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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink