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GutterLoveTravels

Moss Piglet, November 2024

GutterLoveTravels

GutterLoveTravels


It started with a solitary glove lying in the gutter, clearly estranged from its mate, never to be reunited again. I took its picture with my phone. I started to watch for gloves everywhere I went, which led to me noticing all manner of other stuff lying about. Infatuation turned to obsession.


You can tell a lot about a neighborhood from its gutters. It’s like an archeological dig without the dirt and antiquities. Modern day artifacts. Take my diverse, vibrant neighborhood in Miami Beach. The sidewalks and gutters a veritable treasure trove—beer and soda cans in every color; a broken car mirror; a child’s pacifier; a shriveled up red balloon attached to a white ribbon; a playing card, the King of Hearts. Cigarette butts, so many cigarette butts, different brands, signature ways of putting them out. Someone smoked, dropped it without a care, evidence that they’d been here. That they’d breathed. Then I stayed in a trendy beach town in the Central Coast of California. What a shock. Not even a stray butt, what I had assumed was the universal gutter inhabitant. Nothing except leaves block after block. Leaves are pretty. I took their pics.


I walk and take pictures everywhere I go—San Francisco; Palm Springs and Monterey, California; New York; Philadelphia; all over the DC area. I fondly remember meandering for miles through changing neighborhoods on a warm spring day in Chicago, a stranger in a fun land. Black blobs of gum residue blanketed the sidewalk outside of Wrigley Field. I’d never seen so much gum remains in my life. I suppose it’s fitting in a way, Wrigley and all.


I have hundreds of photos saved on my phone. I got them their own Instagram. I call it Gutter Love Travels. At last count I had eight followers.


Bill Young is a pilot. He says he flies posh business aircraft. He’s also a photographer. As he recounts it, standing around in his hotel waiting for the rest of the crew to show up, head down messing around on his phone, he noticed the carpet. Snapped a pic. Another hotel, another carpet. More pictures led to his Instagram with dazzling shots of carpets. It languished for a year with about 80 or so followers. Then his daughter posted on what was formerly known as Twitter that all she wanted for Christmas was for her dad's Instagram account of hotel carpets to go viral. It did. A few hundred thousand viewers later he got his book deal. His aptly-named pocket-sized book, Hotel Carpets, documents the weird and wonderful patterns we step on in our travels, accompanied by what the publisher describes as the photographer's tongue-in-cheek commentary.


Patterns of Bill Young’s carpets are mesmerizing; fanciful; exhilarating; nauseating. I wonder if some people might have seizures staring at them like they get from flashing lights or the patterns of a moving escalator. I see things hidden in them—phallic images, nudes, Mickey Mouse ears, ice cream cones, a virus in an electron microscope. I don’t know what is intentional, coincidental, imagined. Some innovative, cheeky designer hiding dicks and boobs in interlocking flowers and geometric patterns, triangles, squares and circles? Whatever the case, they’re captivating.


I envy Bill Young. Not that he flies people to fancy places and stays at hotels all over the world. Definitely not that he has stayed at every hotel in Las Vegas, including the one where he says he wondered What’s that creepy stain? No, not that. I’m envious of his book.


Christmas is coming. I’ll tell my kids that all I want this year is for one of them to tweet that what she wants for Christmas is for my Instagram pics of crap in gutters to go viral. I’m ready for the book deal.

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