Type: New England Gravel

New England Gravel

Check out this rusty, crusty logo from the old days of hand painted signs and work trucks. You're welcome, antiques fans.

Insane Cat Posse

Uh oh. I feel eyes on me, like I'm being watched....

Rockland County rednecks like lots of things: Hooters, hot wings, beer (all in one great location), huntin', big trucks with flashing lights and awesome monster tires with stripper silhouettes on them mudflaps, and dollar stores. The dollar store in my town is no different than, say, a Wal-Mart is out west. There are pairs of scratchy polyester pants, cheap plastic shoes; in fact, a bevy of plastic goods that "off-gas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgassing) at such an alarming rate, you get a headache if you're in there long enough. It's an unhealthy but sometimes necessary place to shop, for financial reasons.

Ah!! Scared the bejeesus outta me!

And just like my truckin' neighbors, the t-shirt rack rarely disappoints. It's a wealthy mix of loud cheesy prints, sayings, and slogans, most of it overly jingoistic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism) nonsense about flags with colors that don't run, big deer heads, guns, and camouflage prints that relay strong fears about "foreigners", and that's just the male shirts.The women tend to like chocolate and cats; lots and lots of cats. This one design is so particularly egregious, such a high temple to offensively bad taste, I had to snap a few pics. These cats' eyes follow you, and they are angry; oh so angry. Beware. Halloween is a'comin'.

Because I said I would.

Over the years I've worked with just about every type of person on the planet; such is the range of my widely dispersed gifts that are given generously, in a city known for its cosmopolitan ways in the utmost. So welcoming are we (and sympathetic) to the world's woes, that our fair city has been vulnerable to attack after attack—in the name of freedom and liberty—but such is the price we pay for opening our hearts and our world to anyone who seeks peace from war-torn lands ravaged by societal woes like avarice, greed, hatred, and bias. It's no coincidence that the biggest gift from our French allies is a lady dressed in the robes of Ancient Greece, the first serious culture to live by laws; not as it applied to everyone, but it was the beginning of our shared longings for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I am not immune to suffering, which stands almost equal in strength (and often surpasses) the wealth of my gifts, which is not something I often talk about at length, because I encounter such great weaknesses and suffering as I go about my day that my own needs are pushed aside for another day, when (like any good mother) I have the time to cry in private while I nurse my own wounds alone, in some form of a solitary peace that's coupled with great longing. There's nothing quite like the pain of a mother's anguish, and because of the fractured and severely dysfunctional nature of my upbringing, it's sharpened my empathy and compassion to a fine point that's still surprising to me, so often am I perceived as just an average single white woman. But nothing could be further than the truth. Rough childhoods make for scrappy fighters who live very adult lives very early on, making me far more mature than most retirees I meet, and I've met many older seniors during my time here on earth.

It's in this capacity as a great listener—tolerant of hearing about the most violent extremes—that attracts the troubled to me in droves, most often the seriously mentally ill, which is also present in my immediate family. I grew up with it and survived it, which makes me sort of like a snake charmer to a sick person's demons. I've learned when not to take on the woes of the world, because like many Americans, I am also facing the most harsh state of bankrupt finances I've ever encountered in my life, and I officially entered the working world at age 15, which is evidenced in my long storied past with Social Security. I've also worked technically "off the books" much earlier than that (to escape those pesky child labor laws), something which I've referenced before, when I mentioned a worker's permit that I got from the principal of our elementary school at Chestnut Grove, so I could help my brothers with their paper routes.

My experiences, education, background, and natural prowess have shocked the most seasoned con artist, to the point that I felt driven to record such life stories here with you, the reader, so often am I accused of "making it up". It's unusual, and I know that, because I've seen the looks on countless faces, but the most interesting responses are from the sick people who think we are engaged in a lying contest about who can make up the greatest "fish tale", which is kind of innocent and sweet; it tickles a mother's fancy to be lied to by someone who is incompetent. It's mostly harmless gobbledygook, but one woman with BPD was honest enough to try and delve deeper with this walking talking encyclopedia (me) that somehow mysteriously showed up at her job one day, seemingly out of nowhere. No matter how many times we told her that I was a very advanced art director—widely known for my publishing expertise—she couldn't quite wrap her mind around it. It troubled her, and it also made me a magnet to her, like a shiny object she couldn't put down. I fascinated her, and she used me as a source of entertainment and engagement so she could check out of her disassociated reality for awhile.

Most often she was confused and foggy, especially when she went off her medication. She surveyed the office almost every day about something unrelated to books, like petty boy troubles or minor incidents with girlfriends that baffled her as a woman of 40+. It was as unbelievable to me as I was to her. How? She asked me a wide variety of questions that covered an enormous range of topics, but that's my job, just like it is in my family: to have the answer, and so I did. One day she asked me covertly about what it felt like to be me, a common thing for people with serious identity disorders. I must have felt like a Rubix Cube in human form to her, so many times did she ask me "Why this?" or "Why that?" I can recall one conversation like it was yesterday, so profound were (and are) the depth to her needs. What is being trustworthy and why did I seem to have it? She questioned the very nature of my authority over her and the other people in our office, so I broke it down like this: 1) Did she trust me? She said that she did. OK, great. 2) Why was that? She had a frown on her face. Oh. That was a much harder question, but like any gifted mom, I already knew the answer, so once I led her down the right road, I set her up to be receptive to the information when I gave it to her.

She trusted me because I made it that way. Oh! Right! She brightened up a bit, after I fed her the answer in bits. She, and the other employees, trusted me at my word because I laid down a pattern immediately upon the start of my employment there, like a background rhythm to all my business dealings: I said I would do something, and then I did it. I said it, then I did it, over and over again (providing proof when necessary), so that my honesty and integrity never really came into question or under fire, so quickly could I provide evidence of it. Their reliance on me was understood like a second nature, and it allowed me to serve them more easily, without argument or discord. My opinion was asked and the right answer was given, over and over, as many times as they needed it, in as many forms as I could provide.

Just as I am now under fire for having the audacity to become a publisher in one of the worst economies since "The Great Depression", by borrowing against the future of my own success. I will continue to provide you with the highest quality content I can give you, free of charge, because such is the fierceness that I attach to my vocation. And just like the pattern I establish everywhere I go, I made a promise to myself many years ago that I would give back as soon as I could, if I ever found myself in a position of power and authority, with as much as I had, until there was nothing left to give. So, that's what I will continue to do: publish however I can, for however long I can, despite the battles I face. Because I said I would.

www.becausisaidiwould.com

Half Moon Sky

Half Moon in Daylight.

Fall Begins

Dark Shadows

Shadow cast across pavement.

The time has come for our annual trip around the sun, happening by increments each and every day. Shadows stretch, grow, and lengthen to longer heights; the sun sets earlier and faster. We wake up to gradually lowering temps, and we rotate our closet by exchanging space for summer clothes to winter ones. 

Why fight the laws of nature and its' choral of universal music? Time to get out your sweaters, play in the fallen leaves, and drink some hot chocolate with deliciously melting marshmallows. Just go with the flow. You really don't have much of a choice.

Shadowy outline on driveway.

Electricity

When I was growing up, I had no sense of scope about the history attached to New York City (or state), nor did I realize how old and famous it really is around the world, because why would I? Sesame Street was a kid's show about a city block that had large animals in garbage pails (like the nightly raccoon raids at our house), narrated by a girl named "Maria", of the same name in the musical West Side Story. Bugs Bunny had a whip smart comeback to every quip that was delivered in a cool cartoon version of our accent, King Kong regularly climbed our tallest buildings, Batman fought for our fair Gotham's streets to be safe, Spiderman spun webs everywhere, and The Ramones just wanted to go to the beach badly on a musician's dime. 

It was either a t.v. show, or a movie, or a play, or your favorite song. Was there anything else? Who cares? We had everything you could think of named after or devoted to our culture. So when I saw this old shit nailed to a post nearby, I knew it was some crusty, rusty relic from our past, but what it actually was? That I had no idea. 

I went in for closer look, at first to take a picture of a funny bumper sticker on a truck parked in the mechanic's garage that operates next door, and there it was; a bright orange spot in the sun. Ever wonder what a switch box from the first electric poles that delivered early currents to old farmhouses converting over to the new power grid looked like, back when it was new? Now you do.

The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.

Cornfield to Nowhere

Huh. That's an odd juxtaposition.

"Welcome to mah jungle!"

I've walked past this oddly cultivated batch of corn and other assorted plants for awhile now, and I have no idea what it's doing behind a gas station or next to a bus stop, but I really don't care. I like the idea of some wacky station owner or old county farmer refusing to sell out to developers by obstinately retaining this weird garden patch in the middle of nowhere. 

Why an arrangement of corn rows densely interspersed with lawn hedges? Dear readers, I went in for a closer look, and I still have no fucking clue what this crazy redneck is thinking of, but whoever he (or she) is, they're my kind of rebel. Raise your freak flag high and grow some vegetables, you damn Yankee. Hat's off to you!

A little bit of rust and car exhaust never hurt no one.

Fill 'er up, dump off old clothes, pick some corn, or take two shrubs. Huh?

Boat and rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

An exceptionally dense Yankee thicket.

Corn AND ornamental shrubs. Oh my!

And corn. And actual ear of corn can grow here.

Why ram a truck into it, or park two trailers, a boat, and a pile of rocks?

Because he's a rebel redneck Yankee and you're not. That's why!

Jeebus...real corn with cobs and all.

Squash patches and car oil.

Why here?! Whose is it?

You caught my attention with your strange garden patch. Grow on!

Redneck flower pot=discarded tire.

You beautiful weirdo. Kudos.

Spot of Light

The Tyvek House

Years ago I dated a man who was friendly with a third cousin of mine, 
a cousin who felt closer to me because he and my brother were the same age. They had a tight bond as kids and teens. We parted ways necessarily: my brothers and I had destinies that included education and great successes, while he struggled with older family issues like two alcoholic parents who died early on, car theft, and false claims through labor unions for workers compensation, the petty cons he learned early on from the masters themselves.

After I came back from my travels out west, I naturally sought him out, because both before and after Denver, Colorado, I lived in Brooklyn, and he is from Sheepshead Bay. I am the sole remaining family member of my father's line to retain any footing in the city at all, such is the length we have moved outward from it, but such is the place of big media houses and art, so that's where I returned.

And just like my romantic life, I felt I had left behind the traps of working class culture for good, like binge drinking partners, tangles with the law, and domestic violence, but such would not be the case. Like many women of my age, I had a brief marriage to a totally inept partner, only to immediately take up with a man who was slightly better in comparison, then he too fell apart when we left his comfort zone for my urban habitat. I was single, and 37. My cousin's then-girlfriend (now, wife), had just the same experience. Sure, my cousin was a violent, chronic drunk who was always unemployed, but have you been out there lately? Dating is hell! She felt it especially as a large woman, enough to frighten her back into my cousin's arms, even after he disappeared to Ireland with a girl he knocked up when she broke up with him, then returning to Brooklyn, begging her to reunite with him. 
I had reconnected with my cousin at a family reunion, listening to his tale over many drinks that day, while pictures of a boy that may or may not be his circulated around a large picnic table.

I had also tried the usual dating outlets available to modern women, like online dating (a cruel joke for brilliant women, if ever there was), and then a prolonged relief from such abuse through intentional, deliberate abstinence. My cousin, knowing this, reintroduced himself into my scene, with (what else?) bait to hook me back into the lifestyle. It was sophisticated baiting, too: his friend was, on the surface, a great catch: Irish American (as I am in part), a business entrepreneur, and a brilliant mechanic. It seemed logical: two advanced tradespeople uniting for mutual benefit. But just like life, he was far from ideal.

He carried around baggage from a prolonged, bitter divorce, his parent's broken family with kids from different fathers and mothers, a raging drinking and cocaine habit (that he had pitched to me as moderate during the courtship stage), and the insular, inbred ignorance of the uneducated, vicious closed-mindedness that marks the isolated clans of Gerritsen Beach. Enter me onto this stage, and you can already imagine the conflict. I kinda stood out. Noooo?! Me?

But, I had been celibate awhile and I was vulnerable to suggestion, so we began a dysfunctional dance that revolved around his baffled incompetence with relationships, coupled with my continued breaks up with him via text messages, like a nightmare version of me as a teenager dating in the Computer Age. It was nonsense, but it was the kind of bullshit I was raised in, so I knew it well.

Just like his typical working class woes, so the block in his neighborhood followed suit. People, okay let's just say it, a string of fucked up drunks, rung his doorbell at all hours of the day and night, and they felt completely justified in doing so. They all knew each other and had intermarried with one another, so it was kind of like the repulsive, convoluted dating done in front of a reality television audience, but with much less monetary compensation. He knew his environment was problematic; he is very intelligent. We bonded early on at a stupid St. Patrick's Day party we were invited to in the Rockaways about the idiotic drunks around us that slobbered and pawed each other while wearing daddy's cop hat as a costume, enacting terrible, deeply ingrained patterns that always got them nowhere but drunk and out of money.

The events of 9/11 were no different for the people there. It was rife with severe, long term mismanagement. Across the street from his house, which was in a permanent state of construction that went on for years, (my then-boyfriend also lived in a state of flux. He had a staircase in his house without a banister, the components of which remained packed away in a long cardboard box on his living room floor, because there was "never enough time" to complete projects), stood a house permanently clothed in Tyvek covering, the stuff that goes on before the actual house siding goes up. We used to muse aloud about when it would be done, but there were never any signs of progress.

He told me that the man of the house had received a huge settlement from the city after 9/11, supposedly for a fireman's service, but John thought he was merely "retired" on disability after winning money from some lawsuit. His drunken lurching about the block in the middle of the day would obviously suggest such a thing happened, such were our awesome powers of observation. And just like any Shanty Irish Mick with a serious addiction, his requisite blond "trophy" wife (no big prize, but she had all the stereotypical attributes like hair dye, nail polish, and leisure suits) had a bright, new, red sports car in the driveway. Such were their priorities in the wake of great trauma: permanently applied workout clothes, shiny sports cars, and a house renovation that went nowhere, a visual reminder of their perpetually stuck state.

I've since moved on successfully, finally closing that chapter in my family's history forever by physically fighting my way out of his reach, which effectively broke many years of culturally supported abuse. When I think back about the events surrounding 9/11, New York, and New Yorkers, I know that I am just one of the millions who made it out of a continual, self-sustaining abusive cycle alive, and for that, I will always be grateful. I fought back and I won, even when no one was in my corner, because I broke his arm when he put his hands on me, even before I learned (and earned belts in) mixed martial arts. I know now that whenever he feels uncertain about his story with me, he will remember me each and every time a rainy day causes his healed fracture to ache, while he tries to repair the trucks in his fleet.

Take care of yourself today, New York.

Benign Neglect

Diversification and preservation often accompany a purposeful, deliberate kind of neglect. Witness the relatively intact architecture and perfectly preserved cars of Cuba, a nation that was in extreme isolation from us. What would new wealth have done to its iconic architecture? Probably given us one badly done renovation after another. How many beautiful brownstones would we have lost in New York City, if Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were rich white neighborhoods? 

And so it follows in nature. The front lawn of a certain old house in the historic Hudson Valley has an intact lawn; not the artificial one made with an abundance of pesticides and aggressive weed-pulling, but an incredibly rich and diverse tapestry that holds hundreds of plants, weeds, and wildflowers one doesn't typically see untouched in the suburbs, simply because the current owner does not tend to it with the same kind of care he would to his own lawn. It is often through this kind of neglect that the most beautiful wildflower flourishes. 

Welcome to September, dear readers.

Goodnight Sun, Hello Moon

Reading

Ah, that "Q" is perfection. Well done!

I've been a reader for so long, I don't actually remember when I couldn't read. I know I was a very early reader, about 2 or 3 years old, and so was my oldest brother. My mother said he taught himself to read The New York Times so he could check the Mets score, and that certainly may be true. 

I know I attended a pre-K reading class for toddlers at the local library, because I begged my parents to take me to school so I could read, and that was the closest they could find to nursery school before 
I went to an actual school, during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania after leaving the city, before settling down in the Hudson River region.

Discovery and a new chapter.

It's hard for me to describe an experience I do so fluently; it's almost a subconscious thing at this point. I take in information so quickly visually, that I see things way before the lay person can. I've likened in to being an expert swimmer dipping and swirling through the clearest, warmest tropical waters (and I am that, too). Reading is a feeling so sensuous and fluid, few hobbies can replicate that kind of pleasure for me, and I know the same is true for other hardcore readers. 
We occasionally speak between nose dives.

Oh, I've designed flaps like this before.

Few hobbies create the kind of erudition and experience that bibliophiles have, with the exceptions of medical fields and clergy. 
We empathize immediately with the writer, because as soon as we read words, we're right there with the author. Some of us are so adept at it, we work at it professionally through publishing and media. Unlike a purely visual artist, I am also a writer and reader: the harmonious blend of a variety of highly skilled sets that transcend majors taught at the leading universities.

Lots of decorative elements and ink coverage. Some gaps in typesetting.

And so it is that I can talk with ease to an advanced physicist at their level, because I read their words when I design books for the students majoring in their curriculum. I sing along perfectly to Ella Fitzgerald while I riff through a series of graphics that vibe off one another, like a flutist times himself to a jazz pianist, either in the planned syncopation of an orchestration or the more advanced styling of an abstract expressionist who goes off on a tangent. 

To find someone who can follow along like that is the rarest of the rare, and just like the books we collect, so too are the odd ducks of the creative world who finally find their intellectual homes within the great literary houses of the world: those weird combinations of dancer, musician, photographer, model, writer, reader, designer, engineer, artist, and muse, because we are all of those things, and so much more. Open a book, and come find us. We'll be there between the vanilla-scented pages of a hundred year old volume and the near-constant flickering of a computer screen. See you soon.

Crescent Moon

Sunset and Moon, tied together forever: "Anaksunamun!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhesenamun

 

Wildflowers, Wooden Fences, and a Few Weeds

Coming in for a closer look....

For today: this botanical duo from a summer's afternoon, as we officially say "goodbye" to another glorious season here on Earth. Fall begins September 22!

...reveals all sorts of intricate details.