Hanging out with Ron 12/06/23 (catching up #18)

If I posted this two weeks ago it would've been timely. Now nearly three weeks after I took the photos, I'm still catching up. More on them later.

I recently took to regularly checking and emptying my spam folders - yes, that's plural because I use a few email addresses for different things, photography, writing, personal and more. It occurs to me there are whole warehouses full of the the packages waiting for my approval, my signature, for me to correct the address or whatever else these undelivered/undeliverable packages require. They are being held up by quite a variety of freight forwarders, not one of who has a return email address that looks at all like the official domain of the supposed outfit holding up the package.

And yet, I think about the warehouse full of the things I never ordered, the things nobody ever sent me, filled to the brim with the unfulfilled dreams and wishes of people and organizations that want to steal from me, whether it's money, property or my hopefully still good name. On this day of gift giving among many people around me, a day during which I will go to the movies, I think of them and wish them nothing. I could wish them ill but nothing is better because that's all they will ever get from me.

It's almost a shame they aren't paying for the warehouse to store those illusory packages. Then I could wish them more returns.

Anyway, the photos.

I like to spend a few hours hanging with my friend Ron Kolm. Ron's a writer of fiction and poetry, an editor and an all but retired bookseller. He'd retire but the last store he worked for full-time gets him to be man the book table at readings where some recently published writer is regaling a paying audience with either words from their newest book or fielding questions from the eager audience.

Ron is a very good writer and an even better reader of his own works. I've been photographing him for well over a decade so if you search back through this blog you'll find him in more than a handful of entries. He also one of the nicest people I know. He's a good listener and a good storyteller. If he has a flaw, he can be overly self-deprecating.

Since we've become friends we've had an evolving group of locations where we meet a couple of times a month for conversation, a beer or cup of coffee. It was former The Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A in the East Village. For a few years, when the weather was good, we'd meet at Flatiron Plaza on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Recently, it's been Urban Space on Vanderbilt Ave. near Grand Central. We became friendly with the bartenders at the midtown outpost of The Redhook Lobster Pound, now sadly replaced. That friendliness made the place feel more like a local hangout than the large, often noisy food court it is.

It seems that whenever we meet there we draw some of the people around us into a wide ranging conversation. This last time there were a pair of German women friends in their twenties visiting the city who seemed thrilled that I was taking their photo, and two women from Connecticut on an outing with some of the kids from a youth group they helped with. One of these, a former book editor worked with someone I was friends with many years ago. Sheesh. Encounters like that make me feel old.

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Early winter blahs? Feeling uninspired

Break-time's over, time to get back to work.

Yet I am feeling notably uninspired and thus the more than ten days gap since my last post. I know, I've gone far more than eleven days between posts, and besides being uninspired I've been dealing with things around the house. My house is more than 210 years old and sometimes problems in and around it build up and come to a head all at once. For instance, the intensity of rain storms has gone way up, a result of global climate change, and troll me if you think I'm pushing this one, almost definitely caused by humans. I'll take some of the blame, I'm a human, I drive a car, I have an oil fired furnace, sometimes I squander electricity and so on, but what I do doesn't compare to what the petrochemical industry contributes, the construction industry, automotive, oil drilling, refining and more. You add up all of what humans contribute and, as Rick said to Ilsa in "Casablanca," "it doesn't amount to a hill of beans," compared to industry and agriculture. Well, those rains cause me to have more and worse floods than in most of the previous 22 years in  this house, barring Sandy and a couple of tropical storms, and their intensity was probably enhanced by climate change, too. So I needed to put in a new boiler and had it installed a foot+ higher on bricks. I dealt with an issue where the sump pump was gushing water into the road. Now it spills out and spreads out more than 10 feet from my property line. 

And so on.

These things take a lot of time, use a lot of personal energy and in their own way, sap the imagination because it- the imagination- is too busy dealing with the mundane.

In honor of this, and in honor of the first full day of winter, I post notably uninspiring pictures shot at the Kensico Dam Plaza in Valhalla, NY on a day late in October, an uninspiring, grey misty day. The county was beginning to set up it's Holiday lights drive-through show, I was taking a short walk.

So join me in the shortest days and longest nights of December for a trip back in time to a grey day in October when the sun set later, much later since the clocks were still set to daylight savings time, if you could see it, and the nights weren't nearly as long.

You might ask why I post a picture of one of the cats I live with after the autumnal shots. Well, we all know cats rule the universe, or ought to and they are also so darn cute. I mean, she know what matters, curled up on the comforter in the afternoon sun.

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Too Many Choices - coffee

 Vacation's over. Back to the grind, in this case either whole bean or one of too many different grinds. Grrr.

Asked to pick up a bag of coffee when I went to the supermarket, I think I knew what was requested but arriving at the aisle where the coffee was displayed I spent more time than I wanted to spend scanning the shelves for a specific brand in a specific color package but I forgot that I was supposed to look for whole bean of a specific roast as well. I took these photos to show that if I got it wrong it was because it was impossible for me to get it right.

Of course I picked the wrong type - ground but not ground fine enough when I was asked for whole bean but ground would do if it was the proper grind, which I of course I got wrong. At least I got the brand right.

It turns out that the specific brand/type wasn't there, to wit a red package of Lavazza whole bean medium roast. HELP!

I know there are people who think more choice is always better but watch people board an empty train and decide where to sit. Some will walk up the car and back, looking at the seats in empty rows unable to make a fast decision. The same people stepping onto a half-full car will pick a seat and get out their laptop or their book or phone and settle in, the limited choice making it easier to choose. 

The same happens in the coffee aisle. But it doesn't mean I'll choose right.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is to write down exactly what you are supposed to get, along with suitable substitutions if the exact item isn't available, and then just grab something because you're going to get it wrong anyway.

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Radomer Yom Hashoah Gathering April 24, 2023 (Catching up #17)

Thanksgiving Day yesterday, Native American Heritage Day today and after enjoying a Thanksgiving meal with family and friends I'm thinking about the ongoing crisis for Jews everywhere and the conflict in Israel, Gaza and Palestine. And yes, the crisis for Jews everywhere weighs on me. As anyone paying attention to what I've written and posted over the years, I am the child of survivors of the Holocaust, the grandchild and nephew of many family members who I never knew because they were murdered in the Holocaust, and I emphasize murdered because that was what happened to them, as well as a member of a community of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as well as the few who survived that are still with us more than 78 years after the end of WWII. 

This is not a history of antisemitism, it is some of my thoughts on where we are now and where we've been. This is my blog, my space to say something, my bully pulpit. 

Antisemitism is a recurring human disease that refuses to die away and probably will not even were there no Jews for the antisemites to revile. In Poland in the 1960s and 1970s after all but a very small handful of elderly Jews were forced out by the Communist, Soviet supported government, they still held antisemitic campaigns, reviling the Jews who weren't there for their country's economic ills. I guess after the uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 they were not so stupid as to blame the Soviet Union and the Communist system for their problems.

In the Middle East, in Syria, Iran and Iraq where substantial Jewish communities existed for two millennia and more, after the establishment of the State of Israel there were pogroms and every Jew living there was forced into exile. To show I'm not unbalanced, I recognize that Palestinians and their allies won't let us forget that many of them left their homes during and after the Arab League's war to crush the new state, some forced out, most leaving voluntarily but those same Palestinians and their allies don't want us to remember what happened to the Jews and their communities in their states.

It's curious that Jew hatred occurs at all levels of society. The ruling groups use it to motivate people in lower social levels, the hoi polloi act out of sense of resentment, that these people are pushing them down, taking something from them, despite this being demonstrably false. The blood libel laid on the Jews has  deep historical sources and though obviously false to anyone who knows anything about the Jewish revulsion to consuming anything with blood, has lasted in one form or another for more than a millennium. The counterfeit "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a product of the Russian Tsarist secret police continues to find currency in contemporary antisemitism. The contradictory belief that there is a conspiracy of both global capitalists controlled by Jewish bankers and Jewish communists and socialists working to overthrow capitalism would be laughable if it wasn't taken seriously by antisemites who refuse to recognize the obvious dissonance in this belief.

Recognizing the usefulness of antisemitism in motivating resentment and action against Jews by people who don't understand or see where there own lower economic status comes from is a stimulus to both the right and the left to use Jews as convenient scapegoats. Against these deeply held beliefs that are comforting to the holder of these beliefs, finding an outsider to blame for the systemic biases that hold them in place doesn't help us resolve the problem of antisemitism. What we can do is stay alert and take defensive actions against antisemitism as well as irrational bias against other peoples.

Keep in mind, it is Jews and Israel being attacked for the crisis in the Middle East but why aren't these attackers also standing up against genocide in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen and China among others?

Just my opinion.

Anyway, in catching up here's a bunch of photos I took in April, exactly six months ago at the Chabad Center of Northeast Queens where the Radomer Mutual Culture Center gathered for our annual Holocaust memorial service and luncheon. It is a good thing that more than 70 years after the survivors of one of the fiercest antisemitic, institutionalized violence against Jews founded the society as a way to show we are stronger than those who would destroy us and are still standing and ready to fight.

Forgive me for posting this many pictures.

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Boring Milkweed Pictures - sort of still (catching up #16)

 It's fall, almost Thanksgiving and the afternoon light, when the sun's out and half-way between noon and sunset is beautiful. I might say, if I was in the mood for cliché, breathtaking. Except I'm not out of breath except for pushing through the raspberry canes to get a decent shot of the milkweed seeds and coma (floss). We've got several plants at the edge of our property and just beyond that still have a couple of pods with seeds and coma still attached. In case you don't know, they are part of the life cycle of the eastern North American Monarch Butterfly - they lay their eggs on it and their caterpillars eat the leaves. 

The milkweed in fall is stark - most of the leaves are gone, the seed pods with their seeds emerged surrounded by their coma stand out, a miniature tableau of graceful nature, waiting for a strong wind to lift the seeds and it's little glider off to colonize another spot in the open woods and fields around where I live.

Speaking of the woods and fields, there are a couple of photos of them in the autumn light.

I think during the shortest days of winter I'll look at these and remember how much I like the autumn in New York.

I'm not a very good nature photographer but once in a while, I find a little bit of inspiration in something like this. I also like the look of the woods around the house at this time of year - the leaves mostly off the trees, the sun casting a glow on last of them in the understory. So I shoot a few photos and present them to you. If you are bored by them, well, so it goes.

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