You Drink Too Much And Go To Sleep Too Fast

I stare out of my bedroom window quite a bit--my desk space is near there and these sleepless nights of late are killin' me. I've developed a connection to the Manhattan Bridge. Let me say that if skyscrapers are supposedly considered phallic, I hereby declare bridges vaginal, an open legged thing. I'm in the middle of watching Claire's Knee and can't help but note the feminine beauty of bridges. They're like a city's short skirt. 

I used to think the Brooklyn Bridge was the one to throw your troubles over and it still is; it's built of stone and the bends. The Manhattan Bridge, however, is painted blue iron and the suspension cables are white. So what protrudes into the sky is of it? The first sentence in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend reads, "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures on it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in." I too seem to be of disreputable appearance of late, floating between two bridges, the one of iron solid and alluring. Sorry Dickens, I'm all modern.

I know when the seasons are changing because, besides the obvious, the Manhattan Bridge lights go off at 3 in the morning instead of 2. (You know you've stayed up too late watching old Buffy episodes when...) In the summer, the lights don't turn on at night until 9. It's always a little magical, the way they dimly twinkle at twilight, not fully on until the sky has fully gone to wolf. Sometimes friends stay over well past dinner and it's so fun for me to watch people looking at the bridge, jumping a little when the lights go out.

I leave you with some photos I've taken throughout my years next to the Manhattan Bridge. 

A foggy afternoon:

When someone films in my neighborhood, the bridge is lit up with blinding stadium lights:

Looking like a postcard from the 1950's:

End of summer, approaching rain:

Shh. Quiet while we're workin':