12.13.24: A winter walk

This was the second of two dedicated photo walks that I’ve taken this year with my friend Sandy. I met Sandy at one of the events following Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020. Protests and public funerals are a great way to meet likeminded friends, although most of the fellow photographers I meet are a bit shy at first. I tend to like being behind the lens, observing until I begin to get to know you. And then, I’ll request that you pick me up downtown after my chiropractor appointment and drop me off at home in time for my Amazon grocery delivery. Sandy is just the kind of friend who offers the first, and doesn’t balk at the latter.

A few days after this walk, I bought something on facebook marketplace, and the guy told me he lived “in the ugly building across from the Cosmos Club,” which I only had just learned about when Sandy and I walked by it.

I first saw this HOPE poster and didn’t realize it had a second half until I saw one intact a few minutes later.

Totally unrelated: it’s wild to think that a lot of these embassies and art museums used to be single family homes in the Gilded Age and before. What will we have to convert for the greater good when this current Gilded Age comes crashing down? The Cybertrucks aren’t even going to last until climate change renders winters extinct.

I just cannot resist a winter berry. The red and green just does something so soothing to my eyeballs (it’s why I picked it as my main color scheme in my living room!). I’m glad I live in a time when most of the poisonous plant research has been done because I do not fault all of the people throughout history who have seen something so delicious like this in the middle of a bleak winter and thought: yum.

I joked that the theme of the day was “lions” after I took this streak of photos. Then I joked, as I was taking a photo of this deflated santa, that I thought inflatable decorations were lazy. Sandy said she put up inflatables and I wanted to crawl in a hole and die, but she agreed with me: “No, we are lazy,” she said.

Sandy is a native Washingtonian and has lived here a good chunk of her adult life as well; although we didn’t go on a predetermined walking tour like Nicky and I usually to do, Sandy was an insightful tour guide, pointing out the hotel entrance where Reagan got shot (a sad day, Sandy says, because he didn’t die), and a bronze statue of St. Jerome that used to reside at a monastery near her childhood home until it was moved to the Croatian embassy on Massachusetts Ave NW (its sculptor was Croatian).

~enhance bird~

~enhance~

Hi bud.

As a frequent dog walker, I try to adhere to people’s signs about where (and more often, where not) a dog can poop, but you know, sometimes they just can’t control it. I realize this trash can refers to people dropping bags of dog poop into a private person’s home trash can, which I understand can be tempting, but come on people. Hold that shit until you get to a city trash can—or better yet, hide it in a hot hallway of the Heritage Foundation or Congress. If they catch you claim ignorance: “Well, I didn’t see a sign that said I couldn’t dump my cat litter in Ted Cruz’s office.”

I’m a sucker for a lucky cat but I don’t actually own one. I’m sure that glaring omission in my collection of kitsch will rectify itself one day.

The photos that Sandy and I take have a lot of overlap, but even if the subject is the same, the point of view is always unique. We both spotted this “missing” sign and didn’t see the “dog” at first. Either way, it was worth a photo. What do you do when your missing dog poster goes missing?

What photos can never show is all that takes place before, after, and during their creation. I’ve always loved scrapbooking or visual memory keeping—when I look at these photos I remember the snippets of conversation that preceded or were prompted by a particular scene. Most aren’t relevant to anyone but me and Sandy, and even then most of what is said is lost, as it probably should be—the point is always both the journey and the destination.

I don’t know who Jeff is, but I bet he deserves it.