Scattered carts...

[fajrdrako]

I like harmless anomalous objects.

When I walk to work, I go along Col. By Drive, then up the stairs just past the underpass at Ottawa U. Then I cut through the University to Cumberland Ave.

Today, on the landing at the middle of those stairs, someone had tethered a large shopping cart - the kind you get in supermarkets - to the handrail, with a bright red bicycle chain. Was it because they wanted to be able to pick it up later? A piece of semi-performance art? A joke? Whatever it was, it amused me.

It reminded me that on the weekend I went for coffee with maaboroshi at Bridgehead, and we were sitting on the patio at the back. I noticed that in back of the expensive condo next door, someone had left out an old wooden cart. It was the kind you see in agricultural museums that farmers used to use, with sloping sides. It seemed anachronistic, not so much the kind of thing that one might deliberately put in one's garden - there really wasn't a garden, and it seemed randomly placed. As if it had fallen through a rift in space and time. Not so much an attempt at art, or a functioning work-tool.

Comments

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Two wheels or four? I mean, is it, like, a tumbril?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

It doesn't look like any kind of tumbrel I've ever seen a picture of, and the tumbrels I've looked at just now on Google were very different. I'm not sure where the characteristics begin and end. Most tumbrels (as I picture them) have large wheels in the middle; this had two small wheels at the handle-end, and two props at the other end of the rectangle of its base, so it sat firmly on four points, though only two of those points were wheels.

Though I've seen carts of this type on old Ontario farms, I'm sure, I can't find any pictures of this type online - which is frustrating, and it isn't helped by the fact that I'm not sure what to call them.

Maybe I should just sneak back behind the condo with my camera, and take a picture of the thing!

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

my last house was in a highrise building, I shared it with Maarten. He had done art school and did odd jobs and painted murals for people who wanted them (or painted cars or busses). He also brought stuff home from the garbage and painted that. You could come home suddenly and find that the buffet he had found was suddenly in the process of becoming bright yellow.
One day he tied a shoppingtrolley to the railings of our balcony. Really sturdy which he demonstrated by climbing into the shoppingtrolley (it hang on the outside, our flat was on the 5th floor). I have never known somebody with his amount of physical courage and easy and absolute sunny disposition (he said he didn't understand depression at all, but he was not disbelieving about it). He was a joy to live with. (I left the flat when our third flatmate had moved into a house her father had bought her and he moved to live with his boyfriend).

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Maarten sounds quite wonderful! I like that kind of ingenuity.

I used to have a sunny disposition, and not understand about depression. Then I got depressed, and understood.

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

he was (I assume i, but we lost contact) quite wonderful.

I don't think I've ever been wholly without depression. Never a sunny disposition, a moody one, or an unstable one. I think it would be nice to know how it feels to have a sunny disposition.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

"Sunny" is maybe not something I've ever been, exactly, since I'm not very outgoing. I'm of a generally philosophical, calm, optimistic, cheerful sort of temperament, in a low-key way. I've never been very changeable in mood - certainly not in the short term, maybe over weeks or days - so when I got depressed it was a slow and steady decline that wasn't even noticeable (or comprehensible) at first, till I fell apart.

I'm still unusually stable in mood, except for (occasionally) PMS.

[japewierd.livejournal.com]

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[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for the reminder and the tip!