Mark A. Thomas, The Payphone Project guy, is someone of extreme interest to me. Shortly after I found The Payphone Project, I went rooting around to see what else I could find out about the person behind it.
This is the website I found. It's a very plain website that looks like it was designed in the nineties, complete with Comic Sans. The pages are slightly hard to navigate, but visiting each section of Thomas' website feels like flipping through someone's diary.
The following is listed as "projects and amusements" on Thomas' About Me page:
All of it is great, no hyperbole. My favorites, right at this moment, are "Behind Every Story is a Receipt" and "Stuff Written on Money".
"Behind..." hasn't been updated since 2012, but it has enough content to satisfy for a couple of days at least. He has a receipt scan at the top of a post and, below it, has the story or memory associated with the receipt. They're not just measly paragraph long recountings, he unfurls this interesting, tangential-laden story out in relation to things like receipts for a $1.79 hot dog.
"Stuff Written on Money" is just exactly that. Some of the things written are nonsense, others are grocery lists, doodles, and (like the above) confessions of a grade-school type crush on a stranger.
But beyond the list of his projects and amusements, he has pages like this that has sound clips of things like "Summer, 1998- Thunder and Car Alarms: Hear fragile New York City car alarms set off by thunderstorms" and "10 minutes of silence between songs on an LP record".
I'm not really sure what to make of all of this information. There are millions of pictures, words, and stories that he has collected or produced and despite looking through his website for a couple of hours, I don't feel that I know Thomas all that well. I know that he and I have the same interest in finding markers of time passing, like broken down pay phones or gas receipts, and small glimpses into people's personal lives. I suppose, if anything, I just feel excited knowing that he is putting this information on the internet for me, and others, to find. I usually think about blogs as being a special type of narcissism (they're all about you: you posting things you find interesting because you think other people will also find you interesting, etc.), but finding Thomas' website made me think that maybe blogs can also be used to break this wall of insecurity and self-consciousness people carry around with them and allow people to connect in ways that they normally feel uncomfortable about doing while walking around city streets or small towns.
The following is listed as "projects and amusements" on Thomas' About Me page:
- Pictures of my Brain
- Umbrella Carcasses
- Daily Umbrella
- Sepulchral Portraits
- Daily Grave Portrait
- "The Etude" Music Magazine
- My Receipts
- Daily Receipt
- Behind Every Story Is a Receipt
- Cemeteries
- Stained Glas
- "The Godfather" at Calvary
- Found Photos and Slides
- Abandoned Baby Carriages
- Payphone Pictures
- Payphone News
- Mailbox Locator
- My Weather Station
- Random Words
- Piano Music
- Stuff Written on Money
All of it is great, no hyperbole. My favorites, right at this moment, are "Behind Every Story is a Receipt" and "Stuff Written on Money".
"Behind..." hasn't been updated since 2012, but it has enough content to satisfy for a couple of days at least. He has a receipt scan at the top of a post and, below it, has the story or memory associated with the receipt. They're not just measly paragraph long recountings, he unfurls this interesting, tangential-laden story out in relation to things like receipts for a $1.79 hot dog.
"Stuff Written on Money" is just exactly that. Some of the things written are nonsense, others are grocery lists, doodles, and (like the above) confessions of a grade-school type crush on a stranger.
But beyond the list of his projects and amusements, he has pages like this that has sound clips of things like "Summer, 1998- Thunder and Car Alarms: Hear fragile New York City car alarms set off by thunderstorms" and "10 minutes of silence between songs on an LP record".
I'm not really sure what to make of all of this information. There are millions of pictures, words, and stories that he has collected or produced and despite looking through his website for a couple of hours, I don't feel that I know Thomas all that well. I know that he and I have the same interest in finding markers of time passing, like broken down pay phones or gas receipts, and small glimpses into people's personal lives. I suppose, if anything, I just feel excited knowing that he is putting this information on the internet for me, and others, to find. I usually think about blogs as being a special type of narcissism (they're all about you: you posting things you find interesting because you think other people will also find you interesting, etc.), but finding Thomas' website made me think that maybe blogs can also be used to break this wall of insecurity and self-consciousness people carry around with them and allow people to connect in ways that they normally feel uncomfortable about doing while walking around city streets or small towns.
