Gutters

Did I mention how much gutters are growing on me? It all started because at the new school I will be teaching at in Coney Island on the Kingsborough College Campus, the only figment of design or ornament for the poor oversized trailor of a building (on the ocean!) is the diagonal gutters that bisect the exterior grey planes. But now, looking back at photos of old homes of mine, even (especially) prefab(ulous) houses use the gutter as a design element, and I dig it. It is cool to wrap your house in a big bendy straw. With all the ayurveda up my nose these days, it makes me think of all sorts of new age metaphors for the house or building secreting toxins (ama).
Seriously. The gutter is a great term for so many situations:

1. A channel at the edge of a street or road for carrying off surface water.
2. A trough fixed under or along the eaves for draining rainwater from a roof. Also called regionally eaves spout, eaves trough, rainspout, spouting.
3. A furrow or groove formed by running water.
4. A trough or channel for carrying something off, such as that on either side of a bowling alley.
5. Printing The white space formed by the inner margins of two facing pages, as of a book.
6. A degraded and squalid class or state of human existence.
7. (of a candle) to lose molten wax accumulated in a hollow space around the wick.

   10.	(of a lamp or candle flame) to burn low or to be blown so as to be nearly extinguished.

So yesterday, before I went to the Vaidya for the first time, I went to the dentist. I was alarmed when I discovered that the first dentist was from India, a Hindu vaidya! How deeply interwoven my life has become with this ancient mystical medicine.