i.e., a blog
talk to me
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On MetroNorth
Passing the shambling midday souls as they traverse 125th, crossing the trellised steel of a moveable bridge that stretches leisurely across the body of water separating manhattan from the Bronx, passing parked cars and ancient stone embankments that wrap around the iron tracks as they stretch north into the suburbs and beyond them the country, passing structures suspended on concrete-clad steel beams, passing yards of junked cars and brick walls wreathed ornamentally in barbed tape, past pale green street signs counting ever larger street numbers, passing chainlinked fences and lumber yards and graffitoed stone, past other trains and pools of yesterday’s rain, past informatic cables and small, conjoined porches, past ‘H. Maintenance,’ through dark and orange tunnels, and past Community Health Care, past uprooted trees and desperate pleas intimating ‘FOR SALE BY OWNER’ or ‘FOR RENT’ and names marred beyond recognition or legibility by their elaborate chromatic rendering in paint, past asphalt covered lots devoid of weeds, past the Doppler warped whistle of an earlier return trip, past boggy swamp-like roadside pools and lines of inert autos with red-eyed rear-facing breaklights lit, past a dirtied white wicker chair that has been tossed down a hill and which sits, upturned, caked in dirt, past a Penske truck, two unmarked white panel vans and a brown one bearing the insignia of UPS, past yellow brick and deep brown stone, past tall buildings, inhabitants unknown, past stations for the transformation of electricity from one intensity to another, past little backyards and eventually bigger ones, past poison ivy vines and state lines, past concrete platforms with white and red signs, past passé New Rochelle to evergreen Greenwich as I eavesdrop on a conversation about ‘so where do you live in Fairfield?’ and ‘we split our time in Colorado – 25 below and when the snow melts it’s not like here where the ground is mushy,’ slowing now, and the train slopes to the left - on the right is a pile of dirty snow that mixes in an optic trick with smudged concrete below and the highway passes overhead revealing ‘AFFORDABLE BATING CAGES’ on the right and later the relatively empty interstate, resdescended, to the right,
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garage
“What we did in our headquarters all through Afghanistan and Iraq was we built everything out of plywood and we did it because you could build everything very very quickly and you could do it very inexpensively and you could rip it apart and redo it so that your function of your organization was shaped by the form and you could change it as often as you needed to. It also has a certain focused spartan mindset to it. if you are working on plywood you remember you’re here for a function and you’re not here to enjoy the particular types of furniture that you have.
Over time I got a little bit more zen like with plywood because i started to understand that if you look at plywood it’s really pieces of very mid-grade lumber shaved very thin and then they are glued together: when they’re alone you can take them and break them with your hand. when you glue them together they have extraordinary strength and i think that’s like organizations. i think we take ordinary people, and i think we pull them together into teams and then if leaders are the glue then i think we’ve created the equivalent of plywood and we’ve created something much stronger than individuals and so I become a great believer.”
General McChrystal’s general take on things
that last line in particular, “…and so I become a great believer.” has always weirded me out a little.
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Fluorescent tubes, New Haven, CT 2011
38 × 50 5/8 in.
Matthew Booth -
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freak citrus
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neighbors’ ductwork
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home in new haven
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mmmmmmmm…delicious late night shoe snack
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home
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courthouse detail
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new haven
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