The ground beneath our feet.
I will not apologize for my fascination with manhole covers, although it may look like an obsession. Apparently there is an active Twitter community of those who collect or catalogue images of manhole covers. Manhole covers are tokens of the complexity urban life. They symbolize our thirsts, our wastes, our desires for power and to speak and hear, and maybe the shame that we have in our thirsts for power, our wastes, and our need to see and to say: how very neurotic that we conceal them. (Some may deny that power and light are needs, or that communication is a need: how very Freudian!) So we hide these underground, concealed under 200+ lbs of steel. (Manhole covers on modern street need to be heavy because when vehicles pass over them at speed, the air pressure can vary widely in an instant -- an effect known as Venturi -- so that lighter manhole covers might pop out.) Here are some that I've seen in my wanderings through Chicago. Hardly encyclopedic. (Also, some of my shoe wa...