cameras

i was out with 2 cameras today, 3 if you include this mobile device‘s camera, which i do include, as it is not a piece of junk, so… 3 cameras. i used to be scared of taking some pictures at teh cemetery, but most days now i‘m positively reckless about stomping up to vandalized mausoleums and hoary tombstones and kicking the dirt around them. today i saw a cat chase a rat down a hole next to a tombstone. it made me think that people who find cemeteries creepy might be right after all. i also got a pretty cool shot of a mass of pigeons clucking and plucking at a grave site which was recently populated anew. i have been to this yard too many times. even the walk over has become boring. every wall, every sidewalk, every sign and place of business, i have seen them all a hundred times or more. i went over to Review Avenue, to see if the coins i placed atop one of the rocks on the great wall of that street were still in place. as i feared, they are gone. they survived the winter and the 70mph winds and snowblasts, never budging from their spot. but they could not endure the tangle of vines and weeds that surrounded it, an encroaching jungle of foliage and dirt which appear to have ejected the coins from their spot. so sad. i looked to the ground but the grass and weeds there were sufficiently thick and hazardously brimming with swirling insects to allow me to let the coins go, sacrifice them to the cause, the fact-finding tour of seeing how long these things can be hidden in plain sight. before the seasons change i should survey the wall again, noting which stretches of it remained untouched by the foliage. i would like to have been there the moment the coins fell. moments, assuming they did not all fall at once. i should have checked in more frequently. ah well. there is something majestically miniature about stepping up to a giant, giant wall and knowing exactly where to reach for to find something you know is there. today someone saw me. he was staring at me. glowering. i didn‘t care, though a confrontatio
n might have been amusing. i think it was early this year when i was on review avenue on a sunday or a holiday, when *nothing* is going on there. the only activity on those days is drag racers and out of service MTA buses to-ing and fro-ing… which is pretty much all of what i saw there today, save for the randomly skulky dude watching me reach into the weedy wall for unknown treasures. earlier this year, though, i was along that streetscape when a security guard at one of the businesses took notice of my fascinating travels. for whatever reason review avenue was giving me the creeps that day and in a strange way i welcomed the attention of this security worker, imagining that he would at least be a witness should my paranoid sensations summon a physical source of murder or attack. ii wwas taking pictures of every 3rd piece of crap on the side of the road that day, including signage and buildings and anything else. i was reckless! (as opposed to reckful). i guess this tipped the security guy offff into thinking i was evil, but i didn‘t catch that from him at first. i just thought he was securing the premises of the giant warehouse/garage across the street,across that wide, wide street. i kept walking toward 37th street and greenpoint avenue when i looked behind me and saw that this security guard was about feet away. he was trailing me. i laughed. he had left his post at the building where he worked and made the long, long walk across review avenue to get closer to my conspiratorial self to see what kind of terrorism i was engaged in. this particular incident cracked me up, conforming as it did to my belief that virtually every aspect of contemporary security work is nothing but busybody smoke and mirrors. it reminded me, though, of the real trouble i got into back in college, trouble which made it very onerous to get my adult life started. i shallnever explicate the details of these affairs in public but i remember getting the letter from the district attorney which ended with “this letter is to inform you
that this office intends to prosecute this matter“ or somesuch language. i pounded the kitchen counter but my mother just laughed, saying this was nothing, and that “these guys must think they have a big one! these guys must think they‘re going to make their careers on this!“ and i chuckled and said “you know, they just might,“ but she ignored that. this was real law enforcement, though. this was not some doofus security guard on review avenue on a holiday, bored out of his keenly-honed senses christ, sometimes i feel the whoosh of things, the years i could have spent getting fucked in the ass on a cot upstate, in a jail for phreakers and hackers (i was neither), instead of slipping through the clutches of ignorant fbi and secret service, hungry for a prosection of laws they did not understand. blahblah, the point being, peoples pursue things for reasons unrelated to their merits, but for personal advancement and bragging rights, and when i saw that security guard tailing me at close range that day, on that wide and empty street, i both laughed and felt i should just move ahead, mind my business, look busy, leave this busybody chucklehead in the dust. so i did. that is what i did.