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April 14th, 2009 
Behind my house are a number of auto related businesses: used auto parts stores, body shops, and towing companies, alongside a recycling redemption center, busy with drunks all morning long. Within 5 years, they will all be gone. The area is slated to receive subway service soon, and the stop will be right in the middle of this currently slightly grimy area. Already, a large condo complex has gone up, surely the first of many. I’m sure that the landowners in the area are just waiting for the subway to come, so that they can sell their formerly industrial properties to developers for tidy sums. The homeless aluminium can collectors, grateful for the our state’s bottle deposit law, that spend their mornings in drunken brotherhood in front of the recycling redemption center will have to find a new roost, and the auto shops will be forced deeper into suburbia. I don’t feel too sad, because I know that the only constant in a city is constant renewal, but I find the neighborhood as it is now to be much more fascinating, less planned than thrown together.
March 25th, 2009 
This is the rather patriotic auto body shop across the street from me; it is the view out my window, and the source of the faint paint smell on my block. The man who is quite obviously the owner is in his early forties, short, always with sunglasses, a gold chain, spiky hair and a mustache that faintly resembles a mouse’s whiskers. He doesn’t look like he’s old enough to have sons old enough to work, so I wonder if he is really the eponymous Fred, part of the second generation of Susans, or if the shop has changed ownership since the sign was painted. He drives a large black Cadillac SUV, which during business hours rests angled in a non parking zone on the sidewalk in front of the store. It is he who deals with their customers, at least in the beginning, greeting them and their damaged cars, the doctor who exudes confidence and competence: “Everything will be fine soon, you’ll be as good as new and on your way in no time”.
March 23rd, 2009 
One way of looking at this picture, and understanding a restaurant (Cafe Kiraz, located here) is to think of it as a black box that takes in phone calls, performs some unknown transfer function, and finally outputs greasy exhaust. Yum.
March 21st, 2009 
I like pictures that tell stories. The story:
I can’t even remember why the brothers were out cutting wet wood in the first place; I seem to remember that there was an exhortation to work, and a creative interpretation of that call. In any case, the first chainsaw proved not up to the task, and his brother chainsaw insisted on going in after him. I’m quite happy to report that the operation was successful, and that all the brothers emerged heroic, victorious, and intact.
February 10th, 2009 
Winter is cruel to shopping carts. Better luck come spring, if you’re not rusted through.
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