Standing in front of something with a camera in your hands is no time to rationalize why you are drawn to it.

That can come later, when you decide whether the picture worked--that is, whether it transfers to two dimensions something of what you experienced in three (plus time.)

But that still doesn't explain why you were drawn to it.

Just off Bergenline Avenue in Union City, the sun startled me, pushing forward this assemblage of discarded objects against a backdrop of unexpected swimming pool colors.

Standing today in a spotless room stocked with vital fluids and equipment for delivering them, I had a flashback.

Just five and a half weeks ago, I spent several hours in a strangely similar room, having essential fluids dripped into my body from plastic packs hung from prongs on metal poles just like you see here.

It may not be the last roundup, but it does feel like the last for the day.

Git along little downtown Montclair dogies.

Red light. Montclair.

Construction curtains looming like a hull with cockeyed portholes.

I've always loved the tiny backyards of Shore houses---just big enough for a picnic table with an umbrella, a charcoal grill and a clothesline you have to duck under.

But even more tranquil to me are the paved spaces between the houses..

I was thinking it was time to head home when the streetlights came on. And then the yellow lights in the brick building.

I took the hint.

It was beginning to get dark. Something flickering like a cartoon caught my eye from the corner of a demolished room. It sucked in the last bit of sun, glinting above the cathedral on the west side of the demolition site.

Walking around the site, I came to a kind of loading dock.

Not all parts of the Summit site are being demolished. Some are just undergoing a late spring cleaning.

Last week I previewed a visit to an institutional site in Summit where an old wing of a building is being torn down. The question then and now is, can you identify the site?

Unofficial staff mascot and summer intern Roscoe J. Cat is ready for his close up. Keep an eye peeled for him over the next couple of weeks in Editor's Picks.

Hard job selling insurance ten feet off the ground, day after day.

Aside from the stiff neck, the poor creature can't even turn around to locate the source of that powerful aroma of salami just 20 yards behind him on Branford Place in Newark.

As the New Jersey National Guard gears up for its biggest foreign deployment since World War II, Hobby's Deli in Newark is gearing up to support them. You can help.

Most thumbnails, unlike the one at left, show you the complete picture, except smaller.

The daily Plain Sight thumbnail is different. It's always a detail cropped from the full picture. Today's thumbnail represents only about two or three percent of the entire picture.

To see the whole thing, click below.

Eastern Oil on Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair is known for its low prices and its discounts for cash. Cars are always maneuvering around each other like baby water buffalo to sidle up to  the mama pumps.

But yesterday morning, only four of Eastern's twelve nozzles had any gas to give.

Three days of temperatures in and above the 90's--with one more to go, today.

Brutal.

Where to escape the down-pounding heat?

Down the Shore.

Hybrid cars are all the rage, so why not try a different kind of hybrid, one combining photographs and the spirit of two popular children's books? Namely....

The Where's Waldo? series by Martin Handford (which you don't have to be a child to enjoy) and The Everywhere Cat, a 1970 classic by William Corbin and Consuelo Joems.

In coming weeks look for Roscoe J. Cat here in Plain Sight and also on the right side of this page, in Editor's Picks. Can you find him today?

Was it something in the water at the Skyway Diner? Nope.

Did the glaring sun cause a flashback to late Beatles songs? (Before it became associated with heartburn, didn't acid-reflux mean a psychedlic flashback you felt in your gut? Maybe the transformation of the term is Janis Joplin's fault, for singing "take another little piece of my heart.")

No, I'm afraid the answer is I just went a little goofy.

Today we move indoors again, from the shelter of the black steel Pulaski Skyway to the, well, um, men's room of the Skyway Diner.

For some reason, this photograph makes me think of what Humphrey Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman in the last scene of Casablanca:

"It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.''

Like the Boardwalk, with its miles of herringbone wooden beams, the Pulaski Skyway, connecting Newark and Jersey City, offers seclusion and mystery under its miles of steel beams and concrete pillars.

Went for a haircut Saturday in Montclair.

Rain pelting the patio beyond the salon, but by the time I emerged so had the sun.

One wet magazine, though.

The clouds parted and the sun rained down on puddles.

Driving along First Street in Newark yesterday,

returning from a doctor's appointment,

came to a red light.

"In A Mellotone," a great 1939 Ellington tune, is also what I'm striving for today, on doctor's orders.

So without further ado, let's return to the subject this blog began with back in March.

In 2005, my father, Mel Levin, who was suffering from Alzheimer's, fell while walking with my mother, Roz, in their West Orange neighborhood.

He was not seriously injured, but he spent the next several days in confusion and pain in a room in St. Barnabus Hospital in Livingston.

...than to ever let a woman in my life!" I first heard that hilariously mysogynistic song from My Fair Lady when I was about eight and my parents brought home the soundtrack recording from the Broadway theater.

That minds could joke about going to the dentist only confirmed my sense that life was full of temptations and pitfalls I could barely imagine. Back then, shadows on my bedroom wall--let alone knowing I had a dentist's appointment the next day--could keep me awake for hours.

I made it through the first five days after my freak accident fairly well. I had what my doctors called a  "minor concussion," meaning I could expect several days or more of headaches and sleeplessness. Well, nothing unusual about that!

I was in my doctor's office in Springfield, shirt off, waiting for a checkup, when I realized I was not alone.

It's been a medical week, and car accidents offer few laughs.

So let's look at something really funny, like root canal.

Not from the patient's point of view, though nitrous oxide, novocaine and favorite CDs on the headphones do help.

But how does the endodontist keep a straight face?

"Paula" posted a question about whether I am still on speaking terms with my next-door neighbor, who backed into me with his SUV while I was mowing my lawn on Sunday, sending me to the hospital in an ambulance with my neck in a brace.

How this freak accident happened I attempted to describe in Tuesday and Wednesday's Plain Sight.

The answer to Paula's question is...

Luck is when you have been struck by a car backing down a driveway (see yesterday's post), suffered a mild concussion, a hairline skull fracture, various contusions and abrasions, and yet are not in such terrible shape that you can't look at your surroundings with interest.

No, this picture is not upside down. But if you are lying on your back on a gurney in a Level 1 Trauma Center, and your neck is in a brace, as mine was, about all you can do is tilt the camera up and backwards.

...it's rhubarb season.

Strawberries have their place, but their place is not with rhubarb.

I won't call it culinary cowardice, but the knee jerk reflex to dumb down the unique and refreshing tang of rhubarb, one of spring's greatest gifts, by combining it with strawberries turned to mush abuses both 'barb and berry.

Why do I have this thing about trucks? Not all trucks, just ones that for some reason arrest my attention. Like this one down the Shore, that I followed for a block or two until I could get close enough to take a picture.

Yes, May has been cool and rainy, with just a few gorgeous days, but we must keep things in perspective.

In a Morristown parking lot, an SUV sprouts fangs and sings, "I Am The Walrus."

It's a little unnerving to be stared at by the creature that will provide your dinner...

Maybe the water was too hot.

A Salvadoran restaurant just opened a block from our office. I went there for takeout at lunchtime Wednesday.

Ordered a guanabana shake and a pupusa, which is a Salvadoran tortilla, thicker than a pancake and filled with cheese, which melts as the tortilla is griddled. What to do while waiting?

Look at what's hidden in plain sight, of course.

The traffic and the drivers are one thing, but wilder yet is what lies just over the shoulder of our Jersey Interstate Highways.

One of my favorite places to contemplate nature is at the intersection of I-80 and I-280 in (approximately) Pine Brook, where traffic often slows to a crawl, making it easy to roll down a window and pull out the camera.

A few days ago, in posting some pictures from my bathroom series, "I'll Be Right Back...", I promised not to gross anyone out.

Though this picture has nothing to do with bathrooms, I cannot make that promise today.

How about all four?

Photography isn't always about seizing "the decisive moment" or even recognizing that one has just done so.

Sometimes it's about having the patience of a grazing animal or the stubborness of one that refuses to seek a greener pasture--just yet. The line between stubborn and dumb can be pretty thin, as we often see in our politics.

But whatever drives you on or holds you back can finally tumble you into clover. Which is how I wound up taking the photo I posted yesterday of a busboy sitting on a shoeshine stand in a men's room, thumbs flickering over his handheld device. (Oops, that doesn't sound right.)

A busboy found a good way to get off his feet as a long evening wound down Monday night at the Birchwood Manor in Whippany.

They're everywhere. Strange beings with serpent's heads, raising their steely necks above the rooftops of our cities and towns.

Run for your lives!

That's the title of a series of pictures I started in 2002. This picture was taken Friday during our visit to New Brunswick.

The full title of the series is, "I'll Be Right Back: Visits to Men's Rooms and Bathrooms."

I promise not to gross you out.

An interesting afternoon in New Brunswick with Rutgers University staff and archivists, who are helping us find material for our July cover story, THEN AND NOW.

But getting out of New Brunswick at 4 PM on a Friday on Route 18 South....

You'll see a lot of these as this blog continues--things that stop me, that seem to have a spirit, that I can stand in front of a long time, until I lose my concentration or feel that the kind and indulgent person waiting in the car may soon lose her patience.

Oil prices fell Wednesday, the AP reported, after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and a government report said U.S. fuel supplies unexpectedly fell last week.

The most famous scarecrow of all time was Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz, but in these parts we have a bigger problem, geese, and are still trying to find effective ways of scaring them.

Windshield wipers were challenged throughout the day Monday, as were umbrellas, galoshes and all the rest of the stay-dry paraphrenalia.

From behind the wheel of my car, traffic looked like this...

Waiting for a takeout order is a good time to zone out, read a paper, or, if you're like me, start looking at one's surroundings closely and hopefully. I use the word in the old-fashioned sense. I will never give in on hopefully.

At about 100 paces from our office door, Anthony's Pizza and Pasta is not only the closest food shop to our office, but a good one, making fresh tasty subs. The looking around is also quite good.

Forsythia are in bloom. A stubborn plant, it heralds spring in its brassy garish way, flourishing where people want it, where they never wanted it, where no one remembers it even exists.

Pitted against neglect and decay, as here, it mocks our indifference to what we have left behind.

Raise your hand if you're against sprawl. Unruly, unchecked, unregulated growth. It's everywhere, it's stubborn, and it's in our face.

But at this time of year we are reminded of another type of sprawl, just as stubborn and in our face.

Bless its heart.

The poet William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. Well, how about in a thingamajig on top of a rusty metal fence in Edgemont Park in Montclair?

A handsome coffee parlor named Greenberry's opened a few doors from our office on the Morristown Green over the winter. Dark wood panelling, comfy armchairs, friendly baristas, designer chocolates....sound familiar?

The Greenberry's chain started in Virginia in 1992, and Morristown is its first outpost in New Jersey. Their point of distinction seems to be that they don't overroast their coffee like a certain viral franchise we could name.

The photo you see here was not  taken at Greenberry's (heaven forbid), but at its polar opposite, a one-of-a-kind place around the corner called Jersey Boy Bagels.

With all due respect to Forrest Gump, a box of chocolates just can't compare to a pickup truck for that "you never know what you're gonna get" quality.

This one was parked in Wallington, a few blocks from a very good Polish restaurant, Krakus. (Have the pickle soup. Seriously.)

As you'll see as this photo blog continues, I love pickup trucks. Maybe because they have beds. This one was parked yesterday near our office in Morristown.

The telephone poles were taller than the trees in the new West Orange neighborhood my family moved to in 1963.