WORD: PART II

First off, I’ll get this out of the way: besides sight, it’s hard to use any other of the senses to document tubularity. I suppose that sound traveling through a pipe could be considered “tubular,” but I didn’t hear too much of that.

So, most of my documentation of tubularity on the line will indeed be photos.

Anyways, starting back at Alfred State (and returning to the top of my “favorite” peak) I scoured the area for pipes and tube-like structures. Luckily, the line crosses the parking lot, which was filled with cars with tail-pipes.

Although most tubular objects tend to be man-made, the trunks of trees and logs are also tubular in structure. However, I chose to focus more on the exaggerated pipe-like objects that I came across on my trek.

 

 It’s funny that on my first trip walking the line, I didn’t appreciate just how many objects were tubular. Now, however, they tend to be everywhere I look.

   

Luckily, the line leads me through the corner of the Uni-Mart, which provides me with the opportunity to peruse the tubular merchandise that it may have inside.

Tubes of Paper Towels

 

Tubes of Cancer

 

Most of the buildings on Main Street seem to be adorned with an arrangement of snakelike pipes that twist and bend around each plane of the walls. I really like how much character these tubes seem to have, in contrast with the ones that are just straight.

  

Most of the tubular objects I find are indeed a sort of extension or attachment to a building–like chimneys, weather vanes, antennae, and drain pipes.

  

WORD.

The word I chose off the wall was TUBULAR. So it’s not one of those words that I could sit around for hours thinking of multitudes of different ways in which I could interpret it artistically, but it could’ve been a lot worse. Of course, when I think “tubular”, the first thing that comes into my mind is this:

…followed closely by this:

So I did my research on tubularity (which is the correct noun form), and reinforced my original notion that items described as “tubular” are indeed pipe-like, which in case you didn’t know are cylindrical, hollow objects.

But it can also refer to a collection of tube-like objects. A plumbing system–for instance –would be comprised of multiple pipes, making it quite tubular.

In surf culture, it has been used to reference a barrel wave that is what I can only assume pretty cool to surf through. From this, more people caught ahold of the word, and gave it it’s slang definition of “excellent”, which was deemed un-tubular to utter after the 80’s came to a close.

Jeff Spicoli seems like a pretty tubular dude. Unfortunately, Sean Penn is not.

 

 

Tubular bells are metal tubes of different lengths that are tuned to different notes so that when struck by a mallet, they produce a chiming sound.

There is also tubular carcinoma, a form of cancer that occurs when small epithelial tubules invade the stroma.

From there, it gets pretty self-explanatory: tubular glands, tubular cavities, tubular skates, tubular cysts, tubular forceps…(etc.) all have some form of tube-like quality to them.