April 2008 Archives

the plastic bird was not enough. now a fine black mesh is wrapped around several pots and places on the balcony. some monster had arrived to put pig back with eons. there were bits and pieces of bits and pieces all over the floor. had a visitor tried to make me hate them? were the gifts of guano expressions of love?
i was not very good at reading the signs.
not sure the mesh will do anything. if it will not work, the next step is going to be the purchase of a bucket of toothpicks.

walking to mr. suds later in the afternoon, i noticed a pigeon that looked as if half of it were glued to the middle of the ocean parkway service road. the bird must have broken a wing and perhaps more and was now trying to take off, in heart breaking slow motion, maybe at a wave a second.
almost wanted another car to arrive and free it of pain right there. or was i supposed to break its neck?
was this somehow connected to how much i had hated pigeons just a few minutes prior?
i imagined that the best outcome of this would be one of the cats living around the building finding the pigeon, killing it gently and then feeding it to its young.

when i walked past the spot a few minutes later, that seemed exactly what i saw about to happen. a not very large female cat was carrying the freshly killed pigeon in its teeth. the cat had to walk almost upright because of her front legs being almost too short to carry the large bird without letting it touch the ground. the pigeon, with its iridescent belly facing forward, had its wings wide open, together the animals looked like a griffin, or some other yet to be described mythical animal.

looked down on my neighbours balcony. the mother pigeon was still sitting on the nest she had made in one of my neighbour's flower boxes. next to her was a small open eggshell. i at first thought that some other animal had taken the content of the egg and that the mother was sitting there traumatized. an odd thought but probably conditioned by my experience of seeing a pigeon killed just minutes prior. when i looked again and from a different angle, i could clearly see a yellowish, naked, freshly hatched thing under the mother's belly moving slowly.
it looked as if it were two little birds even. but i think it was just one.

then i noticed a second nest on my neighbours balcony, in a larger, round pot. what just a few days ago appeared to be a lucky accident now seemed to be a breeding ground for birds right under my nose. my feelings for pigeons was split back into pigs and eons.

quite a circle of emotions for a simple gray sunday, maybe as gray as the underwing of a pigeon in flight.

the hallway smells as if a pack of hyenas had spent the night going after a nursing home of tuna fish. the morning would have then been spent devouring the carcasses, leaving that signature scent of wild animal mixed with fish rot. it could be worse. of course. fig tree incents make for a good morning. had two of the plum colored sticks going at once. one held upright by three little ceramic tiles stacked inside of a shell, the other one protruding from the crotch of the little iron bunny amy gave me for christmas a few years ago. he is a hot little bunny guy. oh, the good saturday morning. the sun rose in in what looked like very unround shapes. it at first resembled a bean, then an air cushion that makes a new york city bus kneel, then a bit like one of those early fertility sculptures. now it is a blazing disk again, with that bright blue plate dancing in front of it, but only when i make myself stare at it. (if i do not, it remains the gigantic life accelerating star at the approximate center of something, somehow, somewhere.) the new york times came with a green issue of the magazine today, which is too complex of an equation for me to translate into words. a magazine. green. are they as related as ultraviolet and infrared? or is it all about the light?... my brain is too tiny to give me a the proper hint at that. my thermometer refused to give temperature readings for a few days. at first there was a blinking 70F on the display for the outside, while there were goosebumps on the leaves of my jades. then the temperature reading turned into a more honest "---." i thought about calling the manufacturer, but it took me some good old time. the thermometer (it is more of a weather station really,) seemed to be fine, except that all of its wireless communication had been knocked off (it listens to an outside sensor as well as to a mysterious atomic clock somewhere.) then yesterday the wifi connection on my luptup went down, making me immediately book an audition with one of the priests at the 57th street apple genius bar. my last mac book pro had also refused to recognize its airport card about 2.5 years ago, (which made me a burned child.) apple ended up giving me a completely new computer. we are talking new model and all. (which made me a smiling child with some ornamental scarification.) yesterday the issue thankfully turned out to be just a software glitch. i was given a conversation from high priest greg, as well as a freshly plucked battery. really, a new one! just for showing up for confession. toby is on my balcony now. he is a small jade guy who seems to want to commit suicide through starvation. the sun is helping me now to bring him back from his pre-shamanic state. he will hopefully make it. more lemon trees planted this morning (=pits from lemons stuck next to already grown lemon plants in the same pots.) marvelled at the brilliantly (or would the right word be "emeraldly") green leaves which sprang from the buds of the little orphan tree which had planted itself in an empty pot placed on the fire escape in my previous apartment. the light here must be better in a way much beyond what i can comprehend. the same tree did not open its buds until mid august at the other place. which reminds me that there might be a very gentle connection between the words "budzik," (which means "alarm clock" in polish,) bud, (which is a sleepy idea of a set of leaves ready to spring to life at a hopefully perfect moment in time,) and buddha, (which means "the awakened one" in sanskrit, i think?) a pigeon had just called me to help it find the seeds i had buried in a shallow pot for germination. we had a brief interspecies interaction about that new found bird detective luck. i hope the seeds spring to life at some point. we collected some of them near that massive tree on coney island avenue and it would be nice to see it have tiny children on my balcony. i should have probably not gotten up at 5:30 this morning. maybe i could go out and kick some pavement on my little scooter. i wonder if the hallway still stinks. maybe that's not important at all. and neither is much of the other stuff just mentioned. (though some really is.)

as it takes about ten thousand hours to be good at anything, i am perhaps in the exact middle of the distance right now, mumbling to myself that there is no water here and that it is not very pleasant to continue and yet that it is also of no use in turning back. so with every word added, i put myself closer to the spot where i will be allowed to see spaces again, and periods and dashes and paragraphs and chapters and headers, footers and blocks of things. of course it is not completely the case. every moment on the path is the beginning of the path and it is also the ending of it. this word here is the one i had been waiting to write all of my life... wait, which one of the ones i just wrote? here. no, now. argh. typing here without a safety net, on a head freshly drunk with the air of pre-sunrise sky, with the sounds of little machines entertaining themselves instead of me, mixed with the sounds of the city out there, mixed with the birds desperately trying to find their last surviving relatives to pick a fight with and perhaps also to make new ones... no safety net. well, language itself is always a safety net. it will take a while until sdlkj skljwidjvv isijjfi iisdgjhgo ookjgki ppsdjgkn again. and even that's obviously a space defined by letters which most likely were not intended to spend as much time together as they are doing here anyway. though they are not, maybe... this here is not even paper. as if paper... here it is, i can see the tip of the sun peeking its blurry dayglo head between the most proud buildings of flatbush. and i should not have stared just now, trying to figure out the color. there is a green blotch floating right in front of me now, right in front of the exact very me right here right... it is the mothership calling my eyes to return to the closed home between days. a seagull just laughed at me, yes me, as i just fed the seagull her name. orange rectangles are creeping up the empty walls of the living room. it will be just a few moments before they turn a bright yellow and then white and then just disappear in the flood of everything that will be them. more birds are shouting now. prospect park is stretching it's trees. pigeons are taking their best seats on the balconies around me. just another five thousand hours and i will be able to laugh at this very word here. no, i am able to laugh at it right now. and why did i have to try to look at the sun again? i knew it was an insane disk, with another bright blue disk dancing in front of it. i knew it. i obviously have no idea of what i know, don't know and do not know i don't know. and it will be a while until my knowing that i do not know will completely leave me alone. and i can wait.

watched the other end of the sunset. it was a bit like nightrise. first the undersides of clouds turned pink and almost orange, then the color hid in the invisible space, just to reappear in the top layers, more vibrant yet. then dark shadows floated higher and higher until the sky eventually ran out of shades of blue. the birds are quiet now. cars are still around but will soon drive to a place of rest. somebody is pulling a plastic bucket across the sidewalk. a gate in the distance would like some oil. a train had a moment of surprise. and this morning was marvelous. at first it was just the balcony. then the houses on east 7th street appeared, slowly, very. then the circle of visible matter increased. lucky me to have been at one of its infinite centers. hoping for a breathtaking sunrise tomorrow. or at least a sunrise. a day will come. a miracle of illusion.

stumbled into a moment of complete completeness and as soon as i noticed i did the moment escaped me. and i tried to catch it again, but it was not really possible somehow. i had found it as i was using an old burned piece of wood to flatten the soil around three young lime trees which i had replanted into their new home. it was as if i had stumbled upon a dream, yet i was completely awake. the opposite of my falling asleep on the train the other night and waking up in coney island. the first few moments of being awake were special. there i was, running towards the closing door of the empty subway car, in the middle of the night, somewhere in the depths of brooklyn. i think the train spit me out on avenue p. "does the bird you have on your balcony stop the pigeons from coming?" it is embarrassing when i do not recognize my neighbors immediately. here was my next door neighbor asking me about the crow my parents had sent from germany to scare away the pigeons. the disadvantage of living in the tallest building of the neighborhood is that it very naturally attracts birds. especially birds that like to nest in cliffs. i have to keep the my balcony in subtle motion at all times, so the pigeons do not fall in love with some spot. like that pigeon in the flower box a floor below me. there she was, noticed her yesterday. she looked like a bird ready to die. and my neighbor was nice enough to let her. in the afternoon when he was cleaning the other planters he left the apparently dying bird in peace. i took the flashlight in the middle of the night and pointed it at the location of the animal. she was dead. her wings spread, her head to the side. i only saw her for a split second, as i did not want to look like a psychotic, snooping neighbor. thought is was nice of the people to respect the need of an animal. quite the opposite of those two ladies in prospect park a few years ago who dragged a dying cat they spotted in the bushes, called the firefighters, tried to perform cpr. this morning the pigeon was completely awake and keeping her spot. a few hours later "dad" was sitting on the eggs. what is bound to happen here is the opposite of a dying bird. and no, my plastic bird does nothing to the pigeons. they do not care about it. some seem to come visit it. i will take it down soon. i have two. and large birds fly by my window now and then. and it is beautiful. this afternoon something that looked like an eagle (do they live here?,) flew by the building on huge spread wings. he was no more than 300 meters from the building when a little falcon, maybe a fifth of his size sped out of nowhere, fell towards the larger predator and bit him right between the shoulders. it was just a brief moment, it looked like there was some sort of pre-story though. the sun will soon set over brooklyn. i had to bring all of my plants in this morning because of the strong winds. hope my lemon and lime trees will be okay. being replanted tends to be a shock for living things. saw an apartment just like mine available two floors above mine. the view is subtly different. the place smells of fresh paint and newly polished floors. perhaps the thing to do now would be to bundle up and sit outside in the rocking chair; stare at the clouds as they are speeding by in ever new shapes in front of the ever darker turning sky. and i might find a place as non-verbal as when i was flattening the ground with the burned piece of wood. or perhaps i will wake up and find myself having to exit the train on avenue p. maybe i will find a moment so simple the perfect one that will be waiting for me there. and maybe the only way to find out is to finally stop writing this entry and just do... what again?