sufficient period
How minimalist are your Wednesdays, anyway?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Red Hand, or El Mano de Roja as my bagel guy Jose calls it, is pictured above. El Mano de Roja is my enemy, and is always forbidding from doing those things which I wish to do. The Red Hand is everywhere, a seemingly omnipresent and inescapable scold who works for the government. Freedom demands an end to the tyranny of the Red Hand. Freedom’s soil is best fertilized with the blood of tyrants, and blood is red – just like the hand. The Red Hand is part of the janitorial staff, at the house of tyranny and encroachment on individual freedoms.
What can I tell you, I’m an idiot.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If a vampire was riding a bicycle past the hidden driveway on 39th street – or the Harold Avenue Truss Bridge over Sunnyside Yards if you must, which the traffic mirror above services – a trucker would never know they were there and would likely strike the cycling strigoi. Not sure if you can kill a Vampire with a mack truck, but I’m sure you could ruin its day with one. I’ve always wondered about the whole mirror thing with the Nosferatu, as in why do their clothes turn invisible too – reflection wise – but only when they’re wearing them. Shouldn’t you just see an empty suit and cape standing there reflected in the silvered glass? Is it the silver in the glass? What if the mirror is backed with some sort of plastic? If the proverbial cyclist vampire was crossing through the field of view of that mirror pictured above, would you just see the bicycle?
These are the sorts of things which keep me up at night.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Working for the same creeping tyranny group as the Red Hand, but in a different department, the adjure offered above indicates the presence of active rail. You’d probably notice this from the tracks splayed out on the ground, or the bells and flashy lights affixed to the movable barriers, or the dozens and dozens of box cars blocking the road – but some folks plainly refuse to notice the nose at the end of their face, so there you are.
If everything worked out as I planned it, as you’re reading this I’m onboard a boat with the United States Army Corps of Engineers, inspecting the Harbor of New York and New Jersey – specifically Port Elizabeth Newark. I’ll tell you all about that at the end of the week, hopefully.
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clutching inkiness
Simple things, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Amongst the first things that one of my neighbors in Astoria wants to know is what zodiac sign you were born under. When you indicate where your birthday lands on the wheel of the year, she shoots a knowing look at you and acts like you just revealed the code you use for the ATM terminals at the bank. It’s made up, astrology is. Bunk.
Another neighbor loudly pronounces that “he doesn’t give a ‘eff” before doing something stupid or self destructive. He’s part of a whole crew I know that doesn’t give an ‘eff about this or that. At my age, the single thing that I’ve gleaned about life is to give lots and lots of ‘effs. Not giving an ‘eff can get expensive, consequence wise. I’ve gotten to the point these days to proactively give ‘effs, just to save some dough.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Something I use as a gauge of intellect in the people I meet and encounter is whether or not a stressor will cause the phrase “I don’t care, call the Cops, I don’t care” to emerge from their face hole. The statement is meant to elicit fear in the listener, and indicate how “thug,” “street,” or just plain “bad ass” the petitioner is. Usually, the statement is offered as part of a series of aggressive primate display behaviors, with a lot of hand waving and other declarative statements (see paragraph above) wound in.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, doesn’t care when the Cops arrive. If you don’t care when they get there, NYPD will ensure that you do. Me? I do not wish for encounters with people who believe in the efficacious nature of dime store astrological advice and who do not “give an ‘eff” to escalate into requiring the mediating presence of the gendarmes. Seriously… what is wrong with our culture these days?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everybody you see is under constant pressure… the rent is due next week, tick tock. This thing is wrong, and that thing hurts for no reason, and the subways, and now that his Presidential Campaign is done the Mayor is going to get back to doing stupid things again… Washington, and the Executive Branch in particular, is currently being staffed by comic book villains. Everybody is under constant existential pressure, and the ropes tighten up a bit every single day. I can see the appeal of embracing the pseudo scientific, supernatural, and behaving as if you were a mafioso when you are… in fact… a dry wall installer or drive a truck or something.
The question I always ask is “what do you want to achieve,” or “what result do I think this particular set of things I’m doing and saying will cause to happen”? Was it my status as a Virgo that caused me to break a car window while screaming “Call the Cops, I don’t care, I don’t give an ‘eff” and did it cause me to act like an asshole when I got my wish and get all aggressive towards them when they show up? Smart move is to give up. A cop on the street has the legal right to kill you, they are god on the street. Starting from the minute that the cuffs go on, and progressing through the arrest process, the street cop becomes less and less godlike. Be smart.
I just don’t understand people. Really don’t. Better to spend my time alone, wandering through the concrete devastations. There are no fortune tellers there, nor vainglorious fools shouting “worldstar.”
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dual formula
Never know what you’re going to find…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On Saturday last, one attended the Newtown Creek Alliance “Kingsland Wildflowers” event at 520 Kingsland Avenue over in Greenpoint. Sort of a block party set up in a TV studio’s parking lot, it was quite successfully attended by the Greenpoint “nose ring” crowd, and I stuck around until the light got nice and then set off to walk back home to Astoria. As is my habit, Greenpoint Avenue in LIC’s Blissville section was chosen as my path, and since the light was indeed “nice” I got busy on the way.
The security patrol at Calvary Cemetery had already locked the gates of the their Polayandrion Necropolis up, but the regular apertures in their stout iron fencing nevertheless allows one to grab a shot or two from the sidewalk.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whilst scuttling along, the red envelope pictured above was noticed.
If I was a fish, this is exactly the sort of thing you’d bait your hook with in pursuance of making a dinner out of me. “You never know what you’re going to find at First Calvary Cemetery,” I always say, and the only thing surer to draw me in than a big red envelope saying “help” would be a big red button that says “do not push.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dare I look within? I darest.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Within the envelope was a hand written index card bearing some liturgical nonsense, a phone number, and a street address resolving back to Roosevelt Avenue between 68th and 69th streets in Woodside.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Given the particular joy one takes in deflating people’s religious beliefs, (I once talked a Jehovah’s Witness into tossing his Watchtower stock into a trash bin and head straight to a bar for his first drink) the sort of language on the card immediately said “Prosperity Gospel” to me.
The term refers to a certain facet of the evangelical and pentecostal paths in which the Church you belong to espouses the religious requirement of tithing 10% (and in the particular case of the organization at the address above, gross pre tax earnings 10%) to them. Tithe honestly and regularly, and god will return the investment, or so the prosperity gospel adherents believe. It’s like a celestial scratch off lottery ticket.
Hey, I don’t care what you do with your money or believe in. As long as you can sleep at night and aren’t hurting anyone other than yourself…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I believe that Jor El sent his only begotten son to live amongst us, with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. I believe that the savior pretends to be one of us, lies to all of his friends, and continually gas lights his lady love. This is pointed out simply to state that all kinds of people have all sorts of goofy ideations.
The church which the Calvary Card is meant to lead you to is the Iglesia Universal del Reino de Dios, or the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in english. A Brazilian founded order, which dates back to 1977, the UCKG claims 8 million global adherents. They operate out of a mega church building modeled after and called the “Temple of Solomon” in São Paulo, Brazil. The founder of the church, and its Bishop, is a fellow named Edir Macedo. Macedo is a billionaire, owns what seems to be the Brazilian version of Fox News, and is heavily involved in Brazilian politics. Poor people in Queens give this fellow ten cents on every dollar they earn, before tax.
There you are.
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nitrous stone
Someday, I’ll have an army of atomic supermen.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mad scientist, that’s what I aspired to become when I grew up. What kind of dweeb roots for the hero when someone as cool as Doctor Doom is doing his thing. Imagine my disappointment upon discovering, at the age of 9, that any kind of scientist needs to be fairly adept at mathematics – a subject which I have little more capacity with than a particularly slow witted goat does. Oh, the horrors and monstrosities which I could populate our world with if only I wasn’t arithmetically challenged. I’d have the whole chemical rack setup, with machines that spewed bolts of electricity and made humming sounds. One thing I am really good at is megalomaniacal laughing, it should be mentioned.
One has realized that he will need a staff of mathematically competent scientists, outfitted with heart plugs or neck bombs to ensure their absolute loyalty and obedience (of course), if my dream of creating my own race of Atomic Supermen is ever to be realized. Funding remains an issue, as I’d first need to purchase a lair of some kind, and neither minion controlling heart plugs nor neck bombs are cheap to buy or install. Then you have to light and heat the lair, worry about OSHA regulations… nothing’s easy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If you really want to hide a less than legal operation, like a Mad Scientist’s lair or a meth lab or something, I’ve always believed you should keep it moving. Sure, hollowing out a chamber in the heart of a volcano or establishing an underwater base sounds cool, but now there’s a static target for the legions of do gooders to target. Just a matter of time before some lantern jawed hero shows up and foils your plans.
Hide in plain sight, I always say. Disguise your mobile laboratory as a City bus or a panel truck and hire some clueless schmuck to drive you around day and night. The citizenry is too busy staring into those little glass rectangles all the time to notice anything that doesn’t have a thousand “likes.” The mutant army I’m planning on producing – I call this “Plan Nine,” incidentally – will take advantage of the abundance of cemeteries along the Brooklyn/Queens border for biological components. Amazon has a sale right now on mind control chips, so that’s a saving. They won’t sell me the radioactive isotopes I need, so thanks Chuck Schumer, for making me download TOR and get supplied via the highly unreliable “dark web.” So frustrating when you order Cesium and get Palladium instead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the big traps that most mad scientists find themselves in is that inevitable moment when your creation turns on you. To avert this, I’m going to install a video board into each member of my army, which will manufacturing bitcoin. This will fund a nice retirement pension for them, after the new order has been established, and I alone will hold the cypher password. You want loyalty from your thralls? Pensions, that’s how you get and demand loyalty from your minions.
I’m stuck at the moment whether or not my army of Atomic Supermen will have a gun hand or a crab claw hand, or both. Either option has benefits. I’ve settled on triocular vision for them, just like the engineers at Apple have with the latest iPhone.
I’ll be in one of my lairs this weekend, working on generalized revenge against a world which does not appreciate me, and has forced me to live the life of an outcast. Home? I have no home, the jungle is my home. If some bus or a large truck passes you by, and you hear maniacal laughing emanating from within, that’s me, but don’t put it on Instagram or anything. Last thing I need is to have to deal with some secret agent or something. Remember whose side you want to be on after the Plan Nine plays out to the end and the new order is instituted.
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imperfect salts
Getting my groove on in Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured today are the POV’s from 31st street and Astoria Blvd., which is one of the worst street crossings for pedestrians and bicycles in all of Queens. The construction materials are related to the “enhanced station initiative” that Governor Cuomo introduced a few years back, which has been playing out in incremental stages all up and down the 31st street corridor between Northern Blvd./Jackson Avenue and the terminal stop of the N and W Astoria lines at Ditmars Blvd. One was admittedly skeptical about this when it was described, but – in my opinion, at least – the newly redesigned stations are pretty good. They supply an abundance of light to what has historically been a dark and somewhat menacing streetscape, and the “upstairs” component is pretty clean visually.
Saying that, the corner pictured above which… y’know… has a train station over it and thusly a lot of pedestrians, is terrifying to navigate on foot and particularly so at night.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Ultimately, the high volume traffic problem is due to the Triborough Bridge, which spits thousands of cars a day out onto a two block long stretch of local streets which lead to the entrance ramps for the Grand Central Parkway. Why there aren’t express lanes leading directly to the parkway from the bridge is yet another one of those Queens mysteries nobody can answer. The Grand Central Parkway runs through a trench sunk into Astoria Blvd. which stretches from roughly 33rd street to 47th street, where it eventually joins the same altitude as the surrounding local streets. The trench is due to topography, of course, and both sides of Astoria Blvd. for the more or less 3/4 of a mile between 33rd and 47th are heavily trafficked one lane service roads with a parking lane along a fairly narrow sidewalk.
Why not deck the highway and create a green space/park over it? It would save the State a bunch of money in terms of snow removal, create a planted area in place of highway, contain the particulates of auto exhaust wafting off the Grand Central and into the residential streets surrounding the thing, and would likely eliminate the de facto “us and them” factor between the bifurcated neighborhoods of Astoria (one centering around the commercial strip of Ditmars to north and the southern 30th ave./Broadway zones). We’d drink up a lot of storm water with a green space, and break up the heat island effect – and as I’m often wont to point out – there is no greater magnifier for real estate valuations than the presence of a nearby park. Everybody wins – contractors, labor, drivers, pedestrians, politicians, real estate people, even the actual community itself.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over in Brooklyn’s South Williamsburg, where the BQE runs through a similar trench, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has been talking about something similar for quite a while. They’ve done a bunch of the math for this sort of thing, and it’s not outlandishly expensive as long as conversation about the subject stays away from creating a deck structure that needs to support buildings, only parkland. You’d be able to prefabricate the sections, install them one by one during (relatively) low traffic intervals, and give a section of NYC remarkable for its lack of parklands a new reason for the citizenry to move in and join the party. Also, this would likely end up being a fully union laborer operation, so all the Politicians could wet their beaks at the trough of a happy Building Trade Council. Again – win, win, win.
Why not here in Western Queens? Tell me why this wouldn’t improve things for the people of Astoria?
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Buy a book!
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The Newtown Pentacle 