People out in the wild are damn good at conversation. Sometimes they vocalise things inane or mediocre or impolite, but at least they have the courage to express. I can’t do that half the time, and anyone who can inspires me; I went through an extended stint semi-recently where I lost all courage to vocalise and had to get this doctor to exhume the nerve I’d lost. I’m mostly good now, but I still like to listen to other people talk—talking is impressive stuff. I like to listen to strangers speak because sometimes they say things dramatic or wacky or reveal the juicy content of their lives. Essentially, I like to people-watch because people are epic. They inspire stories, inspire confidence, and inspire me to write.
I conducted field research. The ‘field’ here being the only place I’m basically allowed to go at the moment: Sydney Park. It was a Monday. A chill air trundled in from the south-east. The clouds were altocumulus, their bellies aglow with the deep orange of paprika or a butter chicken. There were dogs. To people-watch I’ll usually sit on a grassy hill or slatted bench or brickwork wall with a notebook on my thighs and interpret the sensory detail coming in: the vague whiff of a decomposing bird somewhere off in the reeds, the abrasive pitch of a cockatoo caw, the tingle of my cheek against the zephyr, and civilians. I’ll describe their appearance, note any apparent quirks, and transcribe any verbalised point of interest. Then, they’ll walk or cycle off and I’ll have all the time I want to reflect and speculate about the inner drama of their lives, like the reason that 30-ish y.o. skater devoured his ice-cream so voraciously; or the reason for the divorce of that bleach-blonde mother and her decidedly natural-haired early teen daughter who asked if she could stay at her dad’s on Friday night; or what the go is with that guy’s limp. There’s endless content in people-watching. It’ll often take me an hour to ruminate on an event that took a minute to unfold, and this is fine because I can sit and ponder all I want. But sitting is no longer possible.
Given the current restrictions, I was unable to execute my research in the traditional sedentary fashion. People no longer loitered and fed me with paragraphs of dialogue; they were required to be in constant motion, and so was I. This week, I collected my data under the guise of exercise.
Walk-by eavesdrops are challenging; the duration that a power-walking party remains within earshot is limited to about four seconds tops, no matter how slow the eavesdropper strolls, no matter how much he twists his head and leans back in the direction he came while his feet continue to carry him forward. A duo of yoga-panted, sneaker'd and crop-topped ladies will round the bend and come into the eavesdropper’s view and he’ll have like five seconds to stipulate on who they are, what they’re about, what their relationship to each other is and why they both have AirPods in their ears despite their walking and talking together. And then the eavesdropper will enter their conversational bubble, gather a fragment of a sentence (“…she’s like, ‘Okay.’ So now I’m trying to find…”) and pop out the other side trying to extrapolate and decide on all the dramatic details (like who is this ‘she’? And what is she trying to find?) before another walking party comes along, because there’s more of them alright—an endless stream of conversationalists supposedly exercising. And he can’t write while walking—he ends up with these indecipherable hieroglyphs. And there’s no way he can remember every sentence fragment encountered and attribute it to faces glimpsed. So, in these circumstances, a recording device is advised.
I have a Sony ICD-PX470. It’s black, rectangular and looks like an early-days (like 2015) nicotine vape so much so that my friend Michael once took a toke on the microphones in a dim-lit corner of The Duke of Enmore Hotel—I have the audio evidence to prove it. I originally bought it to dictate fiction to myself on my drives to work but abandoned these efforts upon hearing my own voice for the first time: unemotive, stilted, high-throated, wavering, unnatural, unsure, unsettling, inelegant, ackward and lame. My own playback wounded me deep, and thinking about it now, probably laid a solid foundation for some moderate social anxiety. So the recorder went to my bedside table, buried in junk, until unearthed for this evening’s stroll.
I wore my checkered flannelette; its vertical chest pocket dimensions equivalent to the length of the PX470. I hit record, lapped the park (the clouds were altocumulus, orange, etc.) and returned home to listen to what I’d captured. I transcribed the fleeting snippets of discernible dialogue, skimmed these quotes, and found they didn’t inspire me.
I think it was the lack of context. Traditional people-watching provides an initial velocity, sends a storyteller off in a direction in which they continue to row or roll or fall. But these clips that I collected were limited, acted as single data points on multi-dimensional planes from which no trendline could be inferred. Total freedom is unintuitively restrictive. It’s like trying to decide on a pie. But through this process of transcription, of stripping myself of all sensory detail (besides sound) and hyper-focusing on what people said, I learnt some things about speech that I hadn’t totally grasped before.
Lesson 1: dogs are like the weather, not in the sense that they rain from the sky or anything (contrary to certain sayings), but in the sense that dog-talk is just as bland as weather-talk. It’s just as repetitious, it always lacks substance, it’s rarely offensive, and it has the bonus of an exit strategy whereby upon reaching a dead-end in dog-talk conversation, a speaker (now non-speaker) can stoop down and ruffle some fur and fill the stagnant air with emphatic affirmations. An example of this occurs at 16:55 [mm:ss] in my recording:
“Forgot to mention—how old’s yours?”
“He’s four.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Yours… very much looks like a puppy.”
*Laughing*
“Aww, they’re so cute.”
*ha ha*
“Come on, Afro.”
I’m not dissing dog-talk by the way, rather, learning how to use it and where to employ it, because small talk is often an essential first step in earning trust and a reasonable fallback for when I’ve got nothing to say.
Lesson 2: there’s way more repetition than I thought. Most often it isn’t—it isn’t—the kind of repetition we learnt about whilst studying poetry in Years 7–12 (used for emphasis), but the kind of repetition that politicians use—a stalling technique, something to fill the void of a pause while a speaker considers how the fuck they’re going to stick the landing of this ungainly sentence they started. There’s a whole lot of “but um, but um,” and decent amount of “she, she.” The repetition of “the” pops up at 6:10, 10:50, and 15:30 in my recording and is followed by “rock pools,” “shoe drawer,” and “garage door” respectively. The most extreme repetition I encountered (and perhaps my favourite clip collected) occurs at 19:55. (It's quite difficult to read, so take it slow.) “Yeah, I was like: do you… I was like: do you know how, like—like how long does it take?”
And Lesson 3: I shouldn’t do this. Part of the reason I could hardly speak in public settings a few months ago was because I had this fear of being overheard. Like, what if some creep was recording me? What if he caught some snippet of speech and used it against me? Used it to prove that I was indeed inane or mediocre or impolite. I would get so caught up on revising sentences before I said them, vetting them, ensuring the right balance of repose, comedy, accuracy and originality that moments would pass and I’d end up not saying anything at all. People forget, maybe, but recording devices do not. I feared them. So to anyone out there anxious over having their speech non-consensually captured, know that the PX470 is going back to the junk on my bedside table, know that (mostly for my sake) I won’t do it anymore.
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