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space occupied by rubble
Saturday, August 18 2001
Zero tolerance haunts my dreams.
I dreamed this morning that I was sitting with a friend on the edge of a rural road talking. As a school bus drove past, I menaced it with a couple plastic pistols I happened to be holding, immediately regretting my lack of impulse control as I did so. The bus stopped, backed up, and the driver informed me that the police had been notified of my terroristic threat. A few seconds later the cops rolled up and pointed at me to say, "You're in trouble with the authorities." I nodded with bored resignation, as if to say, "tell me something I don't know." At this point they went to get their handcuffs, which they kept in one of those paisley satchels that hippies use to tote their marijuana. But it was too much bother to get the satchel open, so they skipped the humiliation stuff and simply wrote me a fifty dollar ticket. At this point I was already waking up and I wondered if the ticket that had been written in the dream had to be paid in reality. Then I suddenly realized, duh, the event never even happened, it was just a dream.
The humanity of dogs goes only so far.
This morning I noticed that there is a strong relation between the socializing of dogs and that of their owners. Both species have complex, nuanced social habits and respond in subtle ways to particular individuals as they pass. When I talk amiably to a stranger in Prospect Park, Sally goes out of her way to act friendly toward that stranger's dog. Conversely, when Sally befriends a random stranger's dog in the park, its owner almost always says something friendly to me.
After such customary dog socializing in Prospect Park's Long Meadow (an obligation that mostly seems to bore Sally), we ventured into the far more exciting wooded northeastern part of the park, a place mock-grandiloquently called "the Vale of Cashmere." It's the part that features squirrels, chipmunks, fountains, and many men cruising in search of other men. As a guy just trying to walk my dog, I felt out of place and a little uneasy, especially when I came upon unfurled condoms casually draped over the shrubbery, their spermicidal reservoir tips unpleasantly discolored from anal sex. And what am I supposed to do when I find Sally with such things in her mouth? As Gretchen pointed out the other day, you think you've reached some sort of transcendent trans-special connection to Sally, especially when she flashes you her intelligent sparkly brown eyes as you talk to her along the trail. But then she goes off and rolls in human feces or tries to ingest the nutritional content of a used condom.
I wonder why Park Slope's many lesbians don't cruise for one another in Prospect Park. It would be refreshing to see more women along those trails, even if they did all wear hiking boots and jangle Subaru keys on their keychains.
I'm allergic to cashews.
I'm not one of those infuriating people who can't handle pollen and refuses to visit people with cats, but I do have a number of allergies. I cannot eat kiwi fruit, I break out in hives if stung by a bumble bee, and I have trouble with nearly all members of the Sumac Family. For example, during most summers of my childhood I suffered from poison ivy rashes, and back in the Fall of 1987 I broke out in hives after overindulging in raw cashews. I love cashews, and since then I'd been working under the delusion that if the cashews were roasted they'd lose their allergenic effect. Evidently I was wrong. Over the course of the past week I have eaten nearly all the roasted cashews in a four pound can Gretchen gave me, and now I have poison-ivy-like rashes on the palms of my hands and soles of my feet, as well as some nascent itching on my chest.
I attempt to explore Williamsburg.
I'd heard much of storied Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood to the north, so today I tried to reach it via subway. Things started off okay, with me taking the Red Line to Nevins and then catching the G north to the vicinity of the east-west Brown Lines. At that point I figured I could just walk to Williamsburg, but my sense of direction in Brooklyn has yet to develop and I headed in the wrong direction, trending mostly eastward into the neighborhood of Bushwick. It was a fairly impoverished area, with big ugly faded red brick projects and trash-filled streets. Most of the row houses and other small-scale buildings looked to be of cheap construction and many had fallen into various states of disrepair. Some of the streets were teaming with people out and about doing Saturday shopping. At first most of them looked to be of Puerto Rican descent, but gradually the demographics shifted towards black. After I got tired of walking, I caught a series of Brown Line trains that overshot my intended destination and put me in Manhattan on Delancey Street. Backtracking from there imprecisely (accidentally heading further into Manhattan and then back across the East River into Brooklyn), I again resumed my search for Williamsburg on foot. This time I found myself in a vast Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, with more signage in the Hebrew font than in the Roman. In some ways on this day it was like a ghost town, since the buildings looked to be in need of repair and very few people were out and about. Since it was Saturday, all the shops of the business district were closed and gated. The only people I saw were Orthodox Jewish nuclear families strolling about with seemingly no particular destination in mind. The men all wore circular black fur hats, long silk jackets and tight white knee-high stockings (I'd never seen such garb before!) and all the women wore pastel green or yellow dresses. As for the little boys and little girls, they were all dressed in miniature versions of their parents' clothes, and none were without parental accompaniment. At first I thought these people quaint and adorable, sort of like the Amish I'd seen in Ohio. But after awhile I grew weary of seeing these folks in their precise religiously-mandated uniforms. Couldn't they just once schlep around in tee shirts and jeans? Couldn't just one store be open for me to get V8 Juice? I remember being impressed by all the Orthodox Jews I'd seen walking around Hollywood. These were the only people who had to walk in a city made for automobiles, and they seemed to be infusing community in a place desperately in need of it. But here the Orthodoxy seemed to be stifling the community with its drab unsmiling uniformity.
I never did find the storied heart of Williamsburg, with its teaming hundreds of laptop-toting jobless dotcommers. That will have to wait for another day.
Over the next hour or so, I found myself somehow wandering eastward again and, to keep from repeating the mistake I'd made earlier today, I caught the J Line to Chambers Street in Manhattan and rode the Red Line home. There's nothing wrong with repeatedly getting lost and exploring neighborhoods in a new hometown, especially when you carry an unlimited subway pass.
[REDACTED]
There are no alleys in New York City.
In urban California I became so accustomed to the arrangement of blocks that I found myself projecting this arrangement on the rest of the world. I came to assumed that all urban street maps have a parallel universe of alleys, these being the natural thing that happens where property boundaries abut in the back. But in Brooklyn and Manhattan, there are no alleys at all. Usually in the back of all but the largest buildings there's a small poorly-lit open space occupied by rubble, scattered maples, and opportunistic Trees of Heaven. But this space is completely fenced, often set at a different elevation from all its neighbors, and there is no possibility of car getting back there. Often these spaces are completely inaccessible except through one of adjacent buildings, although in some cases there is access from the street, usually along the discontinuity of building orientation associated with a street corner. The lucky resident with such access usually has several inline parking space while everyone else in the neighborhood is forced to scrounge parking on the street.
Hard rock paints itself into a corner yet again.
For some reason I'm listening to New York's version of KROQ (or whatever it's called), you know, the station that plays nothing but white boy modern hard rock. As far back into history as the station is willing to go is stuff from Metallica's Injustice for All (circa 1988). Most of the stuff you hear on this station hasn't changed much from the winning formula pioneered by Nirvana. The doo-chicka-doo-doo is there, along with the quiet-loud-quiet-loud composition and the angsty lyrics. The biggest innovation made to this genre of music during the nineties seems to have been the introduction of hip-hop elements (think Korn and Limp Bizkit). But after ten years of this stuff there doesn't seem to be anything important left to say. I suppose if you're an angsty teenager such formulaic aggressive music might help you deal with the misery of your world (much as Pink Floyd once helped me). But for a music genre this old and weary to still have a whole radio station to itself seems to be nothing less than a cry for some sort of music revolution. Remember, folks, many of the kids who suddenly embraced Nirvana in 1992 were the same ones who had been getting by on Bon Jovi and Poison in 1989.
The skyline of Midtown Manhattan.
Inside the M train.
Boards on the side of a boarded-up building somewhere in Brooklyn. The tree is Tree of Heaven, a common Asian weed tree.
The narrow chasm between Gretchen's brownstone (left) and the next one west (right).
The backyard wilderness, such as it is.
Sally in a clearing in the Vale of Cashmere (Prospect Park, Brooklyn).
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