Vacant Lot Quotes

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Amazing how he could make her feel. Safe in a vacant lot, warm in the middle of the night. Just being this close to him, being able to touch his thoughts and feel his presence, was comforting-and dizzying.

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Let me guess," said Clary. "On the inside it's an abandoned police station; from the outside, mundanes only see a condemned apartment building, or a vacant lot, or…" "Actually it looks like a Chinese restaurant from the outside," Luke said. "Takeout only, no table service." "A Chinese restaurant?" Clary echoed in disbelief. He shrugged. "Well, we are in Chinatown. This was the Second Precinct building once." "People must think it's weird that there's no phone number to call for orders." Luke grinned. "There is. We just don't answer it much. Sometimes, if they're bored, some of the cubs will deliver someone some mu shu pork." "You're kidding." "Not at all. The tips come in handy.

i laced my shoes with sorrow and walked a weary road dead end streets don't come undone with double knots wing tipped shoes that walk on air through vacant lots

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.

Lost" they say that hell is crowded, yet, when you’re in hell, you always seem to be alone. & you can’t tell anyone when you’re in hell or they’ll think you’re crazy & being crazy is being in hell & being sane is hellish too. those who escape hell, however, never talk about it & nothing much bothers them after that. I mean, things like missing a meal, going to jail, wrecking your car, or even the idea of death itself. when you ask them, “how are things?” they’ll always answer, “fine, just fine…” once you’ve been to hell and back, that’s enough it’s the greatest satisfaction known to man. once you’ve been to hell and back, you don’t look behind you when the floor creaks and the sun is always up at midnight and things like the eyes of mice or an abandoned tire in a vacant lot can make you smile once you’ve been to hell and back.

The world revolves like ancient women, gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

What the Chronics are—or most of us—are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut. We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves.

These rocks are a release for my pent-up emotions. When I feel all tied up inside, I just stand here and throw rocks into that vacant lot!" "Hello, Charlie Brown, you blockhead!" "Sometimes I think I'm kind of a vacant lot myself...

Growth is an unavoidable part of life. Whether we mean for it to happen or not, our bodies continually nourish and regenerate themselves, our minds continually learn and expand, and our lives continually evolve. We have the power to craft our growth the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden, or we can leave it to chance, allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds that spread across a vacant lot.

I stared out the window for the rest of the journey. Building, tree, car, car, van, wall, vacant lot, van. I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls must rise between my love and me and the sea will be a black art between us. Time with a hard hand will tear out the streets tangled in my breast. Nothing will be left but memories. (O afternoons earned with suffering, nights hoping for the sight of you, dejected vacant lots, poor sky shamed in the bottom of the puddles like a fallen angel. . . . And your life that graces my desire and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood shining today in the glow of my love. . . .) Final as a statue your absence will sadden other fields.

PRAYING It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

Gods have a way of sprouting from vacant lots.

Then he glanced at Roar, who waited on the dock. Maverick had never heard him speak a word. He’d only seen Roar stare vacantly at the water, or at the sky. “You know, you could do a lot better than him, ladybug.” Aria shook her head. “No. I couldn’t.

I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts mad in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.

For five weeks, the Associated Press had provided the world with lurid coverage of the attack on Virgil Earp, which was labeled Cow Boy revenge for what was being called “the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” because it took too long to set the type for “Gunfight in the Vacant Lot behind Camillus Fly’s Photography Studio Near Fremont Street.

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. There was a gusty wind blowing in at the windows and the soot from the oil burners of the hotel next door was drown-draughted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot. I was thinking about going out to lunch and that life was pretty flat and that it would probably be just as flat if I took a drink and that taking a drink all alone at that time of day wouldn't be any fun anyway.

He'd obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear. I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon. "It's that vacant expression," she said, "people just want to fill the empty void".

There's hundreds of corners on this island, Crystal said. And there are thousands of us. Exiles from the heartland without a heart. Out of the old country, a brand-new tribe, dancing to new tunes around a bucket of fire in a vacant lot.

...Trout said this about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: 'Easy come, easy go.

It may be that a woman's creative process is misunderstood or disrespected by those around her. It is up to her to inform them that when she has 'that look' in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled.It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and ....

I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.

He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages of a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, toward the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them! Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries! And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark.

Oh, look at you lot. You're all so vacant. Is it nice not being me? It must be so relaxing.

To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Archie's carrying him to the vacant lot near Belle's. He's dead. Shot through the head.

There are no vacant lots in nature.

Up early on Friday, May 18, the day when nominations were to be made, he passed some time playing “fives”—a variety of handball—with some other men in a vacant lot next to the Illinois State Journal office.

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.” The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate. If

Building, tree, car, car, van, wall, vacant lot, van. I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I keep looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

To those who insisted that the lot of the free white laborer was worse than that of the slave, Frederick Douglass liked to point out that his old position on the plantation had been vacant since his departure, and encouraged them to apply.

Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times. There was red lipstick on his beard. He opened one eye, saw the brilliant colors of the quilt and closed his eye quickly. But after a while he looked again. His eye went past the quilt to the floor, to the broken plate in the corner, to the glasses standing on the table turned over on the floor, to the spilled wine and the books like heavy fallen butterflies. There were little bits of curled red paper all over the place and the sharp smell of firecrackers. He could see through the kitchen door to the steak plates stacked high and the skillets deep in grease. Hundreds of cigarette butts were stamped out on the floor. And under the firecracker smell was a fine combination of wine and whiskey perfume. His eye stopped for a moment on a little pile of hairpins in the middle of the floor. He rolled over slowly and supporting himself on one elbow he looked out the broken window. Cannery Row was quiet and sunny. The boiler was open. The door of the Palace Flophouse was closed. A man slept peacefully among the weeds in the vacant lot. The Bear Flag was shut up tight.

In this way the vacant lot acts as a religious catch-all, the anti-church of churches, an amalgamation of others. It’s full of dogs too, who are there to worship the humans, as well as the occasional cat which comes not to worship but to be worshipped.

And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there. There were always six hundred kids everywhere except where two or more neighbourhoods met – at the Park, for instance – where the numbers would grow into the thousands. I once took part in an ice hockey game at the lagoon in Greenwood Park that involved four thousand kids, all slashing away violently with sticks, and went on for at least three quarters of an hour before anyone realized that we didn’t have a puck.

I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness.

Taking Root I am no stranger to roots. In third grade, I punctured a sweet potato’s middle with toothpicks, suspended it halfway in a cup of water until sprout-like whiskers swam along its bottom. On day nine leaves crowned it. I scooped out soil with my hands and buried it up to its neck. I’ve laid down my own in places where corn and tomatoes grow in vacant lots, where cilantro and basil thrive on window sills and in cities balanced on ancestor’s bones. Roots are hardy travelers, adaptable: they float on water, cohere to wood, burrow deep beneath foundations, challenge floorboards. from Second Skin

The two of us, in the rain, went down streets of vacant lots. The sidewalks in that part of the world sink and evade your step, in winter the branches of the little ash trees at the edge hold the raindrops a long time, a tenuous fairyland trembling in the breeze. Our way back to the hospital led past a number of newly built hotels, some had names, others hadn’t even gone to that much trouble. “Rooms by the week” was all they had to say for themselves. The war had suddenly emptied them of all the workers and wage slaves who had lived there. They wouldn’t even come back to die. Dying is work, too, but they’d do it somewhere else.

She's worked alongside him as they built their house on the vacant lot behind the sweet house and cultivated a small but fertile patch of cassava and sweet potatoes. Along the side wall of the house, a paradise of colors: tender pink hibiscus, fiery flamingo flowers, delicate purple orchids, and plump, juicy red protea.

...But as the years passed, and the people of the city started fillin' up the vacant lots and banishin' the animals, the museum started growin'." "It became a refuge for all the wild things," said Olga Ciavolga. "All the things the city did not want." "The hill keeps them," rumbled the bizzlehound again. "The hill keeps everything.

Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don’t grow in forests or prairies—in “the wild.” Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.

Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave.

Your fascinating admirer waits here for you,’ said Donovan, indicating a vacant and grass-grown lot at the corner. ‘Yes, Matty dear, when you’ve gone to your virgin bed, he sits here, in his car, watching your room to make sure of your exclusive interest in him—the whole town’s laughing its head off about it,’ he added cruelly, and glanced swiftly sideways to see how she would take it.

The prescription for spiritual transformation has often been too individualistically oriented. We are encouraged to engage in spiritual disciplines so that we might have the power to do what we can’t do by will power alone. But what happens when people don’t have the “will power” to engage spiritual disciples on a consistent basis? Our character is left untended. “In a wild world like ours, your character, left untended, will become a stale room, an obnoxious child, a vacant lot filled with thorns, weeds, broken bottles, raggedy grocery bags, and dog droppings. Your deepest channels will silt in, and you will feel yourself shallowing. You’ll become a presence neither you nor others will enjoy, and you and they will spend more and more time and energy trying to be anywhere else.”[1] So what are we to do?

Across the intersection he could see the crumbling blue-green facade of the Palace Amusements building, the grinning ten-foot-high face on its north wall smiling out on empty streets and vacant lots. The arcade entrances were covered with plywood; broken neon tubing hung from the walls. He thought of the hours he had spent there as a kid, playing pinball, firing the real .22s in the shooting gallery, riding the bumper cars. It hurt to look at it now.

One day in the spring of 1894 or so, Amanda Cobb looked out her kitchen window and saw Tyrus and a bunch of Negro boys merrily hauling a cart laden with scrap metal, broken furniture, and other things they’d found in backyards and vacant lots around town. They were headed toward the junkyard to try to make a few dollars, and Mrs. Cobb knew for what. “He was always thinking up ways of earning money to buy baseball supplies,” she would tell a writer for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Sunday Union and Republican in 1928. “He was always playing when he was a child. In fact, we had a hard time getting him to go to school. I remember that the first money he earned he spent for a mitt. He couldn’t have been more than six years old when a neighbor asked him to take his cow to the pasture and gave Ty some change for doing it. Ty didn’t buy candy or ice cream. He knew what he wanted, and he got it—a baseball glove.

..something like that make me feel what Rhonda, what Farrakhan, say - there is a god. But me when I think of it I'm more inclined to go with Shug in The Colour Purple. God ain' white, he ain' no Jew or Muslim, maybe he ain' even black, maybe he ain' even a 'he.' Even now I go downtown and see .. I see those men in vacant lot share one hot dog and they homeless, that's good as Jesus with his fish. I remember when I had my daughter, nurse nice to me too - all that is god.

Things got used until they were useless and then they were tossed into a heap in a vacant lot that served as the neighborhood dump. There discarded items sat until the scavengers with wooden pushcarts made their rounds, picking through the piles. Anything recyclable—bottles, wire, any kind of scrap—was carted away to a vast and stinking shantytown in another part of the city where there resided what seemed to be a caste of trash pickers who made a living from recycling Manila’s refuse.

I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress-tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some pan or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's-- the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

I'd been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I've been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City's got a few, and Chicago's got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn't give them a lot of options. The details are different - some of 'em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling.

For all his courtly title, the monarch (Danaus plexippus, thank you, Madame Goody) is the most down-home of butterflies. That is, before they were virtually extirpated by air pollution and pesticides, monarchs were familiar figures in most American neighborhoods. They fluttered their zigzag course (as if under the orders of some secret navigator whose logic was as fanciful as true) across backyards and vacant lots and swimming holes and fairgrounds and streets of towns and cities: they have been spotted from the observation deck of the Empire State Building by surprised tourists from Indiana who thought they had left such creatures down by the barn. Indeed, wherever there is access to milkweed (Asclepias syriaca: let's not carry this too far, Madame G.) there you will find monarchs, for the larvae of this species is as addicted to milkweed juice as the most strung-out junky to smack. His appetite is awesome in its singularity for he would rather starve than switch.

Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked. She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.” “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.” “What’s your point?” “The changes.” I thought for a moment. “They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.” “So?” “Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take.

Feeling like a displaced person Laura struggles with being defined by her status as a widow. “Distracted by the word widow, which had taken root, budded and bloomed in her mind like a weed in a vacant lot, Laura opened the dictionary on her desk. Flipping past thousands of words, she used in every-day communication with family, friends, and acquaintances – those little black letters, symbols to express thoughts for the ear to hear and the heart to feel – she wondered, What words gave expression to her pain? What words described the sense of something lurking inside her, or the dark shadows stalking her mind? Widow: a five-letter word, preceded by words like wide, and widget and followed by words like widow’s peak, widow’s weeds, and widower. This little word – widow- in small case, had no business masquerading as a noun: a person, place or thing. In contrast, - widget, a small mechanical object, not a feeling thing, just an object – seemed an honest noun. Widow is not an object, she thought. “It’s a word so thin as to be nothing but a wisp of breath passing through one’s vocal cords and disappearing almost imperceptibly between one’s lips. It has no life of its own. It’s a mere label, and it could just as well be a piece of paper saying, chocolate cookies or best before date.

Madrid. It was that time, the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette,' he with the hair of cream-colored string, he with the large and empty laugh like a slice of watermelon, the one of the Tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra on the tables, on the coffins. It was when there were geraniums on the balconies, sunflower-seed stands in the Moncloa, herds of yearling sheep in the vacant lots of the Guindalera. They were dragging their heavy wool, eating the grass among the rubbish, bleating to the neighborhood. Sometimes they stole into the patios; they ate up the parsley, a little green sprig of parsley, in the summer, in the watered shade of the patios, in the cool windows of the basements at foot level. Or they stepped on the spread-out sheets, undershirts, or pink chemises clinging to the ground like the gay shadow of a handsome young girl. Then, then was the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette.' Don Zana was a good-looking, smiling man, thin, with wide angular shoulders. His chest was a trapezoid. He wore a white shirt, a jacket of green flannel, a bow tie, light trousers, and shoes of Corinthian red on his little dancing feet. This was Don Zana 'The Marionette,' the one who used to dance on the tables and the coffins. He awoke one morning, hanging in the dusty storeroom of a theater, next to a lady of the eighteenth century, with many white ringlets and a cornucopia of a face. Don Zana broke the flower pots with his hand and he laughed at everything. He had a disagreeable voice, like the breaking of dry reeds; he talked more than anyone, and he got drunk at the little tables in the taverns. He would throw the cards into the air when he lost, and he didn't stoop over to pick them up. Many felt his dry, wooden slap; many listened to his odious songs, and all saw him dance on the tables. He liked to argue, to go visiting in houses. He would dance in the elevators and on the landings, spill ink wells, beat on pianos with his rigid little gloved hands. The fruitseller's daughter fell in love with him and gave him apricots and plums. Don Zana kept the pits to make her believe he loved her. The girl cried when days passed without Don Zana's going by her street. One day he took her out for a walk. The fruitseller's daughter, with her quince-lips, still bloodless, ingenuously kissed that slice-of-watermelon laugh. She returned home crying and, without saying anything to anyone, died of bitterness. Don Zana used to walk through the outskirts of Madrid and catch small dirty fish in the Manzanares. Then he would light a fire of dry leaves and fry them. He slept in a pension where no one else stayed. Every morning he would put on his bright red shoes and have them cleaned. He would breakfast on a large cup of chocolate and he would not return until night or dawn.

It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.” We were broke. We couldn’t go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents’ doors at that time of night. That’s when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip’s parents’ old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. “Let’s get in the RV. We’ll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we’ll have AC,” I said. As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, “I know where we can go.” It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery. “Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?” I asked him. “We’re not going to the cemetery,” Chip said. “It’s just next to a cemetery. There’s an RV park back here.” “Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?” “Oh, quit it. You’re going to love it once I get this AC fired up.” Chip decided to go flying through the median between the two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would’ve both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle. “What was that?!” “I don’t know,” Chip said. I tried to put it in reverse, and then forward, and then reverse again, and the thing just wouldn’t move. I hopped out to take a look and couldn’t believe it. There was a movie a few years ago where the main character gets his RV caught on this fulcrum and it’s sitting there teetering with both sets of wheels up in the air. Well, we sort of did the opposite. We went across this valley, and because the RV was so long, the butt end of it got stuck on the little hill behind us, and the front end got stuck on the little hill in front of us, and the wheels were just sort of hanging there in between. I crawled back into the RV soaking wet and gave Jo the bad news. We had no place to go, no place to plug in so we could run the AC; it was pouring rain so we couldn’t really walk anywhere to get help. And at that point I was just done. We wound up toughing it out and spending the first night after our honeymoon in a hot, old RV packed full of our belongings, suspended between two bumps in the road.

I am on a train passing through Baltimore, where I grew up. I can see vacant lots, charred remains of burned buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards advertising churches, and other billboards for DNA testing of children’s paternity. Johns Hopkins Hospital looms out of the squalor. The hospital is on an isolated island situated slightly east of downtown. The downtown area is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway, and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes and forced relocation disguised as urban renewal.

Did Blake feel this vacant when he was on top? Or was looking up at the mountain a lot worse after hitting ground? It had to be. Then again, we’d both seemed happier in the struggle, at least in the beginning. There was so much to look forward to, so many milestones to reach. Maybe we were both happier with the idea, the lie that if we got to a certain place, that place is where we would find it, whatever it is. I arrived alone, and there is nothing here

Frank and other boys his age watched with wonder and excitement as squads drilled in vacant lots throughout the city. They fantasized about joining the Army to show support for the cause. If government let high-schoolers fight along side fathers, uncles and brothers, why not let fifth and sixth graders join the Army too?

It doesn’t take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground — a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots — understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we’ll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes.

As Tara walked down the corner past the vacant lot that once was the unofficial refuge for kids on the street in Halifax, she realized just how far they had both travelled from that dark end of the street, just how far they had travelled from the front steps of Hell’s Hotel.

Today, Africatown is on the brink of disappearing. All the businesses and most of the people are gone. Fewer than two thousand people live in the old neighborhoods. The Meahers, the same family that removed the Clotilda’s passengers from Africa, have in effect continued to oppress their descendents into the twentieth century. Deciding to get out of the house rental business after nearly a century as one of Africatown’s most prominent landlords, the Meaher family suddenly bulldozed hundreds of rental properties they had built, destroying much of Africatown’s housing stock, rendering entire city blocks into vacant lots. They leased or sold their old plantation land surrounding the community for paper mills and other heavy industry, leaving residents saddled with high rates of cancers associated with environmental pollution. Even today, the Meaher Family Land Trust Group seeks to rezone property it owns in Africatown to bring more industry into the community.

As I remember them, late summer Saturdays were always hot, dry, and colored a deep green. I know now some Saturdays must have been gray; rain must have made water princesses dance in gutter puddles, as my grandmother assured me they did, each time a drop plunked down. But I will never really believe it rained on Saturdays, for I can remember only the sun playing with bits of broken glass in the vacant lot next to my house and myself running all day up and down the block like a heathen.

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him. “From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror. “When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him. “From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror. “When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. “Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception, he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality.

every night is another dream about car keys / a half-packed suitcase / passports and plane tickets / arrivals gates / crowded train stations / vacant parking lots / fields of wheat / sunrises in other cities / smoke spiraling up and away

Praying It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. -MARY OLIVER, THIRST: POEMS BY MARY OLIVER

Ralph Mulino hated the sea. He was comfortable in the stairwells of housing projects and the stubble of vacant lots, but on the water he felt exposed. Knuckling the lip of the Harbor Patrol whaler,

Then a slow mile later such places started thinning out, in favor of vacant lots and piney woods, and a sense of empty vastness ahead.

And there is something troubling about the Burrow, something hard to name, maybe something about the low shadow it casts on the vacant lot around sunset, or maybe the smell of its walls after a November rain, so maybe the children-bless them-are right to keep their distance

It was almost Christmas, and a Santa Claus in a vacant lot was offering to appear in pictures for five dollars. The trim on his suit was mangy, as if it had been dug out of a dumpster, yet young mothers queued ten deep on the sidewalk, holding the hands of kids waiting to get in.

We were parked in the lot of a strip shopping center on Tustin Boulevard in the city of Orange. Book Carnival was a small business between a rock shop and what looked like a vacant slot. Three doors down was a gun store.

You heard me. Home at the stroke of twelve and not a second later.” “What time is it now? Nearly ten?” “That gives you two wonderful hours to win the prince’s heart. Good luck!” “Why? Why midnight?” Godnutter glowers at me. “Let’s just say I’ve noticed your evenings with men run a lot later than I approve of. I don’t want you misbehaving with this prince. And if you’re thinking of disobeying me,” she wags the pipe stem at me, “I have set the spell so everything that’s been enchanted will turn back to it’s true form at midnight. Even the things you put white magic on! You’ll have nothing but a pumpkin, two rats, a mouse, and a dowdy dress. So watch the clock or it could get quite embarrassing!” I slam the door shut. “Drop dead, Godnutter!” I shout as the carriage begins to roll. “I already did that!” she calls after me, following it with her nasty cackle. I look back and the spot where she stood is now vacant. But her crazy laugh lingers, chasing me into the night.

vacant lots in the vicinity of University Avenue. The signature item identifying the killer was a balloon left behind, marking the body like a buoy. The balloon was always the same—a

BY DAVID D. LAITIN AND MARC JAHR | 970 words Detroit, a once great city, has become an urban vacuum. Its population has fallen to around 700,000 from nearly 1.9 million in 1950. The city is estimated to have more than 70,000 abandoned buildings and 90,000 vacant lots. Meanwhile, desperate Syrians, victims of an unfathomable civil war, are fleeing to neighboring countries, with some 1.8 million in Turkey and 600,000 in Jordan. Suppose these two social and humanitarian disasters were conjoined to produce something positive.

Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada’s historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a “National Gallery of Canada” might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as “bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art” rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic?

I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman like but technological … I also blur out the excess of unimportant information” (fig. 1.6).30 The usual critical response to these works is to see the blurring as a reference to accidental effects in amateur photography, to the artlessness and thus authenticity of such “mistakes.” Hawker eloquently explains why Richter’s translation from photo to paint is significant: At the same time that the blur is able to evoke the medium of photography so effectively and economically, in using it as a sign of photography’s idiom, Richter fastens upon something incidental to and quite apart from the medium’s central unifying characteristics (whatever these might be). It is the double duty that the blur does for Richter – its ability to be incidental to photography at the same time as central to painting – that makes it such a powerfully affecting device in his painting.31

Wieland hosted a “quilt-in” at her New York City loft and invited friends, including Canadian expatriates, to help sew La raison avant la passion as a gift for Trudeau.58 The following year, she hosted a huge party attended by Canadian expatriates, various New York artists and writers, and Trudeau himself. Throughout the late 1960s, Wieland had both an artistic and personal relationship with Trudeau. This was unusual because very few artists, if any, had such a close relationship with the prime minister and because what appears to be Wieland’s fascination with Trudeau was, I would argue, far more complex than simple adoration. It seems clear that Wieland had initially been both fascinated by Trudeau-the-person and supportive of his campaign for Liberal leader. She formed a group in New York City, for example, called Canadians Abroad for Trudeau, and, in a 1986 interview, she told Barbara Stevenson that she had initially supported his leadership campaign.59 After Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, however, Wieland’s opinion shifted as she increasingly expressed skepticism towards him and his governing philosophy to the point that, by 1986, she referred to him as a “psychopath.”60 Wieland

When they reached the top level, Susan turned to the left. The corridor had raised wallpaper in a classic floral design and nothing else. No small tables, no chairs, no pictures in frames, no Oriental runners. They passed by maybe a dozen rooms, only two with doors open. Myron noticed that the doors were extra wide and he remembered his visit to Babies and Children’s Hospital. Extra wide doors there too. For wheelchairs and stretchers and the like. When they reached the end of the corridor, Susan stopped, took a deep breath, looked back at Myron. “Are you ready?” He nodded. She opened the door and stepped inside. Myron followed. A four-poster antique bed, like something you’d see on a tour of Jefferson’s Monticello, overwhelmed the room. The walls were warm green with woodwork trim. There was a small crystal chandelier, a burgundy Victorian couch, a Persian rug with deep scarlets. A Mozart violin concerto was playing a bit too loudly on the stereo. A woman sat in the corner reading a book. She too started upright when she saw who it was. “It’s okay,” Susan Lex said. “Would you mind leaving us for a few moments?” “Yes, ma’am,” the woman said. “If you need anything—” “I’ll ring, thank you.” The woman did a semi-curtsy/semi-bow and hurried out. Myron looked at the man in the bed. The resemblance to the computer rendering was uncanny, almost perfect. Even, strangely enough, the dead eyes. Myron moved closer. Dennis Lex followed him with the dead eyes, unfocused, empty, like windows over a vacant lot.

The Russians settled in and learned a lot about us in the process. They realized that we were better educated than their own students, who only went through ten years of schooling before higher studies. They wondered at the difference in our housing, our customs, our food. Russians occupied vacant apartments from people who had fled to Romania and from Germans, who left officially for Germany. At the start of their occupation of Northern Bukovina, a delegation of German officers came to Czernovitz and were received as friends and allies. They registered all Germans who desired to leave for Germany. A number of their apartments became available.

Men can return to where they have done evil deeds, but men do not return to where they’ve been abased. On this point God’s design and our own feeling of abasement coincide so absolutely that we quit: the night, the rotting beast, the exultant mobs, our homes, our hearthfires, Bacchus in a vacant lot embracing Ariadne in the dark.

Every few blocks were vacant lots where victory gardens had been planted at the height of the war. By then, they were wrecked and full of debris. Once in a while, when you looked down at the sidewalk along the lots, you’d see a blade of grass growing up out of the concrete. That’s what my friend, the acting teacher Lee Strasberg, once called talent: a blade of grass growing up out of a block of concrete.

The BPD had also, without a warrant, raided a vacant home next to the lot where Suiter was shot—and found evidence in a completely unrelated killing that had occurred a year earlier.

There were more than fourteen thousand vacant lots in Flint—the highest vacancy rate of any city in the United States.

Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" You're dangerous 'cause you're honest You're dangerous, you don't know what you want Well you left my heart empty as a vacant lot For any spirit to haunt Hey hey sha la la Hey hey You're an accident waiting to happen You're a piece of glass left there on the beach Well you tell me things I know you're not supposed to Then you leave me just out of reach Hey hey sha la la Hey hey sha la la Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna drown in your blue sea Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna fall at the foot of thee Well you stole it 'cause I needed the cash And you killed it 'cause I wanted revenge Well you lied to me 'cause I asked you to Baby, can we still be friends Hey hey sha la la Hey hey sha la la Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna drown in your blue sea Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna fall at the foot of thee Oh, the deeper I spin Oh, the hunter will sin for your ivory skin Took a drive in the dirty rain To a place where the wind calls your name Under the trees the river laughing at you and me Hallelujah, heaven's white rose The doors you open I just can't close Don't turn around, don't turn around again Don't turn around, your gypsy heart Don't turn around, don't turn around again Don't turn around, and don't look back Come on now love, don't you look back Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna drown in your blue sea Who's gonna taste your salt water kisses Who's gonna take the place of me Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who could tame the heart of thee U2, Achtung Baby (1991)

Seattle does not have bad neighborhoods; it has a handful of problematic blocks scattered throughout the city. What distinguishes those problematic blocks from the rest of the city? A jumble of factors, acting in combination. Hot spots are more likely to be on arterial roads, more likely to have vacant lots, more likely to have bus stops, more likely to have residents who don’t vote, more likely to be near a public facility such as a school.

My work is loving the world,” says Oliver, ”which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”10 As she writes elsewhere: It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.11

(The distribution of playgrounds Moses constructed) was not at all even. The areas of the maps on which the dots were clustered most thickly corresponded in the main to those areas inhabited by families that were well-to-do or at least "comfortable." The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly corresponded in part to undeveloped outlying areas of the city that did not really need playgrounds, but they corresponded also to some of the city's most congested areas, to the tenement neighborhoods and slums inhabited by families that were poor—to areas that needed playgrounds desperately. Most of Robert Moses' neighborhood playgrounds had, in other words, been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds least. Few of the playgrounds had been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds most. The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's. He built one playground in Harlem. (...) “After a building program that had tripled the city's supply of playgrounds, there was still almost no place for approximately 200,000 of the city's children—the 200,000 with black skin—to play in their own neighborhoods except the streets or abandoned, crumbling, filthy, looted tenements stinking of urine and vomit; or vacant lots carpeted with rusty tin cans, jagged pieces of metal, dog feces and the leavings, spilling out of rotting paper shopping bags, of human meals. Children with white skin had been given swings and seesaws and sliding ponds. Children with black skin had been left with the old broomsticks that served them as baseball bats. Children with white skin had been given wading pools to splash in in summer. If children with black skin wanted to escape the heat of the slums, they could remove the covers from fire hydrants and wade through their outwash, as they had always waded, in gutters that were sometimes so crammed with broken glass that they glistened in the sun.