Things I Like About My Neighborhood

Happy New Year. I'm relieved to begin 2005, aren't you?

Sometimes I hate LIC. Not in a big way, mind you. It's the Wild Wild West feeling the place sometimes has, stemming from its position as the Land That Parking Regulations Forgot. We have no parking rules, which means we have no street sweeping, which means that we have piles of garbage that collect in the gutters. This is not such a big deal, really.

What is a big deal is the abandoned car down the block that has been there since I moved to the neighborhood. It's slowly disintegrating, becoming part of the landscape, like some apocalyptic Andy Goldsworthy sculpture. Bad things happen to it from time to time: a smashed window here, a flat tire there. There are days I'm very tempted to jump up and down on the hood and cave in the windshield with a baseball bat. I loathe whoever abandoned this car, with its Vermont plates and its array of stupid New Englander bumperstickers commemorating visits to places this car will never see again.

But something happened recently that made me happy once again. Because, you see, I've discovered that someone else hates this car as much as I do, and has commemorated it with some lovely graffiti. I present to you: Pimp My Ride. (Photo taken by Adam.)