I tried to pet her, but she just meowed at me without bothering to open her eyes. Serves me right, she’d had a hard day of sleeping and was just taking a well-deserved nap.

Graffiti I found on the outside of a large abandoned building near the train tracks. I’ve spent a few hours exploring the place, and it’s very big. Almost the size of the dining hall I work in. It’s difficult to move through, since many passages are blocked off, but today I found out that most of the roof is sturdy, so it’s unlikely to kill me while I explore it.

The graffiti here is from the side of the building facing the river (opposite the side facing the railroad and Kinderkamack Road, which runs parallel to the Hackensack River and the Pascack Valley Line for most of its length) and one of the sides facing the surrounding woodlands.

In the place where I work the graveyard shift alone, there is this lovely little statue. Inspiring. Confident. Creepy.

Also, working the graveyard shift alone would be the absolute ideal job for me if only it paid better than crap.

confessionsofasmalltowngirl:

So you’re positive that you’re open…?

I’m sure there’s a story here, and I desperately want to know what it is.

If nothing else, I’ll give them credit for knowing how to use apostrophes correctly.

Photograph of a chair I found behind a gas station on Route 17. What was a chair doing behind a gas station? Does someone sit there? If not, why not?

Also found in Queens. Consider: does this graffito exist in vacuum, without a writer or audience? It is pictured without either, yet the photograph is incomplete.

As a still image of an entity at a fixed point in time, we cannot see the artist (as I will generally refer to those who create works of art, which are ever diverse in form). What was their purpose? When did they choose to create? Why a graffito, and not a poster?

Is the sentence a statement of belief (“[I believe that] the money system will not last”), a statement of vaunted fact (“The money system [cannot] last”), perhaps even a lament (“The money system will not last [and this is a shame]”), maybe? Without an artist, we cannot know. For now let us only consider that it is a graffito, a piece of text which never belonged to a page, as it was taken from the mind of an artist and through that artist’s actions, it is now a part of the City.