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Brooklyn by sunset
Friday, July 20 2001
setting: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Gretchen and her brother Brian went off for breakfast while I stayed behind to tinker with my car so as to prepare it for the final leg of our transcontinental road trip. I checked the oil and it seemed kind of low so I added some. Then I finally figured out how to adequately lubricate my accelerator cable so as to keep it from sticking ("poor man's cruise control"). It turns out cable lubrication was my problem, not stickiness in a carburetor pivot, as I'd thought two days ago.
We experienced no car problems during the afternoon drive across the Appalachians. We did, however, suffer at the hands of local radio stations. On the Pennsylvania Turnpike South of Altoona there's a Clear Channel country music radio station that plays one song, a bunch of advertisements, followed by another song, then another bunch of advertisements. I'd read a lot about the gradual decline of American radio under the effects of deregulation, particularly under the monopolizing weight of such heinous companies as Clear Channel Communications. But I hadn't really thought it had gotten quite so bad that now music was just an occasional interruption in the commercials. Why aren't there Congressional hearings about such clearly deleterious effects of monopolies, especially since they affect scarce radio frequencies belonging to The People?
We crossed Pennsylvania and into New Jersey beneath clear cool post-coldfront skies. Anticipating traffic problems in the Holland tunnel, we took I-95 south to Staten Island and crossed into Brooklyn on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. As we passed Prospect Park we saw Gretchen's friend Yolayla (who has been house sitting for the past couple weeks) walking Gretchen's dog Sally. Gretchen jumped out to talk to them (and receive a hearty lick-filled Sally welcome) while I began the process of unloading the car. I looked west down President Street and saw the sun was just then setting directly over the end of the street. Since this moment, the moment when the sun sets on the end of President Street, probably only happens once (or perhaps twice) each year, I felt as if my arrival in Brooklyn was being blessed by nature itself.
At some point I discovered that the gallon of Tide detergent we'd salvaged from the condo had burst open and spilled all over the floor behind the front seats. What with its concentration, it had ruined (or nearly ruined) everything it had soaked into, which luckily wasn't that much. The worst tragedy was the Tarot interpretation book Linda had bought me for my Aleister Crowley Tarot deck, but by holding it under a facet for awhile I think I managed to salvage it.
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