One Word Sunday: Red

The host of this challenge, Travel with Intent, has a gallery of haunting photographs on this week’s theme. Check them out!

Morning Sky, 2 January 2023

Parking Garage, Berkeley

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #234: MESSAGES

Thanks to Wind Kisses for hosting this week and for coming up with the awesome prompt, MESSAGES!

Here are a few “message” pictures from self’s archives, all places in California:

• sign inside a restaurant in Mission San Miguel Arcangel, California Central Coast
• sign in the lobby of the San Jose Convention Center during Adam Savage’s SilCon 2022
• Fro-yo cup, downtown San Luis Obispo
• Sign commemorating the original Facebook Headquarters, Emerson Street, downtown Palo Alto
• Traffic sign, Kasten corner of Main Street, Mendocino Village

The Detective Washes his Feet? Never Mind — This is a Crucial Moment

This scene takes place in the washroom of the police station in Setagaya. Yuichiro Goda has just been publicly humiliated by a superior, after the latest police attempt to apprehend the Lady Joker gang has turned out to be nothing but a wild goose chase.

Goda knew that from this day on there was nothing but the relentless search for evidence. There would be no time to sleep; no longer blessed with the stamina he’d had in his twenties, he found his joints were wincing in pain. Goda washed his face at the sink and, seeing his face reflected in the mirror, he immediately averted his eyes from the unwelcome sight. A voice inside of him whispered — You are an aberration, a perversion beyond a normal loss of self. In order to shush the voice away, he took off his socks and, raising one foot at a time to the sink, he washed them thoroughly. Outsid the small window facing Sangyo Road, he heard the scurrying footsteps of the media corps — Kota Sasaki must have been released — cascading over the burst of camera shutters, the lively scene seeming to belong to another world.

— Lady Joker, volume two, p. 236

Self tries to compare Lady Joker to those bleak Scandinavian novels she used to love, decades ago, the ones she read after Smilla’s Sense of Snow. There is the same sense of spiritual anomie, and in this story it does seem to rain quite a bit. Interesting, both Goda and the President of the Hinode Beer corporation are Christian. At least, they attend mass. But everything else about them is very Japanese.

Stay tuned.

Night, November: Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig

Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.

Declining Hometowns

The section self is about to quote follows many passages of analysis on the special case of West Virginia. There were a lot of things self wanted to quote, but she decided that felt a bit like cheap thrills. Instead, here are some conclusions the author draws from her close examination of the state:

There Are No Accidents, Chapter Seven

• If the economy declines in your hometown, you need to drive farther to find work, increasing your risk of accident by exposure at the same time that your hometown has less money to pave roads. You are also more likely to take more dangerous work in desperation. If you get into an accident, you are saddled with medical debt that directly affects your ability to pay state taxes so the state government can pave the roads. Even this example skips over many factors that can multiply risk: less-safe older cars, exhaustion and stress brought on by longer commutes and life in poverty, distance to medical care, and the fact that your income might be so low that you have to walk or bike to work, an especially dangerous condition. An accident can make you vulnerable to poverty, living in poverty makes you more likely to die by accident, and poor places do not have money to spend to prevent accidents.

Never mind states, let’s go down to the county-by-county level:

• Nationwide, the census area whose residents are most likely to die by accident is rural Lake and Peninsula Borough, Alaska, which is 76 percent Indigenous.
• The first sizably populated runner-up is Oglala Lakota County, with a population of more than three-quarters of a million people. It is entirely inside the Pine Ridge Reservation. It is one of America’s biggest and poorest reservations, a place of devastating superlatives: lowest life expectancy, lowest per capita income . . . a majority of homes lack water, electricity, insulation, and sewage.

This is heartbreaking.

(London) Skyline

Self is in a nostalgic mood this rainy, gloomy Sunday in northern California.

Posting for Travel with Intent’s One-Word Sunday. The theme is SKYLINE.

Here’s Southbank by the Thames. Took these pictures leaving Shakespeare’s Globe after a play. The bridge is the old Blackfriars.

The Famine Memorial: St. Stephen’s Green

One of self’s must-see stops whenever she is in Dublin is St. Stephen’s Green. She loves this park and its meandering paths, its leafy spaces.

She was in Dublin in late November, when the trees were turning. Here is Edward Delaney’s Famine Memorial. More information about the artist here.

Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six-Word Saturday.

Party in Fort Greene: Still Story #3 in SAFE PLACES

Loving the narrators in this collection — so far, all young women at loose ends, unsure of themselves and mostly just going with the flow.

This narrator lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Not too sure what she does for a living, but she makes enough to pay a very cheap rent, and to watch movies by herself. She meets a young man named Paul, and he invites her to a party at his place.

The next night I was in Fort Greene. It was less than two miles from Williamsburg, but I had to take the train to Manhattan and back to get there. Paul’s apartment was in the basement — cavernous with almost no light.

His roommate Ralph answered the door: “Oh hey, come on in. Paul told us all about you. Hey Paul,” he yelled, “she’s here.” It was the kind of party I hadn’t been to since high school in Portland: eight people sitting around with beer, listening to loud music. They even wore the same clothes: concert t-shirts and black pants, flannel shirts and Levis. The music playing was punk from the late 70s: the Jam, the Clash, the Buzzcocks. The friends — all guys and one loud brashy girl — were all jovial and trashed. “You want a beer?” one guy Mickey said.

— Safe Places: Stories, p. 35

Flower of the Day: California Native

The Atherton Public Library received the Mother of All Glow-Ups last year. Self had grown so used to the trailer that she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Anyhoo, one day last fall, exactly one week before Halloween, self dropped by. The walk was lined with California native plants, giving off a heavenly scent. Anyone know what these are called?

Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.

Ragtag Daily Prompt: PATH

To the Mendocino Headlands, Day After Christmas 2022, 9:30 a.m.

Posting for Ragtag Daily