The Bronx, my childhood home, and one of the five boroughs of New York City which more often than not gets a bad rap, an unfair reputation of being a not-so-nice place.  Certainly not a place to raise your kids.  Fortunately for the United States, a one Mrs. Sotomayor found the Bronx to be a fine place to raise her children.  From the Bronx to the United States Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor sits on the highest court in the land.

1090 Rosedale Avenue, Bronx, New York, the childhood home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Stone chambers, like the one pictured below, are scattered throughout New York’s Hudson Valley.  They’ve been around a long time, 1,000 years+, and nobody knows who built them or why.  From Druid temples, caves of the devil, and paranormal/UFO portals to Native American sweat lodges and Colonial root cellars, stories and theories abound.  One thing is certain:  the eternal quality of stone as an artistic and architectural medium.

Ancient Stone Chamber off Route 301 in Kent, New York

Always with us, often on our minds. Life and death juxtaposed.

Life and death at a cemetery in White Plains, New York 4-24-09

…with a dental instrument in your mouth.

View from the chair at the dentist-with-a-sense-of-humor.

My body–White Plains, New York, below average temperatures, even for early March, slowly warming up.

My mind–Southwest US, hot, dry, spacious, blue skies, can see forever.

Where I Am...watching icicles melt from my roof on a cold early March day in New York.

Where I want to be...on my deck at Gouldings Lodge, Utah, looking out at Monument Valley, ready to explore.

Life happens.  I photograph it.

A seagull yawns

Garbage piles up

A man snoozes in the winter sun

A seller gets desperate

Jesus looks on

Eight long, painful years are finally behind us.  The day the world has been waiting for is here!

Folk Art for Inauguration Day 2009

As Americans get robbed by corporate treachery, and as our taxes get funneled to bail-out the destruction caused by monumental greed, it is still small businesses that are at the heart of the U.S. economy.

Small business owners are hard-working people many of whom provide local services.  And they are everywhere, from small towns to large cities.  They have no hidden agendas; there is nothing underhanded going on.  Your hard-earned dollars are exchanged for their hard-earned services.  It’s the proverbial “win-win” situation in its most basic form.

We can all live, and live much better, without “upper echelon” corporate criminals and the politicians that enable them to prevail.  But we can’t live without the small businesses that provide us with so many essential products and services, many of which, quite simply, make us very happy.  Like pizza!

New Yorkers will argue that the best pizza in the U.S. is made in NYC. Among themselves, of course, New Yorkers will argue about just where in NYC that pizza is made. Manhattan? Brooklyn? Queens? Staten Island? Jersey, even. Well, you can find great pizza pretty much anywhere in NYC (even in Jersey). But the best...that would be the pizza in The Bronx! Pictured here is the pieman from this Bronx native's favorite pizzeria in all of NYC.

Supporters of lesbian and gay marriage in cities and towns throughout the United States simultaneously staged protest rallies against the passage of California’s Proposition 8, also known as Proposition Hate, or simply H8.  Electing the first African-American U.S. president while at the same time voting into law a proposition which strips lesbian and gay citizens of equal civil rights epitomizes extreme irony.  And hate.  Let two things be known from this moment on–Whatever religious mask the haters wear, it will be torn away and your true ugliness revealed, AND, and the fight for true equality, justice and civil rights for our LGBT brothers and sisters will go on, in full force, until it is won.

Some photos of Proposition Hate protesters in White Plains, New York, in solidarity with supporters of civil rights throughout the United States on National Day of Protest, November 15, 2008–

A Constitutional reminder

Truly Christian

Fighting for justice

Calling it what it really is: Proposition 8 = Hate

Jesus was the ultimate civil rights supporter