I am still haunted by something I saw on Friday afternoon. I don't think I know how to conjure up more horror than the phrase "public hospital in Bushwick." But that's where I was. There was the working girl berating the security guard when she found out she was at the wrong entrance and would have to continue to WALK on those stiletto heeled red latex over-the-knee boots. The bathroom stalls with no locks or handles even though I was in the "teaching and learning" seminar wings. The elevator where pushing 1 takes me to the empty echoing basement and every sense in me says danger.

To get there I had to walk two blocks from the subway. Two blocks that were undergoing road construction work and were covered with refuse. Tangles of security fencing, scattered hills of lumber, buckets of bolts, animal carcasses, piles of garbage. No one cares about this, it has all clearly been there for days if not weeks. All the hospital staff have to walk past every day, and no one has made a call. No one has taken responsibility, no one has tried. The abject sense of degradation, of no one gives a shit is so palpable and I am so horrified.