Matthew Gallaway

The Saturnine Project: Tour Diaries 1995

October 4, 1995/Cleveland: We left New York in the morning and nothing happened all day. We found the Euclid Tavern and called Angela, who told us that we were the 'most added' band on the CMJ charts last week. We played with Ether Net, which featured Rob C___, the music editor at AP Magazine. Almost no one was there, though: the Indians were in the playoffs for the first time in about fifty years. Fortunately, we sold $81 worth of merch to about five people, and one kid bought everything. We also met two local college radio station DJs who are opening a record store -- they took 10 singles on consignment and I think we may go back to do an 'in-store.' We didn't get paid anything but the promoter said he would have us back. Angela thought it was funny when I told her we discussed the best type of cookie when she told me that Steve Nutter would be on the guest list in West Virginia and I said 'Steve Nutter Butter.'

October 5, 1995/Morgantown. Morgantown was like going to a strange country. The floors of the club were filled with water and the bar was run/inhabited by several guys who all had long blond/reddish hair and baseball hats. The soundman was named Fuzzy. They were all there in the bar when we arrived and they were all there when we left eight hours later. The sound was really good though: some kid named Jeff with a Jawbox t-shirt told us that it was the original sound system from AC/DC's first American tour. The club was a real 'rock' club: you had to push the monitor to the side in order to get on the stage. We didn't play until 1:30am because the first band played forever. Since it was mid-terms, there was not much of a crowd, and there were only about 10 people watching the whole time. A reporter from the local paper came though and was moved to tears and then bought everything we had.

10/8/95/Chicago: Arrived at the Empty Bottle and found out that the Dirty Three were playing at Lounge Axe and PJ Harvey was playing at some huge place. We also found out that Edsel was making a surprise 'guest appearance' on our bill, although we couldn't really figure out why. When we came back from dinner, we ran into the singer from Shallow, and she was somewhat distraught that it was 10:50 and none of the bands had started: actually it was only 8:50 and she had set her watch forward one hour instead of back. I guess that's what happens when you've been touring since July. The drummer told me that they've been playing for about three people every night. Edsel, who just signed to Relativity, acted like a bunch of rock stars. They went on stage and said: 'We've selected eight songs for you tonight' and then 'Thanks to the other bands for letting us play,' as if we had a choice. The guitar player played with his guitar on the microphone stand and the bass player played knock-kneed, as if it would make him look more 'rockin.' Our set was OK except for this drunk guy staggering around from most of the time right in front of the stage. I got him to go away for a while by giving him one of my drink tickets but he came back after a few songs. Overall, the show felt kind of barren after the last one. We stayed with this guy Chris, which was OK except he taped a boxing match that we had to watch the next morning. Chicago is very spread out and there are a lot of weary-looking people on the streets.

October 8/Dayton: Back at the Canal Street Tavern, which is like a big wooden ship, though tonight it felt like we were in the desert. The club is located in the flattest, most deserted part of town, and it just became obvious that not so many people would come, even though we were written up in the press and the other bands were all good. It was by far the best slate of bands we've played with this stretch of shows. Xebec had all of these silent, mopey kids in the early 20s, and one girl who never said anything and looked miserable. They dressed homeboy style, like out of 'Kids,' except they were from Toledo. Mike V__ of Honeyburn was a super-nice guy and we stayed at his house. Everyone sat around on two couches and watched Jennifer call Gerald in Cincinnati. Mike V told us that there are a pair of Siamese twins in Dayton connected (facing each other) at the waist and that a town nearby is filled with albinos.

October 12/Milwaukee: Right now we're riding toward Chicago and Jennifer is taking pictures of Gary, Indiana. Everything looks pretty good today because the sky is blue and the weather is warm -- so warm, in fact, that I had a fight with Jennifer about rolling down her window. When we bought the van, we decided not to get air conditioning, mostly because Jim and Jennifer said how much they wanted the wind on their faces, but today Jennifer said 'my throat hurts too much from the wind.' Jim and Jennifer had a fight about whether the band Vehicle Flips, who we saw in Pittsburgh on Tuesday night, was pretentious or not. Jim enraged Jennifer by comparing them to Matt Keating. Jim likes to teach people lessons. In Pennsylvania, I said that Northern Ohio was as flat as Nebraska. About two miles into Ohio, Jim said, 'Is this Ohio?' I said yes and he said, 'doesn't look too flat.' Then Jennifer opened her gum at the wrong end, so Jim said, 'Jennifer, which way are the arrows pointing on this?' Fortunately I missed most of the Matt Keating argument because I was playing about fifty games of backgammon with Mike. Anyway, we found the club after a little while in Milwaukee and walked in to find the headliner -- The Mean Reds -- soundchecking. They were a prime example of the death of grunge in front of our very eyes. Eddy Vedder vocals, open shirts, long hair, the peace sign. They were on tour and had a trailer hooked up to their van. Once again, from the very start, it became obvious that nobody was going to come see us. After sound check, we went out to dinner and I said I would be happy if even one person came; when we got back, there was actually one person there waiting for the show to start, but it turned out to be the cocktail waitress. Still, once we played there were probably 10-15 people watching, and 3 guys did come to see us and bought about $40 worth of merch. They also said they would come to Chicago the next time we play there. After we were done and packing the van, Jennifer came running out and told us that she had walked into a fight in the bar. As she was telling us this, Zip the sound guy ran over to the front door right as the guys in the fight were running out, and one of them punched him in the head and took his Alan Parsons Project hat. He was OK after a few minutes. Apparently someone else had a bottle broken over his head, and another guy had his jaw broken. When I walked into the bar, one of our three friends had passed out from the sight of blood and was lying on the floor, with a huge woman with big blonde hair leaning over him. There was almost another fight between the blonde woman and our two other friends because she was insisting that they take him to a hospital, and they all (including the guy who had passed out) said he was OK, so that a hospital was unnecessary. The fight apparently started because some white guys said something racist about these black guys who were sitting at the bar, or something like that. We made $9 at the door. After the show we drove to (Mike D and my law school classmate's) Sarah H___'s parents' guest house, located next to fifty acres of woods and fields. The 'cabin' was incredibly lavish, furnished with antiques and wooden floors and beams, along with every modern appliance, including a refrigerator stocked with food. The house had a very 'lived-in' feel, however, probably because Sarah's sister and baby were living there. For that reason and because I suspected that the H's were not expecting us to stay more than a night, I didn't want to stay any longer, even though Jennifer and Mike were in awe of the place and wanted to stay at least through Friday night, if not the whole weekend. So we had a fairly heated discussion about that, which was rather upsetting, and I didn't sleep a whole lot. When I got up in the morning, I was greeted by Mr. H, who was walking his four dogs. He was dressed in a tie and wearing spectacles, and I went on a walk with him around the grounds. Jim, who greeted him bare-chested with a can of Coke in his hand, also came along. It was apparent that Mr. H didn't really understand what the hell we were doing with our lives, having just graduated from NYU Law, but he was very polite, very Yale. He told us about the cabin, which had been transported from Northern Wisconsin, and the railroad bridge, which he had reconstructed as a footbridge across the stream that ran through the property. When he asked me how long we were staying, I told him we had to be in St. Louis by tomorrow, so we hadn't decided. He said we had better leave by today, though, which I was relieved to hear, because like I said, I felt uncomfortable being there. So we ended up leaving around noon, after I ironed things out for the most part with Mike and Jennifer. Now we're driving through Illinois and the sun is setting behind a cloud of dust from a corn harvester.

[Ed. note: band photos from a recording sesh in Philadelphia in the spring of 1994 or 1995 at Studio Red.]

Time Fades Away: Sunset to Sunset

Last night was another exceedingly beautiful sunset over the rooftops of Washington Heights. As often happens, I did not hesitate to take ___ pictures, and felt grateful for the advent of digital photography.

I wondered where this boat was headed and for a second the answer didn't matter: I wanted to be on it.

I tried to distract myself from the conga players who live directly below us by imagining them being incinerated by the molten heat of the setting sun.

Eventually I went to sleep and woke up at dawn, where the George Washington Bridge was lit by the rising sun.

Dante and Zephyr were happy to go back to sleep.

After we all got up for real, we went for a walk along Broadway, where the Christmas trees were now up and ready to be sold. I hoped that all of them would find a home -- however brief it may last -- because I hate to think of what happens to the ones who are not sold. (This of course a projection of my own fear about wasting my life.)

It was a bright day, giving everything a surreal, plastic sheen.

It occurred to me that if trees were sentient beings, to have a plastic bag stuck in their branches would probably drive them insane, much like a piece of food caught in your teeth when you don't have a piece of floss at hand.

I felt fatigued by the constant displays of nationalism, which has been called the 'opiate of the masses.'  Here is a flag from the _____ Corporation.

Here's a flag from another company that is a popular brand in Washington Heights.

We arrived at the garden and instituted 'Phase Four' of our fall cleanup. (Phases One and Two being birch leaves and Phase Three beech leaves.)

Even after sweeping, there were a maddening number of maple seeds. One thing I've learned about gardening, however, is that perfection is rarely worth pursuing.

The (Acer palmatum) 'shish' was the last tree to turn in the garden, though its lovely red and orange leaves were worth the wait.

My heart broke a little when -- in the process of dumping some leaves into the empty lot next door -- I spotted a pair of stray cats. For some reason the street is filled with them this year.

This one looks almost identical to Elektra, of course, whom we adopted last spring.

Back at the apartment, the sun was beginning to set.

Elektra expressed dismay that one of her siblings might be wandering the streets of Washington Heights, as she had done a few months earlier.

But with nothing to be done for it, she went back to sleep. As with plants, there's only so much we can do for the stray cats in the world.

Perfection, it seems, is reserved for the inanimate objects of the world, particularly when such things are bathed in the amber tones of the setting sun.

Or perhaps those objects, such as the sun and the sky and the river, which however fleeting their existences may be in the infinite time-line of the universe, are relatively immortal in comparison to our our own wavering, flickering lives.

In the Weeds: In Search of Lost Roses

Click through for my latest 'In the Weeds' @ THE AWL, a short tribute to M. Proust. Bonus 'outtake' shots below!

Empty planters.

Beautiful dawn redwood.

Collage of unsold plants.

Creepy Pan.

Dante: I don't care about your stupid sunset.

Time Fades Away: Thanksgiving 2009

It was a quiet Thanksgiving; Stephen is in the middle of a rehearsal schedule and I am in the middle of waiting to hear from my editor -- both of which are very stressful processes -- so we decided to completely dispense with the usual Thanksgiving preparations and treat the day like a Sunday that fortuitously arrived in the middle of the week. The weather was unusually warm, however, and so we went for a walk in the early afternoon (i.e., as the sun was beginning to set). We went to the garden, where one of the Japanese Maples -- an acer palmatum 'Shishigashira' (which we affectionately call the 'shish') -- was finally turning many different shades of red and orange.

A few remaining leaves from the Eskimo Sunset (one of the most variegated trees in the world, as regular readers of this blog will perhaps remember) had fallen on the brick path.

Outside on Broadway, the flower stand was already preparing for the Christmas rush.

On Broadway, the frames had been erected from which they will sell the Christmas trees. Walking past this, I felt a certain excitement for the month of December, along with some relief that I basically no longer celebrate the holiday of Christmas, from either consumer or religious vantage points (to the extent that there is even a difference).

Walking down 158th Street, I paused to admire the iron-work on the front entrance of one of the neighborhood's most beautiful (and sadly neglected) 'grandes dammes.'

Approaching the river, Stephen and I both felt relieved not to be stuck in the heavy traffic heading north.

Traveling on holidays seems like a lot of work in the modern era!

We arrived at the river bank, which was relatively empty, but bathed in a beautiful amber light.

A pair of men were sparring with each other -- they had on boxing gloves -- and their dog barked at us. I felt happy to have relinquished the more athletic nature of my past, and perhaps even the dog-owning portion of my past, although I steadfastly refuse to take a side in the eternal cats-versus-dogs debate that is one of the underpinnings of internet culture in the new millennium.

Like much of Washington Heights, the esplanade down by the river is in ruins, which may or may not add to the beauty of the site.

On the river, a mallard duck expressed relief not to have been born a turkey.

The riverbank is lined with beautiful pieces of Manhattan schist, weathered branches and -- like all waterways around the world -- lots of plastic debris.

A dog ran by with its owner, and exuded the happiness of a dog running free on a warm day.

We walked up to the George Washington Bridge, which like so many monuments of the 20th century, is almost overwhelming in its magnificence; its existence seems to transcend questions of how or why it appeared, and it is impossible not to feel very small and insignificant -- but not necessarily in a bad way -- in its shadow.

We walked up the hill and admired the silhouette of the bridge against the low sun. As often happens on days like this, I wished that I lived in northern Europe or somewhere similar, where the sun is always hitting the earth at a more indirect angle, illuminating everything with such a magical light.

On the way back, we took a short detour around the 'Little Red Lighthouse,' which stands somewhat incongruously at the base of the GWB.

We rested for a few minutes on the park benches in front of the tennis courts, where I was hypnotized by the patterns of the decaying wood and the green paint.

I felt as if I were looking at a lost rune from an ancient civilization. Behind us, the moon had already begun to rise.

To the south, the city arose languorously through the autumn mist.

On our walk home, we observed a trombone player, a sight that -- like the buildings in the distance -- seemed to confirm the improbable truth that we were in fact on the island of Manhattan.

Walking back up 158th Street, I passed 'Safety City,' which has always struck me as a likely cesspool of urban graft and political palm-greasing. If I were an investigative reporter, I'd look into it, because it seems like such a ridiculous way to spend money when there are so many other deserving projects in the neighborhood. But in contrast to when I first moved here, I made a note of it and moved on; resignation is an element of living in a neighborhood that is (and has been, for decades) falling apart in more ways than anyone can comprehend.

Instead I focused on the moon as it continued to rise over the same building -- a true apartment palace -- whose front door I had photographed a few hours earlier, at the beginning of our walk.

Back in the apartment, we observed the last of the sunlight against the bridge, which from a distance seems somehow more human, if no less magnificent.

The George Washington Bridge Project: Thanksgiving Edition

'Happy Thanksgiving, everyone -- hope you have/had a good one!'

--The George Washington Bridge, Thanksgiving Day, 2k9

Time Fades Away: The Saturnine Tour Diaries

Sept. 29 (1995)/Portland: The trip started off on a bad note because Mike tested his amp, which he had just had re-tubed and modified, and it didn't work. It was particularly annoying because the old tubes in the amp are no longer manufactured, so if one needed to be replaced, it would have been a problem. But we got going and after dropping off the now-broken amp in Queens, we headed north. Jennifer's brother Jeff came with us because we're playing with Guppy Boy at Bowdoin on Saturday. Portland seems like a small, industrial city. Jeff was excited to see the water, and he said that he was going to move to Portland soon. Actually, the city itself was fairly deserted by the time we got there. Jeff called it the 'Haunted City,' although the big joke was that every building and street he and Mike saw reminded them of Burlington. We ate at some crappy Vietnamese place and then played the show after soundcheck. There were a fair number of people there, but everyone stood at the back. One or two people bought records. The best was this high-school kid named Casey who had seen us play with Helium a few months earlier. The only reason he got in was that he was selling merch for Car, the band we played with. Car was ok, except they played forever and the singer was overly dramatic. I thought he was trying to be John Fogarty, although Jeff thought he was trying to be Paul Rogers. We stayed at Car's house, which was OK except it smelled like a dog due to the presence of an old dog named Maggie and a basset hound named Bucky. The whole place was covered with hair. Jeff really took to the dogs, however, and he slept with the old one the entire night after building a special 'Maggie extension' with the couch cushions on the floor. Jennifer tried to get the couch and its cushions and she complained a lot about the smell and dog hair. The next day we walked around Portland with Casey.

September 30/Bowdoin: Jim's night was made when he pulled up to the library to ask directions from a student (Asian-American woman) who upon hearing what band he was in said: 'I love you guys!' We played in the new student union and Guppy Boy played without their singer, so I played drums on three of the songs while Mike B played bass. They were extremely happy because they ended up getting paid $200. The student who set up the show was named Gabriel (Gab) and was was a small guy, sort of reminded everyone of a young Woody Allen. He was a music director at the radio station, which as he described it, sounded like a mistreated stepchild of the college. He told a story about how someone had calculated that it cost every student at Bowdoin $9/semester to pay for the station, and how this other guy in one of Gab's classes kept demanding $9 from Gab. Apparently most of the people who listen to the station are located in the town of Brunswick and the nearby military station. Last year, they barely had enough people to do radio shows, so Gab said they ended up giving shows to a bunch of local punks from the town. He tried to explain to them that they shouldn't play any songs with prominently featured swear words, but then he saw their song list and they were playing all these Dead Kennedy songs with the word 'fuck' in the titles. This other kid did a show that developed a cult following on the nearby military base where he would have competitions between two random people in which listeners would vote for the winner, e.g., he had Fidel Castro versus Henry Rollins and Fidel won in a landslide. The other aspect of Gab's life at the radio station revolved around getting funding for bands from the Student Union Committee (SUC, pronounced 'suck'), which he said is run by a bunch of sorority girls. Every time he wants to get a band to play, he has to place it up for vote before the SUC Committee after he makes a speech in favor of the band. Last year when he got Luna to play at Bowdoin, he made the mistake of describing their music as 'celestial,' so now every time he proposes a band, someone on the committee asks if the band's music is 'celestial.' Apparently, Gab's predecessor was physically big and intimidating, so everyone on SUC was too afraid of him to say no, so Bowdoin had a series of great bands in the space of a month: Helium, Archers of Loaf, etc.

Time Fades Away: The Saturnine Tour Diaries

September 2, 1995 (Richmond, VA): Driving to Richmond, we were playing a game of tongue twisters based on our friend Shell Sheddy. It went like this: 'I know this guy, his sister has a friend whose mother's boss ran into this other guy -- he happens to know the cousin of the brother of this guy who plays guitar in a band with the sister of the drummer of this other guy...anyway, he said she said she said he said he said she said Shell Sheddy.' Then we stopped for gas somewhere  in Virginia outside of DC and we pulled into a Shell Station owned by Shashi Sharmin so the game evolved into: '...he said she said he said Shell Station Shashi Sharmin.' When we got to Richmond, the first thing we saw was a guy wearing a t-shirt that said 'FUCK ME SUCK ME.' We met the promoter who told us that we were going to have to flip a coin with Ditch Croaker for the last two slots on the bill: first or fourth. After protesting, we got another band into the fray but we lost every coin-flip and still played first. The bands who played were us, Ditch Croaker, Red Dye Number 3, Chisel and the Seymours.

September 13, 1995 (Nick's/Philadelphia): This was the first night of our 'tour' with Fuzzy/Tuscadero. I call it a 'tour' because it's only four days and two of the shows are in New York. Nevertheless, we are grateful to Tuscadero for bringing us along, and their booking agent, Steve K___, who works at the corporate ICM. Nick's is the new good place to play in Philadelphia, because Brian D___  moved down the street from the Khyber Pass, but barely anyone showed up. My brother Michael came, though, which was fun: he thought we needed work on our endings, and I agreed. We started to break the ice with the other bands. The bass players for both bands are nice guys, and Mike is going to use Winston's 'rig' for the rest of the shows. All the bands got paid $40. Mike renamed Philadelphia from the 'City of Brotherly Love' to the 'City of Crap.'

September 14, 1995 (Maxwell's/Hoboken). This show was much better than Philadelphia. We met these college kids named Jeremy/Jeremy/Ragiv who immediately made the atmosphere seem better than the previous night. For one thing, they would applaud either of the Tuscadero girls when they walked by, and then after we had talked to them for a while, they applauded us as we went to see if we were getting a sound check (we didn't). Maxwell's is a nice place to play because they give you a free meal, and a good one -- definitely the best we've had. One of our jokes comes from this time when Angela told me that 'most clubs will feed you' and we later came to realize that 'most' meant 'none.' When we played, some of the kids stood right in front of the stage, which is somehow reassuring, except for this one girl who inexplicably passed out and spilled Jennifer's beer. We sold a lot of stuff, though, including a disc to the bartender, who as a rule are hard to impress. Tuscadero is the best merchandising band we've played with: after the show, there was an onslaught of kids at the merch table, and we convinced Mike to go try to sell some of our stuff. He was back in a few minutes though, saying 'it was too depressing ... the same kids who bought one of our singles were like buying two shirts and two CDs from Tuscadero.' It was still a good night, we probably sold about $60 worth of merch and were paid $100.

September 15 (New York, Mercury Lounge): This may have been our best show to date; there was no doubt financially. I walked back to the room where the bands get paid after the show and Jennifer was shaking with excitement over the fact that we had been paid $627. Apparently the club split the door three ways, and deservedly so because it was our record release and we brought in a lot of people. The sound was also incredible, people were very complimentary. Joanna F___ kept telling me that my voice was 'angelic' which is certainly a nice compliment and kind of funny coming from the sister of Guy.

September 16 (Boston/Middle East): Another great show. By this time, we're getting along really well with the other bands and we've even learned a merch trick or two from Tuscadero, such as a different bag for every shirt size. This was definitely our best Boston show because we sold about $200 in merch. It was amazing to have a few people come up to the table and buy everything. It was also nice when a few kids came up and bought stuff who seemed (at least to me) to have a similar demeanor to myself. It was reaffirming in the sense that I could sort of think, 'well, if I heard this band, maybe I would like them.' We stayed at Winston and Hilken's apartment, which had a lot of cat hair but was full of interesting knick-knacks. We also stopped by Fuzzy's rehearsal space, which was remarkable for it's 'elevator,' really no more than a stationary forklift, by which people accessed the basement space. Of course we had a lot of fun riding it up and down. We gave Dave the drummer a ride back to New York. He used to play in the Lemonheads, and he once played in front of 80,000 people. It sounded like everyone on the tour was a drug addict.

Time Fades Away: Blue Monday

Today I woke up a few minutes early; I had to meet one of our new tenants and give him the keys along with an 'orientation.' Afterward, I went to the subway and there were about a million people waiting for the C-train; for some reason the MTA had skipped the one that usually arrives around 8:20 and didn't send another until 8:35. I decided not to worry too much about the MTA so early in the morning, though, given that there's really nothing to be done about it.

I went to work, where time passed. I took a break and was astounded by this news item about a man who doctors thought was in a coma for 23 years, but who was actually conscious the entire time. I knew that reading about this should have put some perspective on my own 'problems', and perhaps it did, but only for a few minutes.

More time passed and I left work. Arriving at my apartment building, I got on the elevator with a kid -- now a teenager -- who I have seen grow up the past ten years. He told me that I had greatly influenced him one day when he and his friends were sitting out front of the building discussing 'church' at the moment that I happened to walk by; as they sometimes did back then, they said hello to me and specifically asked what I thought about church. I answered honestly, without a second's hesitation: 'Fuck church,' I said, and they all gasped and then laughed, because they were only eight or nine and didn't really expect this kind of answer from one of the 'white fggts' in the building. I remembered this, too, but at my age, it seems like it was only yesterday.

Times Fades Away: Milk on Sunday

Yesterday my sister arrived to spend a week in the city with her new boyfriend and his daughter, who was turning 18. We went out to dinner on the Upper West Side and discussed the movie Milk, which Stephen and I had recently seen for the first time.

Although I found the movie to be entertaining and 'well-done' to the extent that the actors seemed to inhabit their roles, I couldn't decided if the movie was pulling my heartstrings as a work of art, or if it was a reaction to a dismal sense that in many ways, things have not really changed very much in the thirty-or-so years since Milk's assassination.

In some ways, I argued, things have gotten worse: as an example, I pointed to the clip of Jimmy Carter in the movie in which he encouraged the voters of California to vote against Proposition 6, which would have made it illegal for 'proven homosexuals' to teach in the public schools, whereas Obama has been maddeningly silent about recent propositions that are only slightly less offensive.

But Maggie, the 18-year old, insisted that things were changing, and that in a few years they were going to be better.

Perhaps, I agreed, perhaps.

Time Fades Away: November Blue

Yesterday morning -- or it might have been two or three mornings ago, I can no longer remember -- I paused on my way to the subway, momentarily entranced by the amber tones of the morning light against the archway of an apartment building. Resigned to missing the 8:25ish C-train, I decided to take some pictures to amuse myself for a few seconds before immersing myself into the impending tedium of the work day.

As I waited for the light to change on Broadway, I admired the pre-war details of the building across the street. I think there is an argument to be made for limiting the height of structures to 6-10 stories, at least in this neighborhood, because it provides a sense of uniformity and sky that is lacking throughout much of the city.

I remembered standing at this same corner one day earlier, and noticed the small changes that the ensuing 24 hours had brought. (In truth, I wouldn't have remembered anything, but I had photographed it, thus documenting the moment and 'making it real.') Before living in Washington Heights, I never had such an acute awareness of how the sun shifts a few degrees north or south each day, so that each one is in fact slightly different than the one that came before it or will follow after.

As I crossed Broadway, I took a picture of my favorite delivery truck, and wished that the modern era supported a more generic sensibility in marketing. (I fondly remembered the movie 'Repo Man' in which the Emilio Estevez character eats 'Food' out of a can.)

Not for the first time, I was struck by the truth of this message. (Some things bear repeating.)

As I turned the corner, I felt thankful for the presence of the florist -- open 24 hours! -- which opened just a few years ago and has immeasurably improved the quality of the micro-neighborhood in which I live. My gratitude far outweighed any regret I felt about the garish quality of the bouquets, much less the lamentable presence of 'baby's breath.'

As I walked up the street, I approached a couple whose presence seemed to validate my inclination to describe Washington Heights as the most 'European' of all New York City neighborhoods.

Ten thousand years ago, this couple used to stroll the great urban park in _____ (before they were force to flee to the United States) as the horse-drawn carriages rolled by. Now they reenact this ritual on the streets of Washington Heights, clearing a path through the drug dealers and gang members, who step respectfully aside.

In the subway station, I contemplated a work of modern art where someone had thankfully ripped down one of the advertisements.

I've been writing about these panels for years, of course (but some truths bear repeating): Consider the old panels on the subway platform wall, and observe the finely wrought precision with which each strip of peeling paint has by the hands of time been distressed in the subtlest shades of gold and silver, all displayed in a collage with the glue and paper of generations long deceased. We know there will be many who fail to see the beauty of these forgotten panels, and will respond to our assessment with scorn and disbelief. Yet before you judge, we again invite to you to behold the works in person. Here you have the abstract expression of the city itself, resplendent in decay and neglect, and to observe it for even these few seconds fills us with the transcendent bliss of true insignificance.

I arrived at work, where time passed. At lunch, I went out into the blazing sun, which had turned the streets azure.

A steam vent made the day appear much colder than it actually was.

Back in my office, more time passed. Around 2:30 or so, the sun began to set and I spent a few moments taking pictures of the orange and blue horizon. I thought JK Huysmans, who wrote: 'And the orange remained pure, strengthened and fanned as it was by the insistent breath of the blues.'

Work beckoned and I turned away, but not before closing my eyes for a second, with the hope to sear the fading image into my mind, where I could contemplate it long after it had disappeared.