Behold

TO THE LEFT is a tablet Maps screen capture
TO THE RIGHT is a laptop Maps screen capture

This is part of Staten Island.

Happy Hour in Bridgeport, CT

Two-dollar Bud draft at the pizza place; plus they got Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers in baskets on the bar, right out of a bulk container of Goldfish that looks and pours like a giant milk carton. All the liquor behind the bar is economy size. R asked, “If you were a small person, how would you be able to pour those?” These are hefty jugs. “I’ve never seen bottles that big in a bar before.” The man does a hefty pour for the yapping dads-on-the-loose in here.  He seems like he’s not getting around to us, he’s ignoring us, but he isn’t. He’s there right when we need him, without making a big deal about it, like a good father. He discounts our drinks for no reason.

Vampire Bats (At the Zoo)

All asleep in the corner where the wall of the cage meets the ceiling. Some half-hearted stucco detail suggests “cave” but it’s a cage. The animals are prisoners. Some, like the seemingly friendly toucans, are less put out than others. The toucans sit on the wooden railing that crosses the duck put, right at chest height so you could pet them, if you were an idiot. The two toucans sit side by side and occasionally one of them clacks its great loud beak over the other’s. Their eyes, within their little neon rings, are like little rave-hipsters’ eyes. The eyes are incongruous next to the giant protuberance of beak.

But the vampire bats huddle together upside-down like stressed mice. They make shivering movements, tiny yawns with needle teeth, twitch their oversized delicate ears. They’re living dustbunnies hungry for blood. How are they fed? For the bats there can’t be much pleasure in the process, whatever it is.

Maned Wolf (At the Zoo)

A scary animal from South America. From the age of the strange South American mammals. The last representative of its category of animals, it lopes across its fake pampas. It looks like a wolf in a nightmare: lean, shaggy, with sway back and snaggleteeth. A monster wolf running laps around an unmowed lawn.

When I used to have dreams about animals, I considered them important. I wrote them down, under the heading: ANIMAL DREAMS. I can remember being the person who considered these meaningful enough to record, but I can’t remember how that person felt about the list, or about the self-assigned task. The meaning of this documentation has been lost. Lost and now given over to a weird private archaeological investigation. Like lots of junk, lots of stuff I’ve either found or remember doing but can’t find or don’t care about finding.

Orwell Quote

“For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc.”

-- Orwell describes a youthful compulsion in "Why I Write”

Something I feel like I've written thousands of times

(from a text message, 8-22)

"I think u have part of the camera charger there? The usb half, i found the half that plugs into wall w usb port at end"

Prairie Dog (At the Zoo)

A special habitat I wanted to investigate because of “My Antonia,” in which observation of the surface life of prairie dogs – an exotic species that must be somewhat new to the world – underlines the great mystery of these animals’ underground cities, called “towns”, about which I guess nothing was known. Now we know all about them, for all the good it does us and them, and we can walk around these “towns” and stick our heads up, or our childrens’ heads up, in the Plexiglas bubbles and pretend we are part of the exhibit. (I didn’t capitalize Plexiglas: the machine does.)

 

            The prairie dogs rear up and stand erect and dramatically alert, like tuning forks, each one pointing in a different direction. There are the “spotters”, a very high proportion of the total population, and then there are the others, who mill around, feed, and then pop up suddenly and become still, spotters. Are they less likely to attract predators if they stand there like that? They are precise little machines, the way they rear up and hold the pose. Modern dance. Could some hawk actually swoop down and pick them off? The concrete tunnel under their enclosure makes you feel like a child, confined in a magic world with blind turns. Then you’re out of there before you know it. What are you supposed to learn by standing up in the Plexiglas tube, inside a ring of alert prairie dogs? Can you scan the horizon with them?