The walk home.

Because it is still warm enough and light enough to walk home. At 5:30 through Fulton Market, where the meat packing places and bulk produce shops are closing up but the expensive restaurants are just opening. In the middle of Morgan, an old man in dirty clothes bends down to pick up a piece of newspaper that's very wet and plastered to the street. 

That tall building with all the orange railings, repeating across 20 some floors, might be under construction or maybe it's just going to look that way, and each floor jags inward at a corner in a way the makes a chevron pattern toward the sky. Chevron is very in.

Before the tracks, a man walks two big dogs that look related but different, and he seems to be keeping them away from me like I might be afraid. I wonder if I should be afraid.



There are broken windows in perfect square intervals along a warehouse wall, with giant machinery inside now exposed to the wind. It's getting colder already but I haven't seen the leaves change. It will be easier to believe it's fall once I leave the city this weekend and see an entire grove of yellow-leafed trees next to a soybean field.


Stop to take the same picture I've taken a dozen times this year of the pink sunset behind the black silhouette of the signal tower than straddles the tracks. The contrast never really shows up in an iPhone photo and the curve of the tracks gets lost in the vanishing point and the gravity water tank on the horizon, which is inexplicably romantic in real life, gets cropped out. I take the picture anyway.


On Hubbard, three men are standing around a very big hole in the asphalt, right in the middle of the street. There's wet, smooth mud (please let that be mud) all over the street and this hole, at least 10 feet in diameter, has a single skinny tube stuck down it like the drain that the suction tube that the dental hygienist sticks in your cheek to suck out the spit. It seems pretty inadequate, and the men look concerned, but I'm walking pretty fast and the pink skyline behind them is distracting enough to not wonder to hard about the water supply.

It's not going to be light enough for very much longer to walk home alone on this route. I want to take back the night and all that, but I've been mugged before and just won't feel safe unless I'm on a bike, which makes it much harder to take photos.