User:Inge Hoonte/Allucquere Rosanne Stone

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. First slowly, then steadily, and as the coffee consumption increased, more and more maniacal, we've been typing away on our laptops all 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) Checking my email every few minutes, and, depending on the content and sender of the message that heads my inbox in this distinguished bold font, marking it with a star, forwarding it, trashing it, or writing a brief or lengthy reply.
2) Commenting on Facebook status messages and clicking 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-messaging 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 have my email tab open, I might as well see if my writer-friend Matt is online so I can 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."

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 literally sighed with relief. Yes. You're right. Let's do this ****.

At 10PM the coffee shop closed its metal kicked us out. 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 cross 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 sit down at your kitchen table and review what we have so far. Mumbling quotes, forwarding links, updating each other on our findings, we've tackled 2900 words. The art historian slash design educator's publication has room for one hundred more. 2500-3000 words to compare the use of textual directives in art projects to the command line instructions of computer programming language. You know the computers, I represent the art world.

"3AM." I mumble, "3AM! Gosh it's late," I yawn, "You wanna take a break and polish it in the morning?"

Pumped up on caffeine and two trays of chocolate cookies, we decide to hit the road and do your laundry at the 24-hr laundromat down the street. It's been raining for two weeks now, your knees hurt from cycling to the beach and the city, and you don't like doing laundry alone. Enough excuses for this pile of clothes. I estimate it's a good four weeks' worth of wardrobe drainage.

At 3:23AM we enter the laundromat on Nostrand Ave near Montgomery Street. The walls are lined with double and triple load washing machines, with another two rows of four machines each in the middle of the space. Something is different this time. There's a who are so fed up by the fact that we stuff their mouths with dirty clothes, that they rebel. They reject all quarters, and forcefully spit them out as soon as you drop them into the narrow slots. If you're lucky and flexible (or throw yourself to the ground, face first), you manage to avoid being hit in the eye by your own bullets. Then, you quickly pour some fabric softener to lull the machine to sleep. Your window is small. Two, three minutes at most, these machines are sturdy. He will wake up soon. somehow manage to squeeze your money in while the machine is dozing off, completely drugged by your fabric softener, 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.