MySpace

I've posted a few pictures from the past winter. We received more snow that what we (or most Philadelphians) are accustomed to over the course of three or four snow storms.

The snow lasted for days.

There were streets that were never plowed (ours, for example).

People... started to go crazy.

And by crazy, I really mean that most people were living according to how they exist. That is people were afraid, so they protected what they had. People were selfish, so they hoarded what they had. People were greedy, so they took more than their portion.

When I say people here, I am not intending a universal sense of the word but one in which there was a large consensus of many who declared, "this is mine," in one way or another.

What I mean by all of this is that (for those who own vehicles) parking was hard. Some people resorted to "marking" their space by leaving various things to say, "this is mine!" I even heard of a story where an older "gentleman," began arguing with a young lady (not my wife) because she was trying to take a spot that had been marked off in front of his house by means of a bucket in the street.

She was pregnant.

For now, I am leaving out my interpretation of my own judgement of what people were doing. The pictures I'm posting are garish; they were taken at night and I tried to squeeze in between cars on the other side of these respective streets to get a face forward view of what I was seeing. The light from the flash is harsh. Up to this point, none of these are edited (I will do cropping etc later). I think it just provides a stark reminder of how folks can be in this city.

As a post script, it didn't help that the mayor encouraged this behavior. It's mentioned on a story you can read by clicking here; it's about a woman who had her tires slashed for moving a trash can.

You can check out more of the MySpace pictures by clicking here (or the link on the title of this post)