Tuesdayoff

I'm doubtful that today's day off couldn't've gone much better.

After making my initial posts here for the day I went on to finish reading the book, Jailbird, I had started a few days ago. From there, very restless with the amount of free time I had on my hands, I went for an hour and a half bike ride.

For whatever reason, I have long accepted the notion that Buffalo is a small city and that the only healthy areas it has are Elmwood, Hertel and, to a lesser extent, Main St.

The truth is that Buffalo is a small city relative to the many other cities on the planet. And 280,000 people is still a lot of people unless compared to the 6,500,000,000 of us funny little creatures running around on the same planet. A planet which we also accept as small, but this is true only when compared to other known planets.

But to me, on a bike, the planet is fucking enormous. And even Buffalo is big. Big enough even to house neighborhoods I have never been in. Thankfully, I found a few of them today. In fact I went down eleven streets I had never been on before: Florida St, Hedley Pl, Hughes Ave, Blaine St, Beverly Rd, Meech St, Oak Grove Ave, Loring Ave, Burbank Dr, Meadowview Pl, Agassiz Cir that lead me to the previously unvisited Medaille College that anyone who has ever driven on the 198 has been next to while waiting at the light at Parkside.

Some of the views include:

Beverly Rd, which with its consistent row of houses with the median in the road and those seemingly ancient street lights rotating direction gives me yet another street scape that makes me immediately think of Buffalo:


Trees on Hughes Ave, right behind Canius College, that I didn't think grew that tall in Buffalo. Or survived the October storm for that matter:


Florida St, where I see five distinct Buffalo characteristics in this view:
1. Parking Lot Front property (though that may be more of an American characteristic than specifically just a Buffalo one)
2. An empty parking lot
3. Sparse, unhealthy looking trees
4. A boarded up attic window
5. A plastic covered window


From there I slowly made my way through Forest Lawn Cemetery for a few pics:

Death Front Property:




Once I returned home I caught up with a lot of the small daily distractions that I tend to put off in the name of not annoying myself like straightening up my room, catching up on emails (I'm still behind) and continuing some other things I've been meaning to spend some time working on.

I did catch a couple of brief naps, as well as a brief Seinfeld for my only TV (as opposed to those long Seinfelds). By the end of the day I did take one more bike ride after making dinner and am now winding up the day with a little bit of posting here and the hopefully some reading before I go to bed.

All in all, not a bad day. Seeing what I can do with an entire free of drinking or a hangover it almost makes me wish I didn't drink.

Almost.

Houese Where Nobody Lives

There's a house on my block
That's abandoned and cold
Folks moved out of it a
Long time ago

Now that the heat that had me literally doing nothing—it was too hot to even sit still and read: the eye movement worked up a sweat—for what seems like the last two weeks (not counting the weekend hangovers), I finally found the inspiration today to do what I been hoping to do with my summer and hope to do a bit more frequently here—after all it’s a free activity (as long as one grants me the small cost of batteries for the camera and the power the computer uses to post them on the Internet): I took a bike ride through the West Side of Buffalo and shot some pictures of the area.

And they took all their things
And they never came back
Looks like it's haunted
With the windows all cracked

(Contrary to popular Buffalo belief, people aren’t the only things shot in that neighborhood.)

And everyone call it
The house, the house where
Nobody lives

I used to live over in the area—Upper West Side to be more exact—and find myself wanting to ride in that direction all the time. I figured what better place to start than the old place, 425 Auburn:


(not pictured, 425 Auburn)

And a pic of the place we used to stare out at while sitting on the most historic porch that will never again be enjoyed. Here, the Owl House:



Heading west on Auburn, I then crossed over Grant St and took in a view of the street that, to me, is the exact type of view I envision when picturing a Buffalo neighborhood, with the houses all neatly aligned in both distance from the street and rooftop heights. And I love this type of view, even if the street is obviously lacking in some tree cover:



I headed all the way down to a block before Niagara St before I cut back over to Breckenridge to head back east. Breckenridge, like Auburn and nearly every other street in Buffalo, has it share of houses worth taking note of for still holding out and holding up:





But also those that, well, aren’t exactly keeping up their end of the bargain:





Seeing these houses gives me an odd sense of hope that people aren’t in fact all trees and don’t all have roots. But, it is also a horrific reminder that, even though we are still not completely past our nomadic past, we are incredibly more wasteful and careless in our current methods of picking up and moving away. The fact that one can cause such neglect to a community—root word commune, or something many are a part of—and get away with it is despicable.

...I have all of life's treasures
And they are fine and they are good
They remind me that houses
Are just made of wood

But right now I’m too tired to elaborate. Even in this much cooler weather. I’m sure the subject will arise again, so long as I continue to take such bike rides as these.

What makes a house grand
Ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house
It's a palace for sure

As I returned back across Richmond Ave I noticed an odd sense of quiet in the neighborhood that wasn’t in the West Side. Even though the area is a bit more vacated, people and kids were out everywhere on the west side of Richmond. I saw two football games being played in the street, kids of all ages riding bikes and playing in the street and quite a good percentage of porches having people relaxing on them. But as soon as I crossed back into the more affluent Elmwood Village I immediately noticed the more pristine houses barely showed signs of people living there at all. Other than the few people I noticed on porches, the only people I did see out were quietly watering their lawn. Nicely painted houses, well kept lawns and gardens and streets lined with cars, but no kids, no bikes, no loud laughter of play. As far as I could tell those were the houses where nobody lives. What good is a well kept neighborhood if you can barely tell anyone is alive there? Even though it might not be as densely populated as Elmwood Village, the small part of the West Side I rode through tonight is obviously more lived in.

Without love...
It ain't nothin but a house
A house where nobody lives
Without love it ain't nothin
But a house, a house where
Nobody lives.
-Tom Waits, House Where Nobody Lives

Last week I talked of hearing concertos from my porch, but I now know they were only the band opening up for the much louder show going on in the neighborhoods to the west of me. The same neighborhood I used to take in such sounds from and one I will have to eventually get back to.

Fuck all this uptight silence around me.

(And yes, I finally figured out how to use pics!)