Vine

When I was walking downtown recently I came across this vine growing on a fence. It surprised me to find such a delicate-looking flower in mid-November. But things have been pretty warm here overall -- the begonias and coleus in the flower bed outside my building haven't frozen yet, either.

I had dinner with my friend Joe last night and caught him up on the drama in my life. His dog died at about the same time as Armenia, so we could commiserate over the loss of a pet.

Did I mention I'm reading "Schulz and Peanuts," a biography of Charles Schulz? I've always loved Peanuts, even though the strip made less and less sense in its later years. I still have a few Peanuts paperbacks from childhood, and the minister in the Presbyterian church I attended as a kid always used a Peanuts strip to illustrate some point or other during his sermon. It's easy to forget how deeply Charlie Brown and his colleagues were woven into our culture in the 1960s and '70s. In fact, watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" remains one of the highlights of the holiday season for me!

And speaking of holiday season, I've created another book of my photography -- the promotional badge is to the right. I'm giving it as a gift to family members. Click on the badge to preview the book!

Secaucus

I had a busy weekend. I was out all day photographing street art on Friday (I didn't even bother to go to work) and on Saturday morning I had a real urban adventure.

For months on my way to and from Dave's, I'd seen interesting graffiti from the train as it passed through Secaucus, N.J. On Saturday I decided to find this graffiti, which is painted on the concrete support pillars for a huge overpass of the New Jersey Turnpike.


I took the train out to Secaucus and began walking. I'll spare you all the details except to say it took a good 45 minutes of trial and error before I finally found myself beneath the Turnpike, which towered over my head. The ground beneath it is marshy and full of tufted brown grasses taller than I am.

Walking around down there was a bit treacherous -- more than once I took a step onto what looked like solid ground, only to be up to my ankles in mud. (And this being an industrial area of New Jersey, God only knows what's in all that mud.)


I did eventually make my way over to the graffiti, though, and it was terrific. A street artist named Faro painted several of his trademark mummies on the concrete pillars, including these two.


This guy seems to be saying "Rock on!"

Getting back to the train was much easier because I knew which route to take. All my photos will be up on Flickr in about a week!

Dreams

When I woke this morning, I realized almost immediately that I had been dreaming. I tried to clutch the dream, remember it, but its misty retreat left me with nothing.

I was reminded of an article I read in The New Yorker yesterday about dreams, and specifically nightmares. (I never have nightmares -- at least, not that I remember -- and I never feel fearful or anxious when I awaken.)

This article, unfortunately not available online, contained a few interesting factoids. One is that women remember their dreams more easily than men. This may explain why my female friends can often describe dreams in great detail while I can’t remember whether I dreamed at all.

(When I was in the Peace Corps, my roommate Juliet would awaken every morning and offer up a step-by-step recitation of her dreams. It blew my mind that she could remember them so well. Every plot twist, dialogue, scenes stretching back what seemed like hours -- you name it. I always suspected her of making it all up.)

The other, and more interesting, factoid is that dreams seem to be changing. When Sigmund Freud recorded dreams at the turn of the century, they were long narratives, at least according to his notes. Many took pages and pages to record properly.

Now, researchers have found that dreams tend to be shorter and jumpier. If in the old days they were full-length feature films, today they’re YouTube clips. The article quotes British psychoanalyst Susan Budd: “Modern patients don’t often produce the kinds of dreams that Freud had. Modern dreams mostly seem to be shorter and more fragmentary, and this is because the dream is undoubtedly a cultural as well as a neurobiological product.”

We often talk about the ADD-inducing effects of our culture, from the Internet to our crazy workaholic tendencies, but I never thought about their effects on our dreams. It’s fascinating, and a bit alarming, to think our minds have been rewired to produce short-form nocturnal dramas.

My dreams, on the rare occasions when I do remember them, seem more long-form. One scene will pass into another, but there’s usually some kind of transition -- seldom just a jump or abrupt change. I don’t think I’m immune to our cultural slide toward ADD, but maybe I’m less affected, since I don’t watch much television and I tend to read a lot.

Anyway, it was a fascinating article!

(Photo: W. 40th Street, earlier this week)

Obsessions

When I was a kid, my mom once told me I had an obsessive personality. That wording always bothered me, because it sounds like a psychological condition, and I don’t think I’m that obsessive. But I did go through numerous fads and stages as a young person.

Even now, you could say that my interest in graffiti and photography is somewhat obsessive, I suppose. Where’s the line between an interest and an obsession? Darned if I know.

Most of my childhood obsessions involved an impulse to collect. Here are a few:

-- Stamp collecting. This was the single most dominant, enduring interest of my childhood. I loved stamps and the exotic places they helped me imagine: the jungles of the Congo, the mountains of Eritrea, the plantations of Brazil, the snowy onion domes of Russia. I mowed the lawn each week in the summer and saved the money for stamps, which I bought a few times a year at a store in Tampa called “The Perf Gauge.” (A perf gauge is a tool used by hardcore stamp collectors to measure the perforations of some stamps, which can affect value and collectability.) I traded stamps with my brother and boys in my neighborhood; I counted them, organized them and mounted them in increasingly large and elaborate albums. I still have my stamp collection and I’d never part with it, though these days I don’t look at it much.

-- Recording music. When I got to be a teenager, I became obsessed with taping music off the radio. I bought cassettes at Radio Shack and taped songs I liked, and then eventually songs I sort of liked, and finally songs I didn't much like at all. I just wanted them all. I imagined shelves of cassettes, carefully archived, a library of every song I might ever want to hear. I taped things off the television, even. I drove my family crazy.

-- Beer cans. Around 1980, my stepbrother introduced me to the hobby of beer can collecting. I became fascinated by beer cans -- the graphics, the typography, the sprays of wheat, the various types of pull tabs and tops. Who knew cans could be so interesting? We collected hundreds of them by slogging through marshy mounds of trash in a local dump and looking for rusty empties under trees in sandy orange groves. We joined the Beer Can Collectors of America (aka the BCCA) and went to trading sessions, lugging flats of cans to and fro. We traded cans by mail with collectors from other parts of the country. We amassed a huge collection, then split it between us, and then my interest slowly waned. I sold my collection in 1983 for about $100, just before the fad of beer can collecting collapsed altogether, making similar collections essentially worthless. (My brother collected soda cans at the same time, and still has his, stored in flats in a closet at my mother's house -- much to her chagrin.)

-- Seashells. My siblings and I spent a week at the beach every year and during that time we scoured the shore for shells. I had a seashell guide that helped us identify them all, and we typed up notecards for each specimen, noting where it had been collected and under what circumstances. We bought shells at baskety craft store World Bazaar and, on one glorious trip, at the Shell Factory in Fort Myers. I still have my shells, but now they're all mixed together in a big glass jug and the notecards are long gone.

What is it about collecting that people find so fascinating? Even my street art photos are a collection of sorts -- one that happily requires no space and no dusting. It's funny how acquiring is such a strong human impulse.

(Photo: Fall, Hell's Kitchen, last week.)

Everything is New

I was talking with a coworker the other day who’s also been laid off. We were discussing options -- specifically, how strenuously we should be looking for a new job.

I’ve been firing off resumes almost from the moment I heard the news. But between my severance, unemployment and savings, I do have a cushion to live on for quite a while. Some people have told me, as they have my coworker, that we should use those resources and take time to be creative, find the right job or career path, and not rush into any life changes purely for the sake of security.

I’m just not sure what to think about that.

I enjoy security. I really like to know where my next meal is coming from. Backing away from the job search to mull over my future prospects, and maybe do some creative experimentation, seems like rather dangerous lassitude in the face of an urgent situation.

But on the other hand, how urgent is the situation, really? Although red flashing strobes are going off in my brain, I’m fine -- really I am. For months and months. I could live on severance alone well into the middle of next year, without even touching my savings.

There are also a host of variables complicating my future.

It won’t surprise any of you that I’m thinking about moving to New Jersey. Dave and I have talked about the possibilities, and I’m already looking for jobs there. It seems like a good solution for both of us, allowing us to save money and enrich our lives together.

But if I move to New Jersey, I’d need a car -- and what would I do with my Manhattan apartment? Should I rent it, or do I want to sell it and be rid of New York altogether?

I guess I shouldn’t tangle all these issues together, and I shouldn’t think about them all at once. As the Berbers say, “Imiks imiks ikshim aram tagdoult” -- or “Little by little, the camel goes into the pot.” I’ll just play it by ear. When I have job nibbles in New York, I’ll stay in New York, and if things happen in New Jersey I’ll stay with Dave and work on those opportunities. I’ll just see what happens. If anything, I’m fortunate because I could go in any direction, and I have time to breathe, enjoy life and make the right decisions.

(Photo: Sunrise over a parking lot, East Brunswick, N.J., Monday.)

Woods

Dave and I took the dogs for a walk in the woods on Sunday. These particular woods are part of East Brunswick’s open space preservation program, and they’re a hop and skip away from Dave’s apartment. I found them by accident the week before and thought they’d be great for walking Ernie and Ruby, because they’re much closer than driving over to Cheesequake. But his dogs aren’t exactly athletic, living inside as they do, and we nearly wore them out on this excursion! Poor Ernie came back and slept all day. I was worried about him!

So the jury is still out on whether these woods are good dog-walking territory, or whether they’re just too far away.


In any case, they’ll be good walking territory for me. I enjoyed the woodsy smells and the very last of the colored leaves, the shelves of fungus growing on the trees and the odd bulbous insect nests we found on some twigs. It’s great to have nature nearby.

GWTW

I shot this photo on the way to Wegman's on Saturday. It pretty much summarizes my mood at the moment!

Dave and I watched the first half of "Gone With the Wind" last night. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and in fact I read the book when I was in the sixth grade. It really is a good movie, even with its 1930s melodramatic transition captioning and acting styles. Of course, you have to look past the absurdity of painting the Old South as a place of grace and beauty -- that might be true, but only if you were rich and white!