The Lonely Sock in Manhattan.

The crowning artistic achievement of my life? Possibly.

Lonely Socks, Chicago Edition! (with bonus pics)

So yesterday afternoon I walk out of the apartment where Victory Gardens is housing us writers (we decided last night to call it the Treehouse–with apologies to Bonds and Kittredge, of course), and I’m late for rehearsal, but I have to stop and take a picture, because the first thing I see is this:

Different, but the same.

On some level, this is the exact opposite of Lonely Socks — gloves in a satisfied pair, with a matching hat thrown in for good measure. But somehow, this arrangement feels lonelier to me, especially when viewed in context:

Kicked to the curb?

I can’t help thinking of the last line of Ludacris’s verse on Nas’s Made You Look (remix): “I’m just a victim of society/it’s Chris the menace/with more shit out on the streets/than evicted tenants.” And that’s how I see this trio: evicted, tossed out and tossed out together, left behind as a unit because someone made an active decision to dismiss them from his or her life. When you’ve got a solitary sock, it feels like a mistake. This feels purposeful. Poor, sad work gear.

BONUS MATERIAL!!! — Not far from the door to The Treehouse, one can find this graffiti:

Clearly, Snoop Dogg does not live in Chicago.

And here’s the Treehouse itself:

That's our deck.

And finally, this is where I sleep:

I = manly.

Expect a proper update on rehearsals and all that…eventually.

The Lonely Sock Project, II

Lonely socks, I would find, are not only a Brooklyn phenomenon:

This lonely sock was discovered on the Marble Hill Metro North platform. We’ve moved into a second borough.

This sock, interestingly, was a mere few feet from this sock:

Sadly, I didn’t take a picture of the proximity of these two socks. Doing so would have allowed us to decide if there were, in fact, perpetually lonely and thereby horribly sad socks, or if these two socks were of the same pair and working themselves back together (like Will and Charlize, and I won’t say anything else so I’m not spoiling anything, suckas) and thereby a touching story of the indomitable human (or sock) spirit. Here is another view of one of our heroes:

Something about this last picture is particularly sad to me–this sock feels almost like a hobo, not in the sense that the word is used at Overheard In New York (although I love that site, the use of “Hobo” to describe a homeless person always seems a little cold and, more importantly, inaccurate), but in the historical sense. This sock is ready to ride the rails–next stop, who knows where? (I mean, I know where, because I take Metro North all the time, but I’m not telling you.)

The Lonely Sock Project, I.

I live in Brooklyn. I see strange things here. More often then you’d think, these strange things are socks.

For example, one night I was walking through Park Slope with Carey, and I found this:

This, my friends, is a lonely sock.

Here is another look at him:

Now, if this was just one sock we were talking about here, that wouldn’t really mean anything. But maybe ten minutes later, I found this:

Another view:

One is a fluke, two is the beginning of a pattern. And so, I set out to document as many lonely socks as I could find in Brooklyn and beyond. In the coming weeks, I will be sharing the results of this documentation with you here at Smichovsky.