gratitude

where the stall door bottoms

~ i wrote ~

I found the real community-of-party design genius in the bathroom, where the stall door bottoms stop a good six or nine inches above the toilet seat, such that I imagine anyone with the inclination could get a good look at the user’s netherparts — the face is what’s kept private — which is not so excellent an arrangement for an uneasy American who has come alone and dressed all wrong (yoga clothes?? Backpacking I may be, but in hindsight it was the worst possible solution I could’ve settled on with the tools at my disposal) and is sweating at the ever-growing prospect that she will have to spend the night dancing sober with the cello-wrapped cardboard cartridge she fashioned to smuggle in a joint and some scraps of psychedelica lodged in her vagina because she cannot get it out and, without the aid of its contents, won’t have the disposition to solicit a stranger in this sort-of sex club for help.

It’s a fine length for taking drugs in a group in a standing position, though, and after I got the thing out and made some friends I partook of a few additional substances in a few additional stalls with a hardbodied oncologist wearing perfect Aryan features whom I later enjoyed watching in some kind of heated and highly homoerotic exchange with the Persian radiologist who’d initially drafted me into their circle, and later still after that, when Omar came to me and said, Dieter say maybe you like to go for threesome with us, I said, Why, yes, maybe I would. Because I mean, wow, that’s the dream. Hot boys who want to make out with each other and let me watch AND do stuff with me? Ja, bitte schön, und danke.

But it turned out that Dieter doesn’t actually like Omar that much, and that Omar is more like some sort of blowhard, a talker of big game, and in the cab ride — they ridiculed my wanting to walk — This isn’t New York, they said — they arrived, beyond my linguistic ken, at some agreement that, actually, Omar had to work in a few hours and would be bailing, and Dieter and I would be on our own. Regarding which I thought, Thank the gods, for going home with a man met on a night out has almost never gone well for me — they don’t understand! How rarely they understand — and this promised, actually, to be exactly that times two. And the titillating closeness of their bodies and faces as they smiled and argued in a hazy, throbbing toilet was a far cognitive cry from the 6 am silence and brilliance of Germany in June, and how on earth could I have found my way from the other back to the one?

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urban birding

I said,

1. I’m on my vehicular way back to my pack. Thank you again, so much, for this hard-fought cab ride and for absolutely everything else.

2. Yo there are some things happening between some birds in whatever plaza is if you go out of the apartment and take a left and then take a right. Birds eating other birds. And whatnot. Speaking of conflict resolution.

I took a video of one — a giant seagull, maybe? — pecking at and carrying around the floppy carcass of a smaller, darker bird — a pigeon? — in its mouth, and eventually as it tried to walk away, super-casual, acting like it didn’t even notice me filming, it led me to another one doing the same thing.

I wonder if maybe something happened involving these smaller birds to have them dying in droves and now the bigger ones (are gulls scavengers? I guess that makes sense) are all over it.

Here is a picture of a third big bird trying to pretend for me that it’s not trying to fish that third fucked-up little bird carcass out of the fountain.

[I sent him a picture of some disembodied pigeon wings floating in a fountain with a seagull standing nearby, acting like it wasn’t trying to see if there was anything left to eat]

Also there is 100% an owl trapped inside one of those shuttered ice cream kiosks.

Or maybe it’s in there voluntarily.

Big day for urban birding in whatever plaza that is.

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I am maybe supposed to do the driving

Byrdie is pregnant, about four months, and back in old New York they are going to buy a place way uptown so she can walk to a new job at the hospital around there and Red is going to quit the firm to stay home and full-time tend the baby, which will be awesome. I am maybe supposed to do the driving while we are on this island, because Red rented a manual transmission without noticing, and when everyone was celebrating that I can carry the team in that respect I thought about writing my parents a thank-you note for all the fights we had in 1999 on a hill.

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