Tonight in flânerie: I was obliged to seek out the FedEx on Summer Street, which both ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I assumed was in Fort Point until we looked it up and it turned out to be in South Boston, catty-corner to the pink chimneys of the former Edison Power Plant and right across the street from the gantry cranes of the Conley Terminal. So on the one hand I waited for a lot of buses on a bitter-black wind-chill night, desperately wishing FedEx had actually delivered my new work computer like the stickers on my door claimed to have tried and strongly suspecting they had just rung the wrong doorbells, since the UPS delivery this morning woke me no problem. On the other, I have discovered the location of New England's sole full-service container terminal. I knew it was in Boston: it's the reason the harbor-dredging is important. I had somehow not assimilated its name. I'd like to revisit it by day now that I know where it is, even though by night it was full of rippling black water and sodium-orange reflections and the T-square silhouettes of container cranes. I got a lot of night-reflections of the harbor walking from Fort Point to South Station, even more catching the 7 bus from South Station to City Point—at one point I saw fine squares of dusk-smoky light under the Congress Street Bridge and thought they were some skyscraper's many-windowed reflection until I realized they were the channel itself reflecting through the wooden grid of the pilings, rough-textured and translucent as ancient glass. I had to look up the name of the waterway that divides Fort Point from City Point; it turns out to be the Reserved Channel and as artificially created as anything between Dorchester Heights and Castle Island. "This city is ridiculous!" I find myself shouting to Rob. "We really are just Venice with more buses!" We walked by Durgin-Park, but could never have gotten a table: they were full up with a wait list encompassing old locals and students and families with kids. I hope they go out on a high and I hope their corporate owner regrets it for the rest of his natural life. In the meantime I am home, under some blankets on the couch, obsessively listening to Weakened Friends' "Blue Again." The frontwoman reminds me of Throwing Muses and Buffy Sainte-Marie. We're coming up on the centenary of the molasses flood. Even the dead glitter of the Seaport couldn't block out the haze-curve of the crescent moon. In an ideal world I would have stayed in this evening, but I like how this city I live in is full of things I didn't know.
spatch and I assumed was in Fort Point until we looked it up and it turned out to be in South Boston, catty-corner to the pink chimneys of the former Edison Power Plant and right across the street from the gantry cranes of the Conley Terminal. So on the one hand I waited for a lot of buses on a bitter-black wind-chill night, desperately wishing FedEx had actually delivered my new work computer like the stickers on my door claimed to have tried and strongly suspecting they had just rung the wrong doorbells, since the UPS delivery this morning woke me no problem. On the other, I have discovered the location of New England's sole full-service container terminal. I knew it was in Boston: it's the reason the harbor-dredging is important. I had somehow not assimilated its name. I'd like to revisit it by day now that I know where it is, even though by night it was full of rippling black water and sodium-orange reflections and the T-square silhouettes of container cranes. I got a lot of night-reflections of the harbor walking from Fort Point to South Station, even more catching the 7 bus from South Station to City Point—at one point I saw fine squares of dusk-smoky light under the Congress Street Bridge and thought they were some skyscraper's many-windowed reflection until I realized they were the channel itself reflecting through the wooden grid of the pilings, rough-textured and translucent as ancient glass. I had to look up the name of the waterway that divides Fort Point from City Point; it turns out to be the Reserved Channel and as artificially created as anything between Dorchester Heights and Castle Island. "This city is ridiculous!" I find myself shouting to Rob. "We really are just Venice with more buses!" We walked by Durgin-Park, but could never have gotten a table: they were full up with a wait list encompassing old locals and students and families with kids. I hope they go out on a high and I hope their corporate owner regrets it for the rest of his natural life. In the meantime I am home, under some blankets on the couch, obsessively listening to Weakened Friends' "Blue Again." The frontwoman reminds me of Throwing Muses and Buffy Sainte-Marie. We're coming up on the centenary of the molasses flood. Even the dead glitter of the Seaport couldn't block out the haze-curve of the crescent moon. In an ideal world I would have stayed in this evening, but I like how this city I live in is full of things I didn't know.
