Today I saw a black plastic bag hovering high over the Atlantic and Clinton intersection. Pigeons flew circles around it. It was strange enough that I reached for my camera. Only afterward did I note the parallel to American Beauty.
I was looking out from my new observation post:
You are looking north into Clinton St. I am unpacking and making a mess of the apartment. I am also loving my new place. It is many things but not vertically challenged.
In the kitchen you can see a small window, which is in fact very tall and stretches far above the false ceiling. For days I wondered why the traffic on Atlantic Avenue sounded so close. It was as if I were in an urban adaptation of that funny Tempur-Pedic commercial in which a couple has their bed in a meadow and is totally about to get it on, except I am not about to get it on anytime soon and I am on the sidewalk at Atlantic and Clinton, where plastic bags hover overhead and Trader Joe's tractor trailors gun their gigantic diesels underneath to supply Brooklynites with frozen chana masala and white-bean hummus.
It turns out that the top of the kitchen window is stuck open about six inches. There is a sheet of wallboard separating my pillow from this opening. I am going to get this remedied somehow.
I have been missing from the blog for a while. I've been otherwise occupied. I was packing and moving and now unpacking. I was gonna put up something I had read about life and death, but the thing was pretty contrived. No one wants to read that kind of thing now, because we are in the last weeks of summer and we'd rather go outside and eat soft serve and try to catch a tan before we are again compelled to wear more clothing.
Even then, we are occasionally reminded of death. Last weekend, at the beach, this police rescue helicopter hovered, all plastic-bag-like, right over our stretch of the beach for quite some time, scanning for something in the breaking surf.
There was a clueless man playing in the waves who either could not care less or did not know that was that there was a rescue helicopter twenty feet above his head. To the right of the photo, two women sunbathed without their tops. Later a pair of beach patrol trucks came roaring across with sirens blazing and nearly ran over their legs.
Eventually the commotion died down. The chopper flew away. A man walked by in an orange swimsuit that needed more fabric. A hippie dude with dirty dreads and a big beard ran naked into the waves and frolicked. We were born naked; one day, we shall pass away naked. It was six thirty, it was time to go.
Posts
