Archive for the ‘Lost and Found’ Category
Lost and Found: Those sweet, sweet kicks
Click the above image for larger view
You can almost hear their laughter: a glorious cacophony of twitters and yelps.
A lazy Saturday in the park with some of your best girlfriends and along comes an alabaster lothario. He siddles up with his quirky smile, and killer kicks, and you know that you could have a lot of fun with this guy. “Purple hairs” indeed – you know what’s what. “Come on, Big Daddy, have a seat with us,” Esther quips to your amusement.
Brought to me by an agent of the past – found tacked to a corkboard in the basement of a building, turned to face the wall, crusted with old dust.
“Style… that’s what Captain Ahab there’s got!”
Lost and Found: Where’s Jorge? Not voting!
Click the above image for larger front and back view
It is said that true New Yorkers never look up, but rather, walk their stolid, and grumbling walk with eyes planted firmly on the asphalt and concrete directly in front of them. Since moving to New York City I’ve made a point of remaining awe struck by the fantastic architecture that surrounds me, but on this day, whilst looking down, I met another New Yorker.
Found at the corners of Vanderbilt and Greene glistening in the strong summer sun.
An item, I can only assume, of immense personal value, now yours to peruse – some information has been obscured so as to protect the innocent. I am, after all, not a monster.
Lost and Found: Cha-Ching Ain’t a City in China
To many a New Yorker this orange envelope spells doom, or at least a remarkeably inflated parking ticket.
Neatly tucked behind a window’s wiper blade or folded in half and wedged between hood and front corner panel you will see these modern day scarlet letters. Often though, and infinitely worse for the recipient originally intended, you will see these envelopes scattered along the sidewalk, or nestled in the crook between curb and sewer drain, gently flapping in the grey water run-off of the city’s most recent Neverwinter.
I checked: this envelope contained no ticket or summons.
Traveler’s beware if driving in our fair city: because you can now identify one more of New York’s unique species does not mean it may not fly overhead and shit on you.
Lost and Found: Throw Away Baby
There is something voyeuristic in the finding of another’s belongings and displaying them on the internet for the world to see: I would be lying were I to say otherwise.
And there is precious little more personal than the discovery of someone else’s photographs. Even more so when they come in the form of a faded film strip, for then, you must dig deeper, decoding the message, deciphering their language until you are left with their essence: a color memory of a moment in time as the camera saw fit to judge it.
Here you will see a snippet of someone else’s life: a rare moment that is not affected by anything you do or say.
Found crushed against a granite curb in Greenpoint, Brooklyn – a traditionally Eastern European enclave. A drunk lay near by, his nose askew and crusted with blood.
“Creepy is as creepy does, and dude… this is creepy.”
Lost and Found: Oh, about a MILLION years old…
This is not for me to tell you what it is…
Found along the crags and stones of one of the more northerly beaches of Montauk, Long Island.
A patina like this comes only from the lapping of heavy waves and the beating of a Sun.
Click the image to see some very interesting and enlightening details.
Lost and Found: The Little Engine That Couldn’t
Choo choo… boo hoo.
Yesterday’s giants cast aside like yesterday’s news as the once chubby fingers of youth mature into manly sinew and grasping vice.
Found deeply embedded in winter mud, straddled by the vestiges of spring greenery.
Though only one side (the other was missing) it appears this toy was once powered by a AA battery. No clue as to its method of locomotion (pardon the pun).
Lost and Found: Like a Baby’s Arm…
A doll is not a strange thing, and therefore a doll’s arm must not be a strange thing.
Once, however, the two are separated, their natures change.
Found on a beach on the Pacific coast of Panama, about a kilometer from the Costa Rican border in an area known as Punta Burica.
The sun had not quite worked its way above the horizon, though the first light of day illumed the blue above. I was peeing in the ocean.
Lost and Found: A Thing of Terror
By guest writer Meagan O’Connell
Discarded fragment of a once loved toy? Or the spirit of a mischievous troll awaiting an unsuspecting victim? His plastic eye peered out from under a layer of dust and blades of grass in the middle of a green meadow in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as my dog’s dirt-covered tennis ball rolled in its direction. I couldn’t help but pick it up, both disgusted and intrigued at the same time. It called to me.
What was this fragmented troll head all about? The theory of a once loved toy of a child is easily dismissed by that eery smile and the glance out of the corner of his eye. The chipped nose, uneven ears and matted hair help tell his story….
Perhaps he was a real troll once. You know, like the house gnomes that steal your socks from the laundry, only uglier. However, he had slowly turned disgruntled and bitter at his fellow trolls’ lack of intelligence. He was incensed by their pitiful existence of stealing socks and playing mischievious jokes on unsuspecting humans. Even humans enraged him, with their seeming deeper lack of intelligence. He compared humans to garden gnomes – not smart enough to steal socks, but only clever enough to stand motionless amongst flowers and move every once in a while just to see a startled or confused reaction from others.
As he grew angrier and more bitter, he was deemed a disgrace to the world of trolls by a committee of his elders and sentenced to death by explosion. Not to kill him, of course…. but to scatter his still living remains (because trolls can’t really die, you see) around the world and curse him to an eternity of being peered at like an oddity, to disgust and disturb onlookers. (Note: In restrospect, the commitee of elders realized that this sentence may have been a bit harsh. Perhaps it was the several cases of fairy-made grain alcohol that affected their final judgement.)
Even though disgruntled and deformed, the troll (or remnants thereof), still embittered, plots against those trolls, humans and other living beings that flaunt their ignorance so carelessly. He smiles, seemingly innocent, with a hint of contempt – waiting for someone to pay enough attention so that he might manipulate and plot his re-embodiment and revenge.
So, he sits in a display case in the living room. Perhaps one day his severed little head will mysteriously disappear – a sign that he finally discovered the remedy for his dismembered condition and has moved on to spread this self-made campaign of anti-ignorance and anger.
Or maybe he’s just a freaky, broken, dirty troll toy that fell out of a garbage truck and freaks people out enough to make them think there may be something wrong with me to have brought him home…..
I’m OK with either.
Lost and Found: Unlucky Numbers
What cost hope, I ask you?
It appears to be about $5.00 in this case. A dream discarded like some crumpled stack of lottery ticket hopefuls… wait a minute!?!
Found wadded exactly as imaged beneath a twig and an uncertainly wobbling leaf.
Lost and Found: Under the Bed and Punching
Amidst soggy clumps of rust colored leaves, trampled beneath countless feet, embraced by pebbles of asphalt I found this film strip… as my dog squatted not 8 inches from where it lay.
Who is this man who climbs from beneath a bed wearing boxing gloves, a backwards catcher’s mask, and a sweatshirt slashed in such a way that would make Hulk Hogan want desperately, with mighty “pythons”, to tear it from his very frame?
These questions and many like it haunt my waking hours.
Click here to see the complete set of four scanned photos from the above strip.
