“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 885 (Wednesday) – oddball ponderings

Sometimes weird and wonderous things are just lying in my path.  A coin. A charm. A deceased creature of nature. Nip bottles on the sidewalk, in the gutter, in the doorways. Random partially eaten food items, sometimes inside plastic carry out containers or paper wrappers, often near a doorway along the street. I see them, and then I wonder about them, some longer than others.

Random street sandwich - 8-10-22.

Today’s random sighting happened after work and it was most of a reasonably fine looking sandwich. It appeared to be wheat bread, with lettuce and some unidentifiable ingredients that might have been determined had I bent over to look closer, but I'm probably weird enough taking photos of items abandoned on the street. 

The largely intact sandwich was perched on a concrete ledge between the sidewalk and a building on Merrimack Street. Two bright yellow mayonnaise packets lay on the ground nearby. Two or three bites seemed to be missing from the sandwich. 

The sandwich had me wondering what led to its abandonment as I continued my walk to the garage. There was no wrapper nearby, just the condiment packets. Was someone interrupted during their moment of dining? The sandwich was still neatly stacked and didn’t seem like it had fallen, but that is a completely unscientific assessment and I’m not about to start assembling sandwiches, eating a couple bites and then dropping them to study what happens. Not yet anyway. I’ll just wonder about it a bit and then move on.

While the odd things on the street seem to come and go, there are also odd things that colleagues and I get to see daily. There is an impressive quantity of art throughout the buildings at work and a lot of it is gorgeous. Some of it isn’t quite that appealing. Just because something is hanging on a workplace wall doesn’t mean it’s necessarily enjoyed by the people working in the space with it.

Least awful section of a weird
painting (aka, my favorite part).

There is one art piece hanging in a bathroom that several colleagues and I wonder about. It is a colorful painting of a group of female figures with oddly distorted bodies – extremely long necks topped by tiny heads with detailed facial features and large hats. Long torsos clad in dresses of yellow, blue, red, and black hover over impossibly tiny feet. Every time I use the restroom I can’t help but spend a few seconds staring at this painting, but not because I find it especially wonderful. It’s more a case of dissecting the details and trying to follow the lines which seem to defy human anatomy. 

The other day, I decided to try a new approach to the painting. The section of it found the least hideous has been dubbed my “favorite part of the painting.” It is the extreme upper left corner, executed in red with tones of brown, pink, and strokes of blue. It’s not that the section is all that great, it’s just that it’s the least awful. And staring at a comically odd, borderline bizarre painting is a good mental break to clear the head. It’s similar to the way pondering a mysterious sandwich abandoned on a city street cleared the head at the end of the workday, or watching clouds can help clear the mind any time.