The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A brief interval in the unending torment caused by the cold and snow which encapsulated life here in Pittsburgh – or at least my own – from the last week of January through most of the month of February, arrived.

Bands of snow, some heavy, had been omnipresent for weeks. Temperatures plunged outside, but lasagnas and meats were roasted within HQ. When an afternoon in the high fifty degree range was predicted, one sprang forth once more unto ruin and the world’s end.

One scuttled up the hill from HQ to the T light Rail Station. Soon, your humble narrator found his pre corpse standing on a platform at the T’s Potomac Station, heading for downtown Pittsburgh.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This station (Gateway) is where I debarked the T, and it’s within that downtown part of the T service which operates as a subway, utilizing an old freight line’s subterranean tunnel which has been retrofitted to accommodate a modern mission and the needs of the rolling stock.

Luckily, there’s escalators down here. There’s a kind of a brutalist approach to a transit station going on here architecturally speaking, with big slabs of concrete tossing massing shapes about. It’s a pretty steep set of stairs leading down here from street level, which always triggers my weird PTSD step related thing.

I mean… it’s not that weird, I broke my ankle on a set of steps… so… it’s not like I’m irrationally afraid of flying or getting eaten by sharks… at least, not beyond any sort of normal level of concern that one should display about that sort of thing… what can I tell you?

I’m all ‘effed up.

One uses the elevator, thereby, while going down to the platforms here, instead of those triggering stairs. In the context of this post, I was heading ‘up,’ so I rode the escalator.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The plan for this scuttle was born out of frustrations during my prior outing, as described in last Friday’s missive.

Point State Park was the next destination.

Normally, I’d walk over either the Fort Pitt or Fort Duquesne Bridge’s from there, but I had zero trust that the foot paths might be clear of snow and ice due to recent experience. Instead, I’d head ‘up’ the Monongahela River and cross over to the South Side at Smithfield Street.

It’s great to wander about but you really need to have some sort of destination and plan in mind.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This one looks back at ‘Downtown’ from the path in the prior shot.

Weather conditions and this utter municipal failure to clean up snow and ice, writ large, have reduced me down to walking in a park – damn it. I’m pretty tired of being constantly thwarted by the weather, at this stage of unending winter. Bah! What the hell, Pittsburgh…

Who can I talk to? Who would I call? Fixable… is this fixable?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I could always just stay at home and walk on a treadmill or something, but I’d soon grow so bored with that… I’d pluck out my own eyes just for ‘lulz.’

Honestly, my intrinsic nature is to just sit on my butt reading comic books. Scuttling about is often motivated by an artistic ‘need’ to go shoot photos. Maybe it’s an autistic need… I don’t know… but the point is… bored, boredy, bored and taking a walk punctures boredom nicely. Beyond boredom, I also need to move and exercise in order to keep the plumbing within the pre-corpse chugging along. The meat tuxedo requires regular shake down cruises.

Saying that, this is my annual challenge – getting out and about despite an inclement climate. As mentioned in an earlier post, you’d be hard pressed to find, should you click through the years and years of archived missives here at Newtown Pentacle (links to the right of the page), any series of posts from January or February in which I was not complaining about cold weather in a similar manner, so maybe this set of frustrations is something meta-thematic?

Rise above. Fix the world.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

At Point State Park, ramps allow pedestrian and bike egress to both the Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne bridges. I was tempted by the Fort Pitt one, but given that I was in the ‘zone’ where the ramp touches down on the south side just a couple of days previously and it was completely impassable… I decided to go with a more reliable path.

I’d hang a left instead!

Back tomorrow.

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