Groundhog Day....

Its like I keep waking up in the middle of a bad dream.  Every time I turn around, I find myself back in NYC.  For a guy who is as sick and tired of the city as I am, or maybe we've just outgrown each other, I don't seem to be able to stay away.  Some unfinished business, maybe, or another "angry fix" at Yonah Schimmel, who knows.  A good con man always has a hook to draw you back into the game, even though you've heard that line a thousand times before.  Or maybe, just maybe, it was it was the secret pleasure of hearing myself say to Jackie, ok, so take Mercer to Delancey, left on Delancey to the Williamsburg Bridge, then take the BQE to the LIE, et al, who knows???

Left the city about 1:30 which seemed like a reasonable time, and traffic across the Williamsburg Bridge was good, but it's always the BQE that trips you up, and for no reason we could discern other than "normally heavy volume" we spent about 35 minutes traveling less than 2 miles on the BQE from the bridge to the LIE, most of the time behind Vito's Catering truck commenting on all the bland new overpriced hi rise construction going on in this formerly desolate and deteriorating section of Brooklyn/Queens.

 

And once we hit the LIE, it wasn't much better.  Stop and go all the way to the Nassau County line, where traffic appeared to clear up for a while, then stop and go all over again, slow all the way to Suffolk, and it wasn't even rush hour.  The LIE has a million ways to break your spirit and make you glad you don't live on the island any more.  On the way, we pass LeFrak City, a once mediocre, now horrible  dehumanizing low rise apartment complex in mid Queens still sports the optimistically welcoming banner it has hung for as long as I can remember, "If you lived here you would be home now".  If you lived there, you would only have to delay your impending suicide,  probably by hanging, by 45 minutes or so, depending on traffic.    

Blessed are the words scrawled across the walls of our city...

Maybe it is the resurgence of the outdoor urban art scene that has been drawing me back lately, as you might have surmised from some of my recent NYC blogs.  Thanks to Banksy, I'm sure, the walls of New York have become interesting again.  There appears to be a certain degree of sophistication that has elevated things from an angry cry for help or the drug addled ravings of those lost in a town in which it is easy to drown.

Even the scrawls seem softer and gentler...

Guess I'll be back for more...

                                                                      Pablo

Gamecock Cottage, Stony Brook, NY

This is a photograph I have been wanting to take for years, but seasons and circumstances have always conspired against me.  But here we are, once again at Stony Brook Harbor, mid summer, overlooking the Long Island Sound, which feeds into the harbor, and this time, time and tides were all working in my favor.

At 1:10 pm, 7/13/16, low tide drained the inlet that separates Shipman's Point from the mainland, and at a depth of no more than two feet, I was able to wade from the shore to the point, welcomed by an army of Fiddler Crabs who scattered at the sound of my arrival.  Now at long last, having the dune to myself I had clear direct access to the Gamecock Cottage.   Standing alone, it is the last of it's breed of small nautical structures that used to line the shores and marsh islands, used by the bay men who plied their nautical trades, supplying the world with fish, clams, oysters, and lobsters.  They are long gone, as is their way of life.  Why and how this one structure survived is a mystery, but survive it did, and at long last, here it is!!!!  I know you've been waiting with bated breath.

Pablo