User:Inge Hoonte/Essay

The Machines Are Restless Tonight...

It's Saturday night, 3AM. 3AM! We should be on the dance floor of a club somewhere, drinking a dark Guinness (your favorite). Instead, we've been fueled up on an even darker brew of Grumpy's locally ground coffee since 11AM, when we met up at the coffee shop across the street from your apartment. As soon as we sat down, you thought you forgot your laptop's power cable, so you went back home to retrieve it, only to return to your seat ten minutes later to find it deeply tucked away in your big bagpack. First slowly, then steadily, and as the coffee consumption increased, more and more maniacal, we typed away on our laptops the rest of the day tackling a research essay for one of our business clients, a savvy media artist slash design educator. A true procrastinator at heart, I spent part of the morning maintaining three actions that upkeep my digital social life:

1) Checked my email every few minutes, and, depending on the content and sender of the message that heads my inbox in this distinguished bold font, marked it with a star, forwarded it, trashed it, or wrote a brief or lengthy reply.
2) Commented on Facebook status messages and clicked my way through various photo albums. The photo-plus-witty-comment combination that my friend Brad posts of his 18-month-old son are particularly hilarious. From a purely journalistic standpoint, of course. He's a professional photographer, so his photos are always in focus, and really well lit. I'm more or less looking at art here, right? Yeah, this is work, sort of.
3) Text-messaged back and forth with my roommate about her dog. He was throwing up early this morning (he eats a fine selection of garbage every time you take him for a walk), but he seemed a lot better when I left.
Oh, and 4) while I had my email tab open, I had to see if my writer-friend Matt was online so I could ask him what the accurate word is for "the metal rolling thing in front of a shop window, that owners use to protect their store." As soon as he signed off to get back to work, my friend Emily greeted me, and before I realized it, it was half an hour later.

I promised myself (and my chat buddies) to really get to work around noon, but soon found myself in a rotating mix of feeling guilty and/or/neither accomplished, as I was now stalling work by writing a project report that I promised the curator of a residency I did two months ago. Trying to trick the system, I fed the procrastination machine a document I previously procrastinated on. Well, at least I was getting something done, right? Right.

When you nudged me in the gut at 3PM with a semi-enthusiast, semi-determined, "Okay, let's write this ****!" I sighed with relief. Yes. You're right. Let's do this ****.

At 10PM the owner of the coffee shop kicked us out and pulled down the metal roll-down fencing. We've more or less finished the research, and have a few paragraphs loosely outlining the essay. It's becoming a story. We're making a point. The deadline is in two days, so we crossed the street to your apartment to get the job done. Your home made cookies are to die for. One more coffee? One more coffee. We sat down at your kitchen table and reviewed what we had so far. Mumbling quotes, forwarding links, and updating each other on our findings, we've accumulated 2900 words. The media artist slash design educator's publication has room for a hundred more. Departing from the use of command line instructions in computer programming language that's directly connected to action, direction, and structure, our essay focuses on the use of directives in durational, experiential art works and practices. Computers becoming people, people becoming machines.

"3AM." I mumble, "3AM! Gash it's late," I yawn, "You wanna take a break and polish it tomorrow?"

Pumped up on caffeine and two trays of chocolate cookies, we decide to hit the road and do your laundry at the 24-hour laundromat down the street. You prefer this one over the small, dingy place that's a block closer, also because they have giant dryers that fit several loads of laundry. Plus it's a fun challenge to squeeze a smile out of the grumpy old Greek attendant with the big 80s brown rimmed glasses and greasy gray hair. It's been raining for a week straight now, your knees hurt from biking around town, and you like doing laundry together. Enough excuses for this humongous pile of clothes. I estimate it's a good four weeks' worth of nearing the bottom of your closet, sticking your nose in sweater armpits before you decide to wear them one more time.

At 3:23AM we enter the small laundromat on Nostrand Avenue near Crown Street. The front door is wide open. Three walls are lined with double load washing machines, with a cluster of eight triple load machines in the middle of the space. There's no one inside. Maybe the attendant stepped out for a drink at the bar next door. Someone seems to have dropped a few quarters on the floor, and there's detergent dripping down one of the machines. All around us, a rhythmical, humming murmur. A raspy drone. A growl almost. Underneath us, the floor softly vibrates.

We put down the heavy bags of laundry in front of one of the machines. You rummage around your wallet for quarters to feed the washing machine. I'm surprised you didn't bring your special quarter wallet. You always collect quarters, greeting them whenever you get change back with a now almost routine "Yay, laundry money." You put two coins into the narrow slots, then another three. Slightly sleep deprived and strung-out on caffeine, you simply stand there for a split second, staring into your wallet, confusing nickels for quarters. While you search for the last two coins, the washing machine in front of us forcefully spits out the previous five quarters. An experienced dodger of unexpected behavior in New York City traffic, you're light on your feet, and super flexible: by throwing yourself on the ground, face first, you manage to avoid being hit in the eye by your own bullets. While you're down, you grab a bottle of Downy fabric softener out of your bag, mumbling something about wanting to "drrrown and drrrug the machine to sleep."

It proves to be effective, the machine immediately calms down, but you say you think our window is small. "Two, three minutes at most, these machines are sturdy." You turn to me with an excited, exhilarated look in your eyes, "Hurry up, give me a quarter! He will wake up soon!" Feeling my pockets for change I wonder how you know these things. Do you conquer restless machines every Saturday night? "Really!" you continue, "We have to stuff the machine with coins while it's nodding off, otherwise it will most definitely gush out your laundry while it's spinning... Buckets full of water and white foam oozing out on the tiled floor like vomit on a dance floor."