Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn

As the rooftop farmer explained to me, a "farm" by definition is a commercial enterprise; what he had was a farm, and not an elaborate rooftop garden. That, and the six-thousand square-feet might help.

This rooftop farm is in Greenpoint, the most northernly province--neighborhood--in Brooklyn, kinda like, in Brooklyn terms, Greenpoint is the Canada to Williamsburg's America, the last bastion of civilization before the arctic bleakness of Queens.

The views from on top are, to say the least, spectacular. If I was with you, my fair readers, I could show you the building where Corrie works, but it is too hard to describe it's whereabouts here.

The farm has tomatoes, eggplants, various squash, many peppers, basil, edible flowers, many herbs, and is gearing up for beans and peas. They also have lettuces, kale, and chard. In the previous picture, on the right side, are the heirloom cherry tomatoes, delicious brown beauties and ripe right now; and on the left side are a different strain of heirloom tomato, large acorn shapes, which will be ready in a week or two. The eggplant is ready and ripe, as is the parsley. The hops are almost there, and they're trying to find a purchaser...they're still talking with a few local breweries.

They supply a few restaurants as of right now, as well as stands at a few markets. They enjoy visitors, so if anybody will be in the City within a few weeks, I could arrange a tour.

Egg Harbor, So. Jersey, and a Car

Corrie took me as an assistant with her to a job in Egg Harbor, but not, mind you, Egg Harbor City, which is a different place (or thing). She was telling me it was in Southern Jersey, close to Atlantic City, but I had an incorrect notion in my brain about how far south Atlantic City was. When I saw it on a map I finally figured it out. Wowzers...

Then I realized that while Atlantic City is so far, it is only so far for the folks out here. Yes, it is at one entirely opposite end of a state, but states out here are so small, or seem so small if you grew up out west. People here are loathe to drive to Philly and back in a day, which is equivalent to driving from SLO to Santa Barbara and back, or Citrus Heights to SF or Berkeley and back...how many times have one of us driven from SLO to LA or the Bay Area and back in a day to run some stupid errand? Relative distances and collective imaginations...

In any case, Corrie and I set out on our subway at ten-til-eight Tuesday morning, going to Penn Station, which is on our route, thankfully, having no need to transfer trains. At Penn Station, we boarded a commuter train heading deep into Jersey, and departed at Princeton Junction. Apparently the Ivy League university is off a ways from the train line, and from Princeton Junction one can take a two-car train called, I'm not making this us, a "dinky", off due west towards the university, a few miles away.

At Princeton Junction, arriving around 10, we picked up the ZipCar Corrie had reserved, and I got to be navigator for our leisurely drive south-by-east to Egg Harbor, an inland (go figure) suburb of Atlantic City. I wanted to drive, since I have a valid license and all, but I'm not on Corrie's office plan, and we can ill-afford a speeding ticket, and boy, the ridiculous nature of Jersey roads, highways, traffic organization, and drivers drive a driver a certain kind of crazy.

Along the way we had fun laughing at things native Jersey folk probably think of as quirks, or when they find a particularly maddening traffic signal or sign while traveling outside of New Jersey, they might sigh wistfully and say, "Just like home..." We tried to stay off the main toll roads and drove through small towns, but out there they're all called "Townships", like you'll see a sign for "Edison TNSHP", with an abbreviation that makes you wonder "does leaving the vowels out really save that much money?" or "that W must be expensive."

We got lost, sort of, on the way back, since the road we were following turned out not to be the road it said it was (that makes little sense, I know, but fly to Jersey, rent a car, and try to keep your sanity driving around the interior; it'll become clearer), but we got back to the spot two minutes later than we were reserved for, but thankfully didn't incur a fine. We tried to find a place to eat by the Princeton Junction train station. Good luck with that yourself. If we weren't so hungry, we would've just waited. As it were, we had to choose between Dunkin' Donuts and Subways...

At least Subways has food that hasn't been deep-fried. Don't get me wrong; I've eaten at Dunkin Donuts plenty of times since moving out here; I've eaten at Subways, since moving out here, um, once--last Tuesday in Jersey. That kind of food hurts my body, and I was hurting for most of the train ride back.

I'm glad Corrie had someone--me--to join her on a trip like that...if it had been me alone, or her alone...jeeze, blood-pressure levels would have been dangerously high for the better part of the day, possibly week...

Carnival, Brooklyn Style

Every Labor Monday for the past few years (decades?) in Brooklyn is cause for the Carnival Parade in the style of something resembling Rio's Carnival...other times it's called the West Indian Day Parade or West Indian Pride Day.

All along Eastern Parkway West Indians clamber for a viewing spot to check out the parade festivities, rubbing elbows with Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Colin Powell, now a resident of Virginia, but who grew up in Harlem and is one of the City's favorite gehtto-to-Army-general success stories.

As was the case the last four Labor Day's we've been here, we skipped the event.

Nothing against West Indians, of course, as the brightly colored flags representing the various countries go on sale a few days before hand, and get worn by revelers like capes, dew rags, neck-kerchiefs, pocket adornments, are quite pretty and give us a chance to test our knowledge of foreign-but-close-by nations.

One thing that keeps Corrie and I away is the size of the crowd. This year, while the final tally of amount of spectators is sketchy and won't be known for a while, they were expecting upwards of four-million people to attend. Let me say that again: four-million. That is a ton of people (many must have come from PA, NJ, CT, and areas of NY outside the City), almost half of the population of the entire five-boroughs, and almost twice the population of the entirety of Brooklyn itself. That's quite chaotic, and if Corrie and I were younger, and into visceral life experiences, we might be interested in checking it out...or at least I would.

Times Square at New Years is a packed sardine can of drunken party-people, and they can only boast a quarter of the amount of people they expect to line the blocks of Eastern Parkway every Labor Day.

In 2006, our first Labor Day in the City, we asked our neighbor (who's since moved back to the Bronx) Tanya if she was going to attend. "Hell no!" she responded, "somebody's always gettin' stabbed at that thing..." The next day the papers told the story of the few fights, stabbings, and a shooting or two, which, the paper made it seem like, was run of the mill. We learned to never be surprised when a few million people get together, drinking booze, and mostly natural hot-heads who take attacks on pride as fist-fight--or worse--inducing events.

To me, though, four-million people seemed like it could be in the range of the total population of the Caribbean collection of nations--until I looked it up. I was thinking at most maybe 10 million, but then I saw that as of 2000 it was estimated at 37.5 million. My bad.

It looked like they had a great time at the parade, as usual, and as usual after the parade, late last night there were roving gangs of drunken teens chasing each other up and down our street, throwing water balloons at one another, even though that wasn't my first guess. A shiver goes up your spine when you see one guy running for his life, being chased by six or eight guys, running down the middle of the street, all past your stoop...then it's a relief when you hear the water-balloon...a real fracas would probably have included guns and less running, you tell yourself.

Quite Possibly the Worst Haiku Written

I'm sure there's probably worse Haiku written than this...but maybe not...

I found a Haiku poem I wrote for a homework assignment during eighth grade in some old papers I still have with me, having lugged them--apparently--from Sac to SLO to Brooklyn...

I cracked up when I read it, at how lame such an effort was, but it was the second to last Haiku in the assignment, and the last one is at least, I don't know...

In any case, here you go:

"

My mind is going blank

I can't think of anything

I am now done

"

Is that not the epitome of pathetic lack of effort? Sometimes it's hard to believe I aced that class. I must have put forth effort at least occasionally. Homework was never my thing, but it's usually not most people's "thing"...

One-Hundred-and-Fifty

I was tempted last week to try and add filler to boost my post totals up to get to 150 before August ended, but that didn't seem right.

150 strong and counting, I guess...maybe about 130 posts are actually content and not "I'll be on here soon" or "Hey Dan, how's it going?" (that could be done serviceably with a phone) or "So here's another milestone post or photograph..."

I've had some interesting job scenarios creeping out of the woodwork lately, which is nice, and which I'll keep anyone interested posted. I finally met the literary agent my New York friends kept telling me I needed to meet...we'll see how that develops. In my quest to finish off Thomas Pynchon's entire library of published material I've only got the short-story collection and the novel Mason&Dixon to go, which I aim to get my hands on this weekend.

My own writing has been going well. I like to think of my style being inside a unit-cube, with the axes being--instead of x-y-z--Pynchon-Denis Johnson-Haruki Murakami, and each piece falling in someplace closer to one axis or another, depending on the subject. Whatever. That's hard to explain...

Corrie's kicking ass and taking names still. I was lucky enough to venture to Egg Harbor, New Jersey just this week with her to a job site. This spot was far away, really, as far away in New Jersey as one could get. Her hours are complete and submitted (that is, her hours needed to start taking the licensing exams), and she's thinking about organizing some of our Architecture people into study groups.

Tuxedo has been doing his thing. Whining, mewing, spazzing, outsmarting us, begging for love and attention...and I'll end with a picture of Corrie and him...

Thanks for reading this far, everyone who does, I love all of you.

Quick Video Note

I was turned on to a website back in 2004, while at Poly, that had on a semi-weekly basis a cartoon program where one of the characters would reply humorously to reader's emails.

I'm talking of course about Strong Bad of Homestar Runner's cavalcade of humorous ninnies. The remarkable thing about this website and it's content is that it is funny, yet it's clean. Norm told me that it was started by Mormons, which could be the case.

Homestar Runner is the good-guy idiot, Strong Bad has two brothers--Strong Mad and Strong Sad--as well as some furry toadie simply called The Cheat, but I'm not going to go into all the other myriad characters. Strong Bad's email-reading cartoon shows, called sbemails, have progressed over the years upon better and better computers (the Tandy, the Compy, the Lappy, the Corpy, and now the newest version yet).

I've already spent too many words dealing with some background. I'm supplying a link to a clip about the difference between Independent films and Indie films. This is a pretty good spot to be introduced to this brand of actually funny clean humor, and, for those already familiar with these knuckleheads, it'll be a nice reminder that they're still producing some funny stuff.

Quick Football Note

Kellen Clemens got beat out by the rookie Mark Sanchez, the former USC quarterback (and descended from Mexican migrant workers), to be the starting quarterback for the New York Jets. The Jets moved up in the draft to pick Sanchez, needing a new face for the franchise and trying to drum up support for their new stadium--opening next year--and the attendant expensive PSLs (that's Personal Seat License for you non-NFL fans...does it seem strange that you should need to drop between two- and twenty-thousand dollars for the right to buy tickets to games?).

At first, depending how much you know about the Jets, or really care in the least, it might seem to appear that Clemens got jobbed. He was supposed to be the new face-of-the-franchise. He was picked in the second round a few years back after a nice college career at Oregon, tapped to be the new "it" kid by the coach and general manager. He never wowed anybody though, and before last season started, it seemed like that would have been his time to shine, his time to excel, his time to claim his spot as an elite starting QB...and then the Jets went and traded for Brett Favre. Maybe next year would be his year.

And then they went and drafted the flashy Sanchez, and let them battle for it during the preseason. I thought they hosed Clemens. To me, it seemed like they were screwing him over again, but the reality of sports in this media-centric area makes franchises skittish with unproven stars, and maybe Sanchez could be some backup, some insurance.

But then Clemens never took control of the quarterback competition this preseason, even with four years to learn the complicated playbook and starting out ahead on the depth chart...so, whatever it's worth, I've changed my mind. Maybe Clemens hosed himself. Maybe he needs a change of scenery, and with a trade he might develop into a great QB. Maybe he's just not good enough to be elite.

But really, it's just football. American football. America's bloodsport and machismo factory. I must say, though, that it's kind of neat having an LA kid who's grandparents were thrown out of Chavez Ravine, to make way for Dodger Stadium, after moving over from Mexico, be in an extremely prominent spot in New York. After Sonia, he's another Latino role-model in the area that's set to make a splash.