{"id":42138,"date":"2012-06-15T03:56:24","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T03:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=42138"},"modified":"2012-06-16T21:07:21","modified_gmt":"2012-06-16T21:07:21","slug":"receipts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/receipts\/","title":{"rendered":"Receipts"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On my desk in front of me is a receipt from Supreme Hardware on West 73rd Street from 10:30 this morning for $8, which I spent on a 1\/4″ masonry drillbit that I used to mount bookshelves in my apartment. The new shelves, which I finished today, let me finally put away an enormous stack of unorganized books that had accumulated on my living room floor near my reading chair. While sorting these books I found many I hadn’t seen in years, including a damaged paperback Lytton Strachey biography that I bought off a blanket on the street; a page was marked with a folded and faded receipt which, unlike today’s strip of paper tape-ribbon, from the hardware store’s old-school register, is a full digital transaction record. <\/p>\n

Apparently I was at a Krispy Kreme at 285 West 23rd Street at ten minutes to two on the afternoon of June 20th, 1998, where I bought a large iced coffee from somebody named Lonnie. What was I doing on West 23rd Street that Saturday afternoon? (Google provided the day of the week.) Is there still a Krispy Kreme there? Was I alone? Who was Lonnie? (Male or female?) Was I carrying the Lytton Strachey book with me or did I absently stick the receipt in my wallet and then pull it out later when I needed a bookmark? I remember that I got mildly interested in Strachey after I saw the Stephen Frears movie called Carrington<\/i> (with Emma Thompson as Dora Carrington and Jonathan Pryce as Strachey); IMDB tells me that the movie came out in 1995, which corresponds to my memory, because I saw the movie with a friend who worked at a website (an “internet company”) for which I was doing some work at that time. The movie was in theaters for a few weeks, and I could probably figure out where I saw it (but not when); I might even have a ticket stub or a receipt from the restaurant where we had dinner after the movie. <\/p>\n

But none of this helps me figure out what I was doing on that Saturday afternoon, three years after that; whether I was reading the book then, or later that day, or the next day, and what made me go into that Krispy Kreme and buy that large iced coffee that I don’t remember drinking from Lonnie, a man or woman whom I can’t picture and who, if he or she is still alive, may only have the vaguest memories of working at a Krispy Kreme in Manhattan fourteen years ago and certainly has no memory at all of me and my iced coffee. But it happened that day, and at exactly 1:51 PM I handed a twenty dollar bill to Lonnie and got $18.11 back and left the Krispy Kreme with my large iced coffee, and the receipt went into my pocket and then into the book and I never saw it again until today. What did I do with the rest<\/i> of that day? Who was Lonnie? The thermal ink on the receipt has faded to near-invisibility; I can barely see the 8-bit characters that reveal just one incidental forgotten moment of millions, billions in this city every day, every decade, every century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On my desk in front of me is a receipt from Supreme Hardware on West 73rd Street from 10:30 this morning for $8, which I spent on a 1\/4″ masonry drillbit that I used to mount bookshelves in my apartment. The new shelves, which I finished today, let me finally put away an enormous stack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42138"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42138"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42146,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42138\/revisions\/42146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}