At our blogger dinner last week, Ann noted that when she was in New York, she was drawn to visiting some of the uglier parts of the city specifically because they would make good photographs (that would then be posted on her weblog). Today, right here in Madison, Ann starts off on a walk at the pleasant enough local zoo but then, her camera in town, she once again is drawn to exploring municipal squalor. And what did she feel was the apex of the "unsightly" local things she decided to post? Why, the back door of the building where I lived for more than two years! Yep, that's it, reproduced above without permission--hey, I paid like fifteen thousand dollars to keep up that photogenic view--the posterior side of good ol' 1515 Monroe Street. Hey, it was close to campus. And cheap. And it didn't get unbearably noisy until shortly before I moved out. But now, perhaps, Ann understands my enthusiasm for moving into an RV.
Update, 7pm: Stop the presses! That's not my back door. That's the door next to my back door. My door is out of the picture to the left. All that ambivalent nostalgia for naught!
This possibility occurred to me when I wrote my original post, but then I looked at Ann's other picture and saw that the door was just to the right of the dumpster in the alley, and I thought, that's mine--just to the right of the dumpster. But now I remember: there were two dumpsters in the alley. The dumpster in the picture is the dumpster for the place next door, whose owner would completely flip out if you used his dumpster for your trash. It could be the most I've been worried about getting killed over something in Madison, not counting my graduate methods course. So, I think, out of fear, I more or less repressed that dumpster for the remainder of my time living there--a panicky but functional psychological blindness motivated by the idea that I couldn't accidentally throw my trash away in something if I didn't actually allow myself to see it.
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