(no subject)

I missed my stop on the L and got off at Wilson Avenue. It's a hard looking station: heavy, repeating, curved steel braces painted industrial green buttress the walls and ceiling. Everything else is concrete. I couldn't say what neighborhood it was but it had a rough edge, with long, dismal streets against brick walls. And where there were houses or walk-ups, every building was a different shape and size giving the area a complete sense of divorce from an idea of neighborhood. I glanced at the map on my phone and realized I was near the vast graveyards that strafe the frontier between inner Queens and Brooklyn. There was a sense of general menace, so I put on the most improbable music on my phone: a Grateful Dead concert from 1969, and followed the map home. Half-way, antique detail emerged from some of the run-down apartments: wrought iron doors, or carved wooden porticoes with graceful curves; then the cream colored buildings of Ridgewood. You make a certain unspoken deal with the city, one that you're likely to forget most of the time: you'll exist in spaces of nothing natural: just glass, metal, brick, and plastic; the only thing soft is the human body.