Octagonality

Sometimes you just know you shouldn't ask for directions. It's just not going to work.

When we got to the rest stop on the Maine Turnpike, it was amazing how many people were there at 1 pm on a Saturday. All headed for vacation land. It had been renovated since last year, it was no longer a cave-like place where you go to mine for cinnabons, french fries, coffee, fried chicken. Now it has a central atrium, 8-sided, with a skylight, also octagonal, so that the design suggests the beloved lighthouses of the region, and why not? Under the skylight there's a small wooden gazebo surrounded by silk flowers for charm, fabric delphiniums, black-eyed susans, digitalis, fiddle-head ferns... They make me feel bad. On the north side of the atrium large photos of weimeraners hang, looks to be a Wegman work. Is he a Mainer? Are those dogs WeimerMainers? They're very New England in a Martha Stewart way, Cape Cod Grey, with a slight dusting of sugar lustre for highlight. (please, people, use the world "lustre" as much as you can - because that's livin'. )

4 TV screens are hung on the walls of the atrium, not in N, S, E, W positions but 2 on the east wall and 2 on the west wall? Why? I resent such screens, that have started to show up with more frequency every time I leave the house. At the bodega, on the elevators, at the rest stop. Is it really necessary, can't we go a few minutes without a screen to blank out into? You can't hear anything that's being announced on TV because of the noise, but I read the closed captioning, it says authorities want to insert a camera through a hole to view the victims of the Utah mine collapse. How horrible, to see what's happening but not be able to help. Why? Will something important be learned from this?

Later I wonder about stop signs, they are octagonal too, why? Is there a reason they aren't square, circular, triangular... The day we left for Maine we drove by a bunch of teenagers hanging out on the corner of 16th St. and 11th Avenue in Brooklyn. Some of them were climbing a sign post and smashing their heads against the stop sign mounted on it. I seldom see any teens in Windsor Terrace, they are a very mysterious bunch. And when I do see them, I see this?

At the rest stop in Maine, I'm wondering if there are more octagonal buildings here because of the lighthouses. What part of the earth is densest in octagonal structures? Perhaps places where for some reason it proves too challenging to make cylindrical shapes? I'm wondering about the minerals up here, Maine is rich in them, how many sides do those black tourmaline crystals we used to find up here have? They are all lost now, as are the enormous industrial grade garnets and huge sheets of mica I used to find in a mine, open to tourists, up 302, past Naples.

For a while, I hang out next to the toy grabbing machine that my children are amused by, my son is getting mad because I don't give him money for it. He wants to hit me. Suddenly there's a couple in front of me. On the woman's arm there's a tattoo that looks to be a Manhattan skyline, rendered beautifully in a grey palette with subtle gradiations. The focal point is a detailed rendering of the Chrystler building, and I get a little choked up for some reason, as if it were the Christ-ler Building. It's just so beautiful.

I bite the bullet and seek directions over at the Z Mart. I get access to the cashier and ask her how I can get to N 35. Do I have to go around the rest stop, I ask her. She tells me I'm already at the rest stop. This is going nowhere.