The crowning artistic achievement of my life? Possibly.

Walking home the other night, I saw this:

Nothing unusual here, right? A broken umbrella handle.

I take about 30 steps forward, and I see this:

At first, I thought this was the rest of the broken umbrella. But this umbrella, while broken and discarded, still has its handle.

At this point, I’m thinking that I might go back and take a picture of the two broken umbrellas, as it’s a pretty unusual sight to see.  Then I take about 80 steps forward (I went back and counted), and saw this:

It's a little difficult to see here, and I might have missed it entirely if I wasn't looking closely.

Can you make that one out?  Here’s a closer view:

It's a little blurry, but you get the idea. It's another handle.

At this point, I’ve gone back, taken photos, and am pretty satisfied with what I’ve discovered.  Then I see THIS:

FOUR!

And then:

This looks like a garbage bag, but it's an umbrella. I didn't check to see if it still had its handle.

I’m not sure if these fit into the Lonely Sock category, since there’s a sense of community here somehow.  I do know that this whole experience was kind of incredibly, impossibly sad and sort of bizarrely beautiful.

I’ll digging into my backlog of socks-related pictures for the next few weeks, because my camera is a little out of commission.  I’m also going to tell this story wrong, because my mom told it to me a long time ago.  But it’s pretty damn good and relevant, even if it doesn’t actually contain any socks.

So I get a picture message on my phone a while back, and it’s from my mom.  This is the picture:

This is a lonely high heel.

Turns out my mom was leaving her job (or going to her job, I think), and passed this shoe on a fence near her office.  So she took a picture (I hope she wasn’t driving) and sent it to me, specifically for The Lonely Sock Project.

Which is all fine and well and good in and of itself, because lonely high heels are particularly lonely–all dressed up with nowhere to go, since it can’t go anywhere, since it’s a shoe with no foot in it.  This looks like a sensible work shoe, which probably means someone had it in her (or his–no judgments) in her bag, went to work in sneakers, got to work, went to change her shoe, and discovered that she was unable to do so.  It’s a sad state of affairs.

But…the fact that the shoe is on the fence tells another story.  Someone foudn this shoe, realized that the aforementioned scenario is what is likely to have happened, and placed the shoe in a high visibility spot on the fence, hoping that the owner would return and claim her missing footwear.  It’s a story about the good in humanity, really.

SO THEN…not much later, I get another picture message from my mother:

A Lonely Rabbit?

My mom had driven past the fence again, and the shoe was gone…but this stuffed rabbit was now at the foot (HA!) of the fence.

What does it all mean?

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.

So one night, I’m walking through Grand Army Plaza when I spy this:

This sock is lonely.

That picture gives you a good look at the sock, but without context, it’s hard to capture the loneliness.  So here, without further ado, I provide context:

Shying away from the spotlight.

We all get lonely at night in Brooklyn.

All in all, a successful night of sock scouting, I’d say.  But wait–we’re not done.  The next day, about 21 hours later, to be exact, I was once again walking through Grand Army Plaza when I saw something out of the corner of my eye:

Still there.

This, of course, raised some philosophical questions for me.  Why did I awesome these socks would somehow move on from their spots by the next time I came around?  If I’m not picking them up and taking them home (I gotta draw the line someplace), who is?  Why would I think someone is going to come throw the sock away?  If that sock is there, it’s staying there.  It’s unloved.  It’s lost.  It’s alone.  It can’t dig itself out of its metaphorical hole.  It has no powers of ambulation.

How is this sock supposed to be anyplace else?

22 hours after this picture was taken, I went back to Grand Army Plaza.  The sock was gone.

And my world was changed forever.

Next week…believe it or not, I’ve still got more socks to show.

So I’m keeping my eyes open for Lonely Socks left and right, and then one day I’m in the Atlantic Avenue train station, and I see this:

And of course, this changes everything. I realize that while socks can be lonely, so can almost anything that comes in a pair. So of course there are going to be lonely crocs as well. It’s possible, however, that this particular croc wasn’t so lonely after all:

Now, there are a few ways to view this picture. One, and this is my initial reaction, is that Croc #2 is lost and alone down on that lower step, and Croc #1 has given up hope and is prepared to go it alone. That’s the sadder view, although it is, again, some kind of commentary on the indomitable human (Croc) spirit. The other way to see this, I think, is that Croc #2 is just hiding from Croc #1.

It’s a glass half-full/half-empty kind of thing. Or a Pop Tart gun vs. Twinkie gun kind of thing.

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.)

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.