Pigeons on the Asphalt

I woke up feeling leaden, but my mood lifted as soon as I left the house. Walking to the bus stop, I remembered I've been meaning to start photographing the huge parking lot that's on the way.

People hate this parking lot. It's an entire paved half-block, in front of an old supermarket that's been closed a couple years and a thriving K-Mart.

I see why people think it's ugly, compared to, say, a green park. 
But I like it. It's one of the few large open spaces nearby where you can see the sky, and it has its own ecosystem: people who hang out there and, especially, flocks of birds--mostly pigeons and seagulls.

The expanse of asphalt makes me think of the grey sea.

If I could write like Melville, I would write about this parking lot.

Let's see...
[quick google]

A-ha. Yes. Here, the third paragraph from Melville's short story, "Benito Cereno":

"The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a grey mantle. Flights of troubled grey fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled grey vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms."

Here's a photo from this morning.
I think the pigeons are very fine.