Seven years ago, on fourth of July weekend, her dog pulled her into that same parking lot, running away from fireworks. She broke her wrist and carries the scar of the dead dog with her still.

“There’s not just skunks around here,” she said. “There’s raccoons and possums — that’s what scares me.”

Years ago, “a hundred or so,” she was an art professor at Princeton, though she maintained a residence in the city. That changed when she required more room for her art studio. Still located a few doors down from us, she says the neighborhood has changed.

“Across the street, that used to be tenements, and a doctor owned your building….. I don’t trust doctors,” she continued. “My father was one at NYU, and when he died, a hundred or so years ago, he said he only trusted one doctor at the hospital,” she continued.

“I think most doctors these days only see through the eye of the needle. They’re not here to diagnose the whole body. They just isolate the problems.”

I tell her that I’ve spent more money on x-rays for the cat than I have for myself, and she inquires what the cats name is. “Goose,” I say, “after the Top Gun character.” She nods that she knows the movie, and then says that a hundred or so years ago, she once read that pets understand humans better if you speak in a falsetto voice.

Suddenly, a skunk appeared in the parking lot. Together, we attempted to call Goose out of the parking lot; her using a falsetto voice and me clapping, as Goose remained, staring puzzled at us both.

Sensing our presence, the skunk retreated back into the fenced area, and I grabbed Goose, picking him up and saying that it was time to go before we all got sprayed by a skunk.

“It was nice meeting you,” she said. And I replied with the same. We never even shook hands or introduced ourselves, but I won’t soon forget that our chance meeting essentially happened because of a family of skunks.

I was wrong.

Our problems started just after entering the NJ Turnpike. Before we even got to the first exit, almost immediately after grabbing the toll ticket, traffic slowed to a stop, filtering down to one lane over a Turnpike bridge connecting Jersey City and Bayonne to the rest of the the Turnpike. Such was our fate. We had entered the traffic and would have to wait it out or get off at the next exit.

Then things took an unexpected turn. Instead of waiting in traffic like the rest of the traffic jam, a few cars began exiting their lanes, pulling into the shoulder lane and speeding ahead. First a few, then more. Speeding ahead as far as possible in the shoulder, then reentering proper lanes when they couldn’t proceed any further in the shoulder. I understood their frustrations; we were all in the same boat. And a small part of me even respected their decision to not let the mess of traffic beat them. But overall, it was making the traffic even worse than it already was.

Ahead of me, a woman in an SUV in the left lane put on on her directional, motioning an intent to move into the right lane. As there was nowhere for myself or the car I was driving to immediately go, I let her into the lane. But instead of remaining in the traffic, she pulled into the shoulder, sped ahead maybe ten cars, then reentered the right lane aggressively. I asked myself aloud, “Did I really just do that?”

And I did. I had extended a courtesy to a stranger that inevitably made my time in the traffic even more intolerable. And with that one simple action, the little faith I had left in humanity possibly rising to the challenge and righting the wrongs in the world slipped away just a little bit more. I suppose I could’ve let it be, but I tend to unnerve real quick, and when the next string of cars tried to pass in the shoulder lane, I pulled our car over, blocking them from passing. Cars honked, gave us the finger and generally weren’t too pleased with my highway vigilantism. This lasted for a few minutes, and it took a lot of energy, and it didn’t necessarily mitigate anyone else’s wrongs on the road that day.

After a few minutes, I gave up, pulling back into my alloted lane as Ziggy Stardust drew to a close on Q104.3. An exit for Bayonne appeared, and I jumped on it. We had traveled 6 miles in 40 minutes, and I still didn’t know how to interpret the situation. Part of me thought I was right to defy other people trying to get ahead of the pack; part of me now thought I had no right to play god on the highway; and another part of me thought I should’ve pulled into the shoulder lane and joined them.

Our detour took us through Bayonne, into Staten Island, down the Staten Island Expressway and back into New Jersey via the Outerbridge Crossing. Along the way, with a few minutes hindsight in tow, I decided to take local roads to the beach, and it was during this stretch of road when I started to think that the idea of a moral instinct died the minute humans entered into a car and let a machine dictate their actions with other humans inside machines.

Later that day, we ate at a Jersey Shore restaurant near the bay. We sat outside, next to a marina, where two seagulls shared equal time atop a mooring, going back and forth between jaunts into the water.

I thought to myself, “They got it right.”

On our last day in Shanghai, we ventured away from the chaos of bustling city life, into a section of the city that was not yet in the throes of development. As we began our journey, we stopped for a red light at a six lane intersection. A few moments before we had arrived at the light, a motorized bicycle hauling recycled styrofoam through the intersection unknowingly dropped some of its cargo. The driver continued on, leaving a large flat piece of formerly white styrofoam in the road. As the lights changed, cars, bikes and people trampled over the discarded styrofoam, and the foam began to break apart. We waited, and watched, and after just a few minutes, the styrofoam had disintegrated into an artificial snow, covering the intersection in a haze of once-white debris. On an island in the middle of the street, children ran through the snowy haze as they waited for the light to change. And then it did. And the change was instantaneous.

One moment, we were navigating our way across a six lane mess of traffic and discarded styrofoam, and the next, we were away from everything; the traffic, the people, the noise, the smell. This was a pocket of Shanghai which had managed to escape absolutely everything about the traditional Chinese city. Trees grew along the well groomed road, maintained by a road service that rode three-wheeled motorized bikes and worked their way around bamboo brooms. Birds sang from the trees and dotted the grasslands. Fish grew in the polluted creeks along the well groomed road, and old men on mopeds squatted and smoked as they fished for dinner on the side of a quiet road of a modernized Chinese city.

A mile or so down the road, amid the silence of the road out of Shanghai, we arrived at an empty stop light, and noticed a crowd of onlookers beyond the light. In the center of the crowd was a car smashed against a tree in the middle of the road. No one was speaking, and no one seemed emotional about the wreck. They simply stared, arms folded, heads down, baffled by the strength of the tree against a demolished car. We continued on.

About 200-feet from the road, every mile or so, a new development was under construction on both sides of the road. Soon, the road would be covered with everything we had left behind in Shanghai, but for now, it was a respite from the city. Signs along the road dotted the entrance ways to the high rise construction sites, with names like “Gold Cloud Apartments” and “Apartments By The Sea,” which sat in front of an artificial lake along the road. Outside, the bus stops sat empty.

Our destination was a skatepark at the end of the road. Guarded by government workers, virtually free to enter and basically empty, the SMP Skatepark wasn’t what I was expecting when we arrived. The park was vast, expertly built and occupied by scattered groups of English, Australian and American families. No Chinese people were present at the park except for the two guards at the entrance; they also sold beer and pizza out of their outhouse-sized guard house.

Two hours later, after a skatepark session in the sun, we were ready to depart. The skatepark was limitless, and fun, and vastly overstated, just like the rest of Shanghai’s modernized construction projects. We departed. On the ride back into the center of the city, we encountered much of the same occurrences as the ride to the skatepark. Although now, we were in a different mode; a sort of “It’s so peaceful out here, let’s not forget it” air ran through us as we pedaled back down the same road. The car smashed against the tree remained, as did the government landscapers on three-wheeled bikes. I think we were the same too; the air just smelled a tiny bit better on the outskirts of the city and that did more than we probably realized. In a matter of minutes, that had changed, and we were back in the boisterous area of downtown Shanghai, surrounded by masses of buses, bikes, dogs wearing shoes and more styrofoam snow.

The next day, we began our journey home. Passing Longdong Road on the way to Pudong Airport, drinking cheap beers after making it through airport security, wondering what was next. I’ve only spent a total of ten days in China, but I’d like to go back and trace the line that leads from major city to tributary extension and back, just like we did on our last day this past June.

My father’s answer for the latter: a self-propelled lawnmower, worked for a time. But his long term solution proved more agreeable for lazy, teenagers in the suburbs of New Jersey. He planted ivy at the top, and in a few short years, it began to grow down the slope, slowly covering over the angled area of grass with dense, green vines. As a part-time landscaper, my father was rewarded by the successes of his experiment, and as full-time slackers in the 16-year-old, don’t give a shit about the upkeep of the house department, the ivy meant less work with the lawnmower. It was, in the very best of ways, a mutually beneficial solution to grass growing on a steep hill, and children that cared less and less about their home as they aged year by year.

Our dog, an 80 lb. mutt named George, spent hours in said backyard. And it never tired him. Between squirrels, rabbits and laps around the above ground pool, there never seemed to be a dull moment for that dog in the backyard on the side of a hill, half-covered in ivy and dog shit. He knew it end on end, traversing it daily and announcing to his fellow animals in the area, “This is my backyard, stay away (and don’t think you can hide in the ivy.)” He had made it into his territory, and he maintained it as his own. To his credit, he dismantled rabbit nests (crunching the rabbit offspring between his teeth,) chased trespassers away (even if they were friends casually using the backyard as a shortcut between two roads,) killed a cat or two (hiding the bodies in the ivy) and even drank a saucepan full of cooling cooking oil on one dreaded (and vomit-filled) occasion.

George owned the yard, and he continued to do so until his death in February of 1994, leaving a trail of paw prints behind in the snow as a mark of his presence. At the time, I was 19, living away at school, and not ready to deal with the death.

When my father called me, and announced that my brother was also on the line, I just knew that something couldn’t be right. And they didn’t beat around the bush: George had been sick, but because he was a pack animal, he had kept it hidden to prevent his pack, which by now was essentially (but not instinctually) myself, my brother and my father, from turning on him and/or abandoning him. He stumbled, and fell, and my father and brother rushed him to a 24-hour vet in Linden, where he died a time later.

The ice on the stairs to my apartment in New Brunswick hadn’t yet been cleared from the last storm, and although I don’t remember dropping the phone and running into the cold night, I do remember falling backwards down the stairs, clipping the back of my head on the top stair, then instantly getting up and continuing to run to my car. I drove the 20 or so miles home, and tried in vain to take some expired asthma medication to fall asleep. The house was too quiet, and George’s food bowls remained in the kitchen.

Sometime in the middle of the night, when I realized that George’s familiar weight wouldn’t be crashing at the foot of my childhood bed, I got up and walked downstairs. I pulled on my shoes and walked into the cold night of the backyard, unbeknownst to my father and brother. And there, in a moonlit and snow-covered yard, lay George’s footprints, circling around the pool and traversing up the hillside of the backyard. Not knowing what to do or how to react, I traced his tracks around the pool and up the slope of the backyard, careful to not blemish the physical marks he had left in the snow. In the morning, I returned to school, and inevitably initiated the grieving process.

February turned to March, then March to April, and George’s footprints melted into the topsoil. And as I reached for anything to mark his presence in this world, my boyhood backyard stood silent under my dog’s gainful watch, ivy glistening down the slope in the morning New Jersey sun. George everywhere.

Then Leigh Ramsdell went on Happy Cow, and we decided to do a little exploring. Happy Cow is a Web site that allows users to list, rate and review vegetarian restaurants the world over. As it happened, Shanghai had a few vegan-friendly restaurants, so we got Chinese directions from the hotel concierge and headed out.

The first place we visited, a restaurant about two miles from the hotel, looked a bit suspect. But the one English word the wait staff could speak was, “Ve-gan,” and that’s all it took. There was no English on the menus, and the waiter used his phone to translate what the pictures we pointed at on the menu were. I would point at a picture, he would type Chinese into his phone, then let me look at the English translation. The first picture I pointed at, I thought was a pretty simple mixture of tofu and vegetables. When he showed me his phone, it read “Fungus flower,” which I took to mean mushrooms.

In the end, we played it safe, pointed at two dishes and hoped for the best. The first dish, a mix of chili peppers, peanuts and mock chicken (we hoped) was really good, but the next dish threw us off. At first we thought it was a mix of mock chicken and green beans. I grabbed some green beans with my chopsticks and dug in. But the green beans were hot peppers. Hotter than most things I’m accustomed to eating. Our mouths roared with fire, but we continued picking at the dishes and determined that things were okay, even with a huge communication barrier.

The next night, we tried a new place. Called The Loving Hut, the restaurant quickly became a daily destination for us. The food was cheap and the friendly proprietor didn’t mind tossing his English skills around with us. They even had an English section on the menu, meaning we knew what we getting into now. (Sorry, we’re dumb Americans.)

My first night, I had traditional Chinese noodles and the same combination of chili peppers, peanuts and mock chicken from the other restaurant. The traditional noodle were akin to American lo-mein, but the Chinese American taste in China spared me from a week of straight fruits, vegetables and bread, and I was glad for that. The rest of the week, we feasted on fried mock pork cutlets, curried potatoes, something that tasted exactly like chow mein, various soups, flatbread and mock meats. When we would finish, the staff would politely wish us a good night and ask for us to come back.

The walk back from The Loving Hut to the hotel took about 20 minutes each night, and along the way, we would buy cheap beer while peering into the market windows of the many shops and restaurants along the road, as children from the shops played on the bustling sidewalk. Occasionally, we would stop and marvel at a “Strong Man” condom machine placed on a wall around a sharp corner in the road, but mostly, we were just glad that The Loving Hut was there to feed us.

I smiled and nodded at him, then pedaled away when the light turned green. Normally, I would’ve verbally retaliated with something along the lines of “You walked into me. Why don’t you pay attention to where you’re walking?” But things were different now. I had just returned from a week long excursion in Shanghai, China, and I had learned not to take my position on the road personally.

Shanghai’s streets are overrun with a mix of speeding cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, scooter, pedi-cabs, rickshaws and pedestrians. Traffic lights aren’t necessarily obeyed, obsessive honking isn’t unusual, and spotting a bike with a payload of a refrigerator and an oven on the back is more common than finding a restaurant with dog meat on the menu. Entering into a deluge of vehicles on an overcrowded Shanghai street, is, at first glance, an unspoken entrance into mass chaos. But within that chaos exists order; one just needs to not search too deep for it.

For starters, you need to change the way you view your self, or better yet, completely stop. Because less emphasis is placed on the individual in traditional Chinese culture, the rules of the road reflect a more communal approach to life, aspiring to a sort of harmonious interdependence. It is not “You versus the rest of the people on the road.” It is “You and the rest of the people on the road.” Nor is it, “Get out of my way so I can get to my destination.” It is, “Let’s keep this thing going so we can all get where we need to go.” The ramifications of this approach of getting from point A to point B manifests itself in many ways. But perhaps the most important (and my favorite) aspect of this approach is the lack of anger and aggression on the road. (A by-product of no selfishness.)

So on a random Shanghai street, with all manners of vehicles noisily buzzing to and from their destinations with little regard for Westernized traffic rules, it’s important to remember to not internalize your fellow driver’s actions as personal attacks on the self. This is all of us just doing what we can to get from one point to another, together. And that’s why I didn’t get angry at the pedestrian calling me an asshole, back at home in New York.

I can’t say for certain if this was the case with Medications, but it’s been five years since their last full-length release, and I’m led to believe that life and bills got in the way of the band a little more than expected.

Medications formed in 2003 out of the ashes of another Dischord act, Faraquet. Comprised of Chad Molter, Devin Ocampo and Jeff Boswell, Faraquet played an angular and tense mix of DC math rock that sometimes borrowed from King Crimson. As is the case with almost every Dischord band in existence, Faraquet lasted a handful of years and called it a day. But Ocampo and Molter soldiered on, reforming under the Medications moniker with drummer Andrew Becker.

The original line-up of Medications released an EP, followed shortly after by the severely underrated ‘Your Favorite People All In One Place‘ in 2005. Then something happened. Faraquet reformed for some shows and released a compilation of earlier material, in between Ocampo and Molter joining forces with both Beauty Pill and Mary Timony. Becker left the band, and Medications seemed to get put on hold. Life had gotten in the way of the band a little more than expected.

But after a break, Ocampo and Molter managed to return to Medications, releasing ‘Completely Removed‘ on April 20, 2010, and the time away from the music they write seems to have produced a different band. The prog-infused math-i-ness of their earlier releases is still there, but it’s juxtaposed against a lighter pop sensibility that has escaped earlier Medications releases. Recorded in Ocampo’s home studio, Molter and Ocampo chose not to replace their former drummer, handling most of the instrumentation on their own (with the addition of Mark Cisneros, who plays keys and clarinet.) The result of the new approach, upon first listening, is a more melodic and more direct Medications. But that approach is layered, multi-faceted and more succinct than previous releases. In simpler terms, shorter songs, more pop sensibilities, less anger, awesome guitar sounds.

‘Completely Removed’ is available now, and Medications is on tour in support of the album. The lesson here is that life getting in the way of whatever you might be pursuing isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the long run. Take a break, regroup and don’t be afraid to try something new. Just be sure to let that one eager fan in New Jersey know why its taking so long.

Let’s talk New Jersey for a few minutes.

Exactly one week ago, I installed the air conditioner in the front window of our new house. The reason behind the installation: a humid 86 degree day in early May. A slightly unusual occurrence, but not entirely implausible. Now, one week later, I’ve found myself ignoring the air conditioner controls, keeping my hooded sweatshirt on in the house and cranking the thermostat in a clockwise direction. The reason behind these actions: a windy and cold 46 degree night one week after the warmth of last Sunday. That’s a 40-degree change in temperature in just seven days, and I’m failing to mention the accompanying conditions of the past weekend: 40 mph winds and some of the fastest moving clouds I’ve seen in my life. The drop in temperature and the wind are a little more unusual and unexpected than the warmer, humid day.

Before I go any further, I’m going to take this space to apologize for continually attempting to become a de facto meteorologist, but I don’t think things are necessarily right in the world anymore. And that brings me back to the term “Global Warming.” I believe the Earth is warming, and I believe that’s been well documented in science over the past decade. What I don’t automatically believe is a static rise in global temperatures throughout the world without any attempt from the environment to balance the incongruity.

Especially New Jersey. Much like a made man from The Sopranos, New Jersey’s ecosystem seems to be retaliating against the Earth’s tendency to want to become warmer, in the form of colder winters, stronger daily winds, and as evidenced by today, unseasonably cold days in the middle of May. Now here’s where it becomes relative. I’ve lived here off and on for most of my life, and the past 5-10 years, the weather has changed. I don’t necessarily think it’s become warmer, but it has become more violent, colder and in a sense, reactionary.

Which is why I think the term “Global Warming” should be accompanied by the term “Environmental Reaction.” As humans, we’ve done a great job of attempting to change the environment we’re a part of, and I honestly think the Earth is starting to react in ways we didn’t see coming. I could probably connect this back to the idea of conquest or the human desire to want to control if I really wanted to, but instead I’ll end it, go put my jacket on, fight the wind and go take the garbage out.

Not that a three day weekend could ever qualify as much time, but I was there; in Missouri, off the Interstate, and not in an airport. At first glance, Joplin is a town like many others dotted throughout the Midwest and placed along a major roadway. It’s got hotels, chain restaurants and the usual array of chain-store brands.

Outside of a car, it’s a slightly different story. For one, there aren’t a lot of sidewalks. Now this might be because the town is actually 35 square miles in size, or it might be because people drive cars instead of walk. I can’t say for sure, but I did see a ton of cars and next to no pedestrians in the town. Of course, it is a big town. Parking, from what I could see, was a breeze, and traffic, during my tenure there, didn’t seem to exist. In simpler terms, Joplin is not Jersey City, and I’m not sure how Joplin might react to Jersey City’s local population of older men riding three-wheeled bicycles adorned with the Puerto Rican flag.

But because I live in a place where a good parking spot is king and the average time to cross town in a car is slower than that of walking, you could put me anywhere in the world and I’ll return to the same thoughts: “Damn, that’s a sweet parking spot” or “Let’s just walk, it’s faster.”

I guess I should add that I have nothing against the city of Joplin or the many people that drive cars there, and also that I didn’t spend every waking moment there thinking about automobile travel. I thought about All, too.

In the early ’90s, All (featuring 3/4 of The Descendents) was a band from the Los Angeles area that toured constantly and cranked out records almost annually. Because the band was on the road most of the year, and because being in a band was an expensive endeavor even back then, All left California and attempted to centralize themselves in the United States to make touring easier. They picked Missouri, and from what I know, they didn’t last long.

All recorded one album while in Brookfield, Missouri; the poorly-received “Percolator,” and it offered small glimpses into the band’s alienation while in Missouri. At the time, I couldn’t really relate, but walking the desolate streets of Joplin on a Sunday night, in between empty strip malls selling the fixtures from whatever store had once existed there, I finally figured out what they were talking about.

I listened to that album this past week, while driving, in traffic, and searching for parking spots. And eighteen years after the fact, it made me appreciate Missouri.