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Mike, The One Mockingbird
You can only wonder is it the rumored conviviality of its occupants that brought about the events of this morning.
It is something I wonder about. Is there more than one mockingbird? Everywhere I go I keep seeing the same one.
Last night, nodding off, the rabid fox, which I haven’t until now mentioned, made demented, near death fox noises, in the woods outside my window.
I don’t know if you can hear it from where you are but there is a light tapping on the bay window by the kitchen table in the other room. It is loud enough to hear over Townes Van Zandt, who is singing a ballad about not being loved.
I know you’re going to tell me that birds sometimes fly into windows by accident and it is my responsibility as someone who purports to be sensitive to hang streamers in front of it or some other visual marker so the birds won’t be tempted to fly into my kitchen.
I don’t think you understand Mike, the one mockingbird.
This isn’t the original paragraph that goes here, that one got eaten by the ibm thinkpad, which, similar to Mike, crashes, but not into windows, into itself, unless you want me to mean Windows, which probably is the culprit. Now the whole window concept is sort of tainted for me. I don’t feel good about it. But also, you ain’t missing nothing from that original paragraph, except the one allusion to Rudyard Kipling and one tired Heavy Hummingbird alliteration/metaphor.
I can still hear him though, Mike, in the other room, now tapping along to Willie Nelson singing Rainbow Connection, which I think is a cover of that Kermit the Frog song.
I cut some cask strength bourbon in half with water and offered it to Lorina so she would have something to drink while watching Fog of War, which I think is the most chilling anti-war statement ever made and also lends perspective to current events in the sense that what this country has survived just in the last sixty years is pretty remarkable when you are able to realize it through the lens of a condensed timeline. I mean if we can survive WWII and later a team consisting of McNamara, Johnson, and LeMay and not too long later survive a Nixon/Kissinger clusterfuck, and then 8 years of Reagan, well, we should be able to survive whatever comes, except, you know, the end (and here I would like for all you fundamental Christians to at least consider the possibility that your near salivating in anticipation of an Armageddon every time—and only when—the US is involved in some world conflict near the middle east, is sort of creepy, and perhaps indicative of mental illness, which is treatable. I am not speaking to the entirety of your value system as represented by the words of JesusChrist, which for the most part I aspire to myself).
What history shows is a balance of insanity and reason. Speaking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the voices of reason that ultimately prevailed, Lorina expressed her fear of this current administration being faced with a crisis of similar magnitude. I got pretty good cred for wallowing in lakes of futility but I am breathing clean air with my head bobbing above that these days. I have tricked myself, I have told myself and believed me, that wallowing like that is a colossal waste of time and forgive me but I usually have to punctuate the sentiment with—you punkass crybaby bitch. Anyway, and also, I tend to feel the need to look contrary to popular opinion, regardless of the opinion, and why imagine a desolate future when there is so much of it you can experience in the here and now, if that is your cup of tea. So I said to Lorina—we can’t know for sure that such a crisis would be handled poorly by this current administration. Even though they may be lame ducks, there are voices of reason within the administration. I offered the obvious. I said we still have Colin Powell.
Lorina is a talented musician and spends time each week with talented musicians so she has a sense of timing and beat that overlaps into her everyday living. You don’t really know that a pause is pregnant until later but that’s what it was, that quiet space between me saying we have Colin Powell and her saying, oh, he resigned today. Well then, good thing Castro has been marginalized.