It was around two on a lazy afternoon when my co-conspirator invited me out to lunch. As it was Sunday, and as it was a nice winter's day, we would go to the Slug-and-Weevil. To explain the causality here would require so arcane and elliptic reasoning that western keyboards are ill-equipped for the task. Several eldritch symbols are required.
In any event, we had a fine meal, after which my partner-in-crime joined the emerging Celtic Jam.
She plays harp, and she plays it well.
Having settled-in with the other musicians, she would not surface for hours. Like Pete Townshend on stage at Woodstock, only taller, blonder and with about 30 more strings.
I'd consumed about a litre of beer and was feeling all glowy. Owing to the loss of my companion and my natural disinclination to be around groups of people, I decided to amble my way on back home. The walk wouldn't take half an hour, and I had my camera with me. I'd poke my lens at things on my way. And I felt all glowy.
The first thing I snapped was City Hall. It's a respectable Soviet-era sort of structure. Lots of undifferentiated concrete and straight lines. Its blocky profile and grey uniformity playfully express the cold irony of truth in packaging.
Somewhere there's a plaque noting that Kafka paid a parking ticket here once.
The armory is a sort of red-brick gothic revival. Except for the carved piles of stone cannonballs. It makes the individual ones awfully difficult to pick up. The Goths frowned on that sort of thing.
Piles of carved stone cannonballs being another matter entirely.
It strikes me that maybe a number of New-World Scots read Macbeth one or two times too many. Nobody said anything at the time, continuing the rich tradition of not screwing with masons.
I think that might be an owl up there on the turret. I'm not sure though, I'm no bird-ologyst.
The bird, if that's what it was, flew away only seconds after landing. Owing to the Gotho-Scot vibe, I' guessing it might be the spectral form of Findlaech, Mormaer o' Moray himself. I wouldn't put it beyond a ghost to be able to fly. It stands to reason.
Still, I'm no ghost-ologyst.
I started to wander around to the side of the structure. I'd been taking shots of the tower from the parking lot, but now a minivan full of the local regiment had pulled in and was starting to unload.
This bit of petramancy is called a "corner" I passed it while slipping around the corner.
The juxtaposition of soft chevron and solid rock is kinda neat. I wonder if the masons calculated the angle that the snow piled on this corner would reach? A mystical angle. A fluffy, downy, snowy-white mystical angle.
Spooky.
I'm thinking of calling this one "The Great Looming Orifice". A mere image really can't capture the actual loomy-ness of it all, but trust me - it looks like the sort of place that things never come out of again.
If you look really hard, you can just make out the chitiny blackness of its malevolent doors.
Having been sufficiently creeped-out by The Great Looming Orifice, I did an about face and started off across the street. Two steps off the curb, I noticed a pair of powder-blue tennis shoes hanging from overhead wires.
I think they were girls' shoes.
They were frosted with snow and one had an icicle suspended from its tip. I know it's a silly overdone meme, but frosted powdery-blue sneakers with an icicle on the tip! How could I resist?
This structure was right across the street from The Great Orifice. I walked under the shoes to get there. I wonder if that's bad luck?
It's called a kirk or "church". I don't know which god they go by, but I'm sure it's a good one.
I also thought the buttress thingys were nifty.
Did I mention the buttresses? They slope out a bit, so the stones catch some snow. The sort of touch worthy of a Kubrick film. Or maybe Ridley Scott, he's awfully good with snowy bits. Snowy bits and unicorns.
There was a building doing big laundry somewhere nearby. Every so often I'd be engulfed in a warm cloud of April-fresh steam. It made for a nice photographic effect.
After a while, I noticed a pretty young Asian girl standing next to me. She had appeared in the dissipation of the last nimbus of flowery vapor. She was taking pictures with her camera-phone and listening to an iPod.
Definitely a Ridley Scott film.
Dang, I like this picture. Right from its weathered particleboard, on through its weird-ass cinder-blocks, right down to its subtle crimson accents.
This is definitely a paintjob with a message, and that message is "You have just now received your lifetime dose of nuclear radiation".
The weird part is - at night - it glows green.
Oh, and I took the shot while investigating a bunch of "private property", "keep out", and "no trespassing" signs down an alleyway behind the armory.
I might not be the sharpest egg in the bunch, but I figure that this is a cat. Either that or an owl. In any event, I was walking along a public rail-trail the runs behind a number of peoples' back yards. This cutie was sunning herself on the railing of one of the houses I passed.
I don't know the street name, but I'm guessing that the number is 196.
This used to be a tree. Someone decided to cut it down. Someone else put a birdhouse on top of the unusually high stump. I'm presuming it was someone else, the birdhouse thing doesn't strike me as part of the methodology of tree chopper downers.
I don't know if any birds live in that house, but I sure bet they used to live in the tree.
I dunno.
January 10th
2006
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