Checkpoint Cheery

Brooklyn Battlestar Gallactica

Is there any more unnatural shade of green than tollbooth green? A permanently false spring.

In Joseph Brodsky's essay, "Less Than One," he describes a fence enclosing a scraggly little garden outside the factory in Leningrad where he was then working. It was a simple wooden fence of twenty-inch high planks with two-inch spaces between them, and a transverse lath of the same material. "Wherever you went in that empire, you would always find this fence." More depressing, for Brodsky, while the fence came prefabricated, even when people crafted their own fences, they followed the same pattern.  I feel much the same about the metallica green of toll booths, and not just in New York. Tokens came and went, toll collectors are almost gone, someday even EZ Pass will go, but that green will outlive us all. Ask not for whom the tolls bell.