thoughts. At the first drop of my salty, warm sweat I stop, tried to calculate the calories I burned, but I get too distracted by the Maury Povich Show playing on the monitor. I’m glad I have to read the captions and not hear the screams of Middle America. I’m very sensitive to sound, so it’s good they are mute. By the time I get back home it’s already past noon. I’m tired, but strangely enough I don’t feel the pressure not to be late. I start emailing, twittering, blogging, and creating. In other words LIVE !?!
Hector Canonge is an artist who lives and works in NYC where he studied literature, film and Integrated Media Arts. His work incorporates the use of various media and commercial technologies, physical environments, cinematic, and performance narratives. Canonge’s works have been exhibited in various museums, galleries and art spaces.
