Some youngish guy, maybe a few years older than myself, walked up with a little black dog – part dachsund, part chihuaha, part terrier it would turn out. I grew up with dogs and love them. I pet the dog and offered to watch it while the guy went in for a coffee.

The guy came out with his coffee, and I asked him about the dog – her name, how old, was it a girlfriend’s or his, where they live? It turns out he lives right across the street from an apartment I had sublet one summer down Bleecker a few blocks. We ended up sitting there talking for an hour at least. We’ve both been in the neighborhood maybe half a decade, both face many of the same doubts and challenges in our lives in the city, the same fears, struggles and hopes in love. Anybody who might have walked by would have thought us lifelong friends.

An afternoon like this – sitting out on a bench on the street, reflecting, making friends with strangers from the neighborhood – is something that for tragically long in my life I would have considered wasting time. I think that with age I am recognizing it to be entirely the opposite. The reward you reap from time that you invest in work is not linear. For the most gratifying sort of work – stumbling on a novel opportunity and building a company with friends, for instance – the governing law is a power law. A couple of years invested in the right opportunity may well earn you far greater renumeration than a lifetime of more typical work, no matter how hard you grind at it.

Taking time to reflect, to get to know people and myself, to be detached from the noise of the web is for me a part of opening up to these greater opportunities. These days I would rather cultivate energy by taking a day off like this to enjoy the city and its people than pour energy into speculative projects that don’t have the ambition or hope of being the big win.

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I found myself laughing out loud last night reading this passage, a snippet of an interview Mitchell did with Harlem Calypso legend Wilmoth Houdini:

“A war is where three Calypsonians stand up on the platform in a tent and improvise in verse. One man begins in verse, telling about the ugly faces and impure morals of the other two. Then the next man picks up the song and proceeds with it. On and on it goes. If you falter when it comes your turn, you don’t dare call yourself a Calypsonian. Most war songs are made up of insults. You give out your insults, and then the next man insults you. The man who gives out the biggest insults is the winner. I was so insulting in my first war the other men congratulated me. Since then I maintain my prestige and integrity as Houdini the Calypsonian. I got a brain that ticks like a clock. I can sing at any moment on any matter. If you say to me ‘sing a song about that gentleman over there,’ I swallow once and do so.”

— 1949

I laughed because I felt I could well be reading a description of the contemporary cultural institutions of freestyle rapping and the “rap battle”. As far as I can find on the web, there hasn’t been much made of any formal anthropological link and I’m no anthrolopogist so maybe it’s just in my head.

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