Two workers mop a sidewalk in balletic unison a man in a parked car idly sucks a woman’s toes a woman places a live pigeon in a Duane Reade bag like a salad she’ll finish later. But Wilson does magic with his staggering archive of street footage, all full of details that, if you encountered them yourself, you’d ponder for days: peculiar behaviors, dreamlike coincidences, strange omens and general “glitches in the Matrix,” as he puts it.

“How To,” now in its second season, is (nominally) a tutorial, offering advice on subjects like wine appreciation and parking, and (formally) a documentary, following its themes to a bowling-ball factory or to interview a teenage real estate agent - and (ultimately) a form of memoir, a personal essay on video. On the way to the checkout, he marveled at a product he said he’d already purchased from a different dollar store: a clock radio with a built-in fish tank far too tiny for a fish, a “cool dollar-store-only object.” The entire place suddenly felt like a tidy analogue of Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world. Nearby he pointed out a display of tools from Trisonic, a budget brand he investigated in a 2016 short film, before collecting the things he’d come for: sink strainers, a miniature folding chair, a toilet seat with a fluffy white Pomeranian printed on its lid. He told me that he spends a lot of time in dollar stores when he has writer’s block. A morning stroll near his building, in Ridgewood, Queens, did not offer up anything with the kind of Wilsonian surreality the show specializes in - but our destination, a dollar store Wilson described as one of his favorites, did.

You might think that there’d be something uncanny about walking around New York with the filmmaker John Wilson, insofar as that’s what much of his HBO series, “How To With John Wilson,” consists of: We see footage he’s magpie’d from around the city while he muses, in his thoughtful-Muppet voice, along baggy themes. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Where to watch impulse season 1