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September 25, 2002
mark thomas Last night, I went outside and there was smoke everywhere. Bad, stinking, "New York City Is Burning" kind of smoke. It was smoke like I experienced in South Dakota this summer, when the Grizzly Gulch fire covered parts of Rapid City and the approach to Mount Rushmore with enough smoke to give anyone a headache. The smoke here came from a 4-alarm fire at a Duane Reade up in the Bronx. The fire started earlier yeaterday afternoon and appears to still be burning today. WCBS said that reports of smoke were coming in from as far away as midtown Manhattan. I remember being strangely unimpressed by the Grizzly Gulch fire. It was not one of the summer's bigger fires, but it threatened a lot more structures than the others. Because of that, whoever prioritizes these things made that fire national priority #1 for the firefighters. I wasn't out looking for it, but I did end driving right past the towns of Deadwood and Lead. The towns had been evacuated, and the plumes of white smoke belching out of the valleys were visible all across the region. I felt for anyone whose house was destroyed or threatened. But this wasn't terrorism. At least everyone knew what was happening, and at least there was an established process for dealing with the situation. It all seemed positively quaint.
I might be buying a new camera soon. My trusty Nikon Coolpix 990 has held up well, but I've reached the limits of my patience with its shortcomings. If I get the job I think I'm about to get, I will probably go to B&H and get a Nikon D100. I am not much of a gadget hound. In fact, for someone who spends as much time as I do with computers, I am surprisingly lacking in the kind of object fetish that a lot of technically oriented people possess. I started carrying a portable CD player, thinking that listening to music or the radio would fill useless time spent walking from place to place with something vaguely productive. I gave up on that because the headphones gave me headaches. I only recently got a cell phone, having never owned one. I don't even wear a watch. The only piece of technology that I've recently had a love affair with was my Handspring Treo, a combination cellphone and Palm Pilot. It had plenty of shortcomings, but I could live with them. I lost the damn thing. I am someone who never loses anything, and I am still depressed about losing that Handspring Treo. I lost it somewhere between LaGuardia Airport and this apartment, probably in the cab I took after I got back from Nebraska. I actually went so far as to call the New York City/MTA Lost and Found. Man you know you're desperate when you call those guys. I've been printing out a lot of my photos lately with my newest gadget -- a Canon S900 photo printer. It's amazing how much better some of these pictures look in print compared to on a computer screen. I've considered printing out a whole stack of them and setting up a table somewhere to sell them, just to see if anyone bites. I would feel like an imposter posing as a photographer, but who would know? I'd make a sign that says "No film was used in the creation of these photographs" and I'd go sit out in the park selling my pictures of toilets and garbage dumps. I've had what might be considered a disturbing number of visions of myself sitting in the park selling things. Magazines come to mind. I used to work at a magazine company which gave out free copies of all its magazines to all employees. After 7 years of working there I now have boxes and shelves filled with old magazines, most of them in perfect condition, and somewhere in my mind I have an image of myself in my old age sitting in the park selling them off at $5 a piece. People I worked with made fun of me for hording. But I didn't do it with the intent of someday selling them. No, that image of myself sitting in the park selling magazines evolved from other elements of my ever deteriorating self-esteem. I just like reading old magazines, moreso than current ones. I don't really know why, except that a lot of times current news and current cultural trends don't make as much sense to me as do news and stories from the past. But speaking of money, one magazine which I had in my possession but threw away (the December, 1996, issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids), has sold on EBAY for over $10,000. Damn, damn, damn, such regrets. The magazine itself isn't worth anything. What makes it valuable is that it contained the first ever Tiger Woods trading card, printed while he was still an amateur and before he was famous. Maybe my idea of selling magazines in the park is a subconscious way of making up for throwing that magazine away. I really did tear this place apart trying to find it, though. Just like my Handspring Treo, I still think it will turn up some day.
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