#276: Pretty Vacant?

Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

There's been so much pretty urban decay to gawk at and so many delightfully wonky numbers in the collection lately that I've almost forgotten about the understated elegance of some of my neighbor's address plates. It's just too easy, you know? It's like having a crush on the homecoming king. Justifiable, sure, but hardly interesting. Give me the socially awkward, kind-hearted misfit over the neatly-packaged prat any day of the week. Better stories. More fun.

It's gotten to the point where I am so obstinate about finding hidden, underappreciated gems that I will spend an entire city block ignoring all else around me, contemplating, nay, admiring spray-painted numbers on garbage cans -- the same ones that often misspell the name of their own street and even the one that's tagged by someone known only as "BEER SLUT." In other words, I think I might be taking this obsession a little too far. Is there such a thing?

Even though I am kidding no one via this exercise, least of all my slumming, iconoclastic self, I will take this day to step back, look up, and appreciate the finer typefaces in life. Oh look -- a manhole cover!

#277: Bad Math Flashbacks

Gowanus, Brooklyn

I had a bad math flashback today.

I should point out that, for someone who's ostensibly obsessed with numbers, I suffer from serious mathophobia. Algebra eluded me, Pythagoras puzzled, pre-calc drove me half batty, and after a severe bout of trigonometry, math and I shook hands and respectfully parted ways. That is, until we were unexpectedly reacquainted in that year, fresh out of grad school, when I hoodwinked the staff of a well-known SAT test prep company into hiring me as both a verbal and a math instructor for large numbers of high school students who surely could wrangle a parabola with far more aplomb than their fearful leader ever could. (Please don't tell their parents.)

They say we teach what we most need to learn. But that was giving me way too much credit. I didn't teach math so much as memorize lines, as one would a play. (My interior monologue: Now here I'll say, "Turn to page 89 and look at question 3." Then I'll say, "We can see the absolute value of x is...") But should a student pose a question from the homework or one from a practice test I'd never before clapped eyes on? Not a chance. I was sunk.

Each Saturday morning, I'd rise at six in the morning to take the hour and a half subway ride up to the Bronx, caffeinating heavily and valiantly dispelling my SAT prep wisdom to under-served populations like thousands of do-gooders before me. I made slightly more than minimum wage but far less than I felt I deserved, considering my sizable student debt; still, as the tireless pterodactyl in the Flintstones cartoon often croaked, punching Fred's time card at the quarry, "It's a living."

With ease and skill I whisked my half-sleeping students through the verbal portion of the lesson. But each morning as the verbal portion of class switched cruelly to an hour and a half of straight-up, no-holds-barred mathematics, I would sweat bullets. I went to great lengths to avoid the (quite common) phenomenon of a student asking me a question where I hadn't pre-packaged my reply, either rapidly changing the subject by saying that in the interests of time, we had to jump ahead to the next question and/or using the time-honored pedagogical game of dodgeball: "Well, what do YOU think the next step is?" Or: "Think it through. I'm not going to just GIVE you the answer, you know." I would punctuate this proclamation with an imperious glare and a swift flick of the page, and thus would I put this or that particular nightmare off -- at least until the next class.

You see, my escape was only temporary. My students' practice tests were multiplying, the math section definitely wasn't going away, and my nightmare of looking like an utter fool before a group of bloodthirsty teenagers seemed doomed to recur with each new class no matter what diversionary tactics I tried. I knew eventually the issue would catch up with me unless something changed. I had only one choice: I would have to become adept in my most hated subject or die trying.

I tried to learn the math. I did. I scrunched my forehead in concentration over desks and filled practice tests with meaningless scribbles in hopes that it would somehow all click if I kept at it long enough. On warm weekend days, I cloistered my sorry self in my kitchen with a scratch pad and collection of number two pencils, wrestling with arithmetic while others were off riding bikes or drinking in my favorite bars. I took four-hour practice tests and at the end, felt like that guy in the urban legend who, in the middle of an exam, drove pencils through his ears or nose or whatever in sheer desperation. I even consulted a math tutor myself, so great was my need.

Nothing helped.

The anxiety of prepping for my classes wore down my nerves faster than the rubber on a NASCAR tire, and when the College Board announced they were making the math section on the SAT even harder, I quit that gig faster than you could say solve for x. Now I teach college level English, a language I'm somewhat more familiar with, and I'm happy to report that while the stacks of papers to grade are higher, the cold sweats have stopped.

My math flashback was brought on today by a rather harmless bit of LOLing from a student in my English composition course, responding to my open-ended "Do you have any questions for me?" query-in-writing that I do midway through every semester. Generally, I will get students asking me English-y things like, "How is my writing so far?" or "I really liked 'Third World Driving Hints and Tips,' is there anything else you can recommend I read?" I do give Get Out of Jail Free cards for those devoid of curiosity, assuring my chickadees that if they've answered the first five guided questions fully, they can leave the last question blank.

I was at the very end of the day's stack when I came across this scrawled under the heading "Do you have any questions for me?":

If a train leaves Pittsburgh going 20 mph for 60 miles then excels to 70 mph for the remainder of the trip, how long will it take that train to reach Toronto?

I gave the student a check for doing the assignment, a joke-acknowledging emoticon in the margin, and while I can't award LOL points when calculating midterm grades, I sure did appreciate the chuckle -- after my heart stopped palpitating in almighty fear.

Posting numbers is so much easier than solving for them.

#278: Rothko in Brooklyn

Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn

#279: Zed Seven

Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

Who needs Agent 007 when you've got Zed Seven? With a name like that for a main character, this new spy series of mine is just gonna write itself.

#280: D.C.

Washington, D.C.

#281: Foiled!

Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

#282: From a Halifax Harbor

Halifax, Nova Scotia

One travel-fogged night nearly ten years ago, I was on the red-eye from JFK to Shannon and gazed out the window down at the twinkling lights some 35,000 feet below. That glittering land mass beneath me was Halifax, a place I'd never been, but a name I sure liked to say.

For years the place had a strange sort of fascination for me, and whenever life in Da Big Crapple would get too hectic with its rat race pace, life-threatening taxis, and muttering hot dog vendors, I liked to slow down and picture myself in Halifax, what I imagined to be a remote fishing village. There I could pass the days weaving fishing nets, or impressing my friends with some fancy sailor's knots, or doing whatever landlubbers with seafaring hearts do to pass the time.

The real Halifax, when I finally touched down for the first time last summer, turned out to be a tad more urban than I'd imagined in my fisherperson's fantasies. But still, with its fishing boats and seagull-haunted harbors and yummy salt water taffy, I found plenty in it to make me lose myself in the notion that I could be just like the narrator in the Waterboys' "Fisherman Blues."

#283: Call Me Blue Roses

North Circular Road, Dublin

The weeks pass, the numbers count down, and over the screen the tumbleweed blows.

I love my collection, and I love to share it, but lately I've started to feel uncomfortably like Laura from the Glass Menagerie, obsessing over my pretty little glass animals, limping around with an ailment I can't pronounce, wondering where my gentleman callers have gone. OK, not really so much limping around with the weird ailment part. But as for the other stuff? Y'all can just call me Blue Roses.

Laura Wingfield (AKA chick in the Tennessee Williams play who can't pronounce "pleurosis") is one of those characters who probably irks me so greatly because I recognize some of my most unflattering features in her. I'm all for a good Tennessee Williams drama, but Laura as a creation gets under my skin: a frail Quasimodo in a dress, a tinny whinefest of a character who I am tempted to sweep off the shelf in one swoop of my arm. You want to shake the girl and say, Stop moping about your goddamn glass unicorn that broke! Quit daydreaming about admirers! Go out and live and little! So you're afraid of the outside world and find it all safey-wafey in your dreamland? Fine, be that way, go nuts with your magical made-up universe, but don't check your stats like some hypochondriac taking your temperature. The fever is always from within, not from without, if it's any good at all, and that you know without checking.

A sad fact of the creative endeavor is it's not always so hot in that supposedly fiery furnace. All creative bursts face a cooling-down period, and this project is no exception. True, there have been expeditions where I've set out, camera and notebook in hand, with almost a grim missionary duty to find, say, a 291 or a 178, and I will trawl up and down the comfy gridded streets of Manhattan, feeling less and less that feeling of exploration that inspires me in cities and more and more like the city is some crossword puzzle I am trying to finish. I wonder sometimes if my blog risks falling into that trap, this puzzle I have to finish merely because I started it.

I work through the slow times -- wandering, taking pictures, collecting, writing -- in hopes it will pick up again, and in fear that my best days are in fact behind me. Will the anecdotes flow, the banter resume, the joy of the hunt still keep me on my toes? No idea. Better not reflect on those glass animals too long, Blue Roses. It's the weekend. Aren't you, like, going to L.A. or something?

#284: Consider the Lobster Pound

Red Hook Lobster Pound, Brooklyn

Here's a mouth-watering number, and it's got nothing to do with the font. #284 Van Brunt Street is home to the Red Hook Lobster Pound, the jewel in my neighborhood's claw.

Now that the weather's getting crappier rainier colder warmer, my hankering for Red Hook wandering has been awakened. Maybe it's the fact that I can practice my tin whistle on an abandoned pier to the annoyance of none but the seagulls. Maybe it's trad night at Rocky Sullivan's. Possibly it's because there are few things I love more than cycling through urban maritime dereliction. But who am I fooling? It's the lobster rolls, plain and simple, best consumed on a partly sunny afternoon sitting in the grass near Valentino Pier. From there, you can eat your buttery snack and gaze out at the Statue of Liberty while the New York Water Taxi chugs past, ferrying loads of Swedish furniture-seeking passengers to that blue and yellow Mecca on yonder horizon.

Swedish design, Maine lobster, served up Connecticut style, in Red Hook, Brooklyn: not a bad recipe at all. I think one of the homeless guys on the F train says it best: "It doesn't matter what the food is, I'll eat it: Mexican, Chinese, Polish, American, Jamaican. Ladies and gentlemen, my stomach is like the U.N. building: it's international."

Red Hook Lobster Pound pimpin' its wares. In the background, a rare sighting of the B61 bus, native to the area. This elusive species is rumored to make scheduled stops along Van Brunt Street, though it is best known for its erratic behavior and general knack for speeding off just as one spots it.

#285: Delivery Boy

Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn

Brooklyn street art: where the humble delivery boy is elevated to the status of a Socialist Realist hero.