I've had a horrible headache all day, which is unfortunate because I stayed home today because of it. Not unfortunate I stayed home, but unfortunate I had a headache since I have much to do. The pressure of our trip is building slightly, we need to make a decision soon about the second half of our plane tickets, we need to start checking into visas. M, bless her heart, has created a highly organized list of visas we need along with how much we are going to need to pay for them. Turns out is isn't cheap! I wonder if there ever will be a day when no one needs visas to go anywhere. I think we'd have to be attacked by aliens first.
A few funny things have gone down in the last few weeks that I want to catch up on. It is summer in New York, though you wouldn't know it by my cold, and people's windows are open, there are parties on the few scraps of lawn in town, and we are all generally looking forward to slogging through the humidity for the next few months. Right now though, it isn't too oppressive yet, so we've been trying to take advantage. We've ridden our bikes a bit, once, up to the scene of the big fire in Greenpoint. You'll remember that fire, it was the time it looked like the world was burning down and the air smelled of kielbasa. The nightmarish fire has given way to a landscape straight out of War. Some construction, and demolition has been done there, but in general it is sitting idle, dreaming of the time in the near future when it will be 40 story condos, and not the historic waterfront market it once was. I'd bet anything that the condos will be characterless glass and steel, mostly glass, without a glance back at its origins: a seedy Brooklyn waterfront scene, crowded with laborers, fisherman and sailors from around the globe. It will probably be called, "The View at Greenpoint" or something crappy like that. Anyway, we managed to climb through a hole in the fence in order to have the place to ourselves. Magda shot the crumbling brick walls and metal fire doors hanging ironically from their hinges. The light was excellent and looking between ruined walls you could see unhindered the skyline of Manhattan. It's hard to describe looking out at the greatest skyline in the world from a war zone, it was downright apocalyptic. Our footsteps on the fallen bricks scraped and echoed as we poked through the ruins. When we finally had enough, we started back to the hole in the fence, a swinging corrugated metal flap at the main gate. Undoing a piece of wire holding it in place, it fell open, but I immediately shut it again. Across the street, parked next to where we'd locked out bikes, sat a FDNY truck, engine running, a uniformed fireman in the driver's seat. He hadn't been looking, and if he did look up, he would have only seen a quivering sheet of metal blowing closed. We were cornered. I can only assume someone called them after seeing us squeeze through, or, he was sitting there randomly, out of all the streets in NY, across from where we were trespassing on the scene of the biggest fire since 9/11. Fortunately I have a long history of breaking into things for fun, and escaping capture by the thinest of margins. I was in good company too, M never panics at times like this, in fact, she seemed only mildly concerned, and I imagined that she was even thinking of continuing to photograph. The way I figured it, a disaster scene this size had to have a few human sized holes we could crawl through. Much in the same way our mouse slips in and out of our apartment unseen, so would we find another pest hole to escape from. It didn't take too much time to find another gate that had a big enough gap for us to climb under, making a mess of ourselves but otherwise freeing us outside of the sight of the fire marshal. Covered in dust we casually sauntered in front of his truck to unlock the bikes and head back on our way.
Occasionally in the city I see things that are surprisingly humane. Because of everyone's proximity to each other, you feel strangely protective of your fellow man. This feeling I think crosses all social barriers, save the Hipsters, who wouldn't cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire. I was walking down a sunbaked 5th avenue last week and had come to a stop and an intersection, standing with a paunchy, balding man of perhaps Italian descent. He was sort of a classic New Yorker, with what little jet black hair he had slicked down and wet looking. Our attentions were caught by a skateboarder who pulled up short at the intersection with the scraping of wood on concrete. He looked like he was a model, tall with chiseled good looks and very expensive black ratty clothes. We was carrying a huge black messenger's bag with several item of clothing hanging off it. I imagined he was commuting somewhere to go be fabulous. When there were no more cars coming, he kicked up down the street again, dropping a shirt from his collection of gear as he did so, but didn't notice. In no time flat he was kicking himself towards the Flatiron building like a bat out of hell, on wheels. I made a quick calculation that told me there would be no way to grab the shirt, and catch up to him on foot, but that didn't stop the man beside me from shouting loudly, the way only New Yorkers can, "HEY!!" and running into traffic to rescue the lost item of Prada. He stood just next to the moving cars, watching the skater disappear, when a white van pulled up next to him, breaks squealing perhaps on the verge of failure. An African man, perhaps picking up or supplying the odd African shopping district on Broadway, was at the wheel and in a quick word, told the man in the street he'd catch the skater. The man handed him the shirt, pounded on the roof of the van, and the African man accelerated in a mad attempt to catch a well-to-do skateboarding model who had been dripping designer clothes during his journey downtown. The balding man watched, pleased, as the van too disappeared down the road.
I'd like to say he caught up with him, I'd like to say he simply took the shirt home. But I'll never know. Either way it was enjoyable to watch three such disparate citizens path's cross in the middle of the street.