telephone poles

If Beagles reads an article that says the border is on fire and they're going to come up here and kill us all in our beds he believes that on the face of it regardless of anything else he reads.  If it's something about Trump or the republicans however, he is all like there are two sides to this story so how can we ever know what the truth is (shrug)?  If you attempt to rob a bank but fuck up and don't get any money it is still a crime.


I was saying telephone poles as a sort of generic designation.  I am aware that all sorts of things go on with those poles, well I was aware in a general fashion, I hadn't paid much attention at all.  But now I realize that there is a whole nother world out there.

When I was taking the train out to Irving Park I was paying attention to telephone poles (I am using the generic description).  There are none downtown of course. everything is underground, underground is crawling with snakes of every description and of every use.  Whenever they peel back the skin of our sidewalks or streets (and they do that all the time, all the fucking time, while we might think of a foot of concrete as sealing something for eternity, to them it is just masking tape and wrapping paper), there are all sorts of things going on down there..

It was somewhere north of North Avenue that I saw my first pole, and soon they proliferated, but not too many along the route, although the train being electrified, there are all kinds of cables and wires along the way.  After I got off and started walking I noticed that there were none along the busy streets, and not that many along the streets that weren't busy, mostly just the alleys.

You know I could write a whole thing about alleys, and I see it coming up in the future, but right now I want to talk about telephone poles.  Actually there are all kinds of things attached to those poles, but I kind of took to the transformers, kind of graceful in their way, hanging silent, handsome, and patient from those spindly arms.  I didn't even know they were transformers.  I picked that up when I was talking in watercolor class about 'those hanging things,' and one of the guys said transformers, and I said, yeah, transformers.  Before that I was chiefly aware of transformers as the things that adjusted the speed on my electric train as it went round and round and round in that stupid oval, until a thing that had seemed so endlessly fascinating became boring as hell, after all that begging and all that money that your parents spent on it, and you better get your butt downstairs and play with your damn train, aw gee Ma, do I have to? 

Of course my dear mother never spoke that way, I just transformed it for dramatic effect.

More on poles tomorrow maybe though I may have already exhausted my knowledge of the subject.  In the meantime I will leave you with this beautiful photo I took Monday.