03.30.24 [on the J train]

there's an oak leaf pressed in this notebook from the owl funeral i attended last month—along with the zoo photo safari i'd taken just over a week earlier, one of the stranger trips i'd taken for an article, though there's a strong likelihood i'd have gone to the funeral anyway. i've now been writing and/or fretting over my latest Earnest Science Feature for nearly three months, though it feels more like thirty. i haven't begged joe to read any of this one except for the first version of the opening scene (one of my favorite will mcphail panels is the one where a woman asks a spider she's trapped under a glass to read something she's written), but given how much i've bitched and tossed around in bed about it, i'm sure he'll be as glad to see it out of our lives as he was, say, when i finished my orwell essay for the new york times. out, it will soon be out! until i get a big old tattoo of its subject in may, that is. (owl, not orwell.)

a man on this train is snoring the sort of snore that seems like it'd rouse the snorer, or jolt him a few inches in the air, at least, but he snores on, and i wish him well; it would be nice to be flat for a few more hours. i'm trying to get a few more bleary mornings volunteering in queens out of the way early this spring, as i'm going to mexico on assignment(!!) in a few weeks and joe and i are then meeting my folks in copenhagen, where i have decided i don't care if it's touristy to truck out to elsinore kronborg castle. we have planned little else beyond a few meals and a night at the opera and, oh, a shared airbnb i picked for when we migrate to stockholm. will my stepfather, aghast at the way i live when i'm not at a high-end hotel, decide he doesn't love me anymore? will joe out-snore this guy on the train, who sounds with every breath more and more like he's awake and trying to fool schoolchildren? will i join the danish swans and leave my terrestrial life behind once and for all? hard to say. i ended up not interviewing a colleague out in prospect park for the swan essay i sent off to the printer this week, as the thing was short enough that bringing in another voice was going to be kind of weird and she was being flaky enough about meeting that i didn't have the energy to keep chasing. i did send a draft of the piece to my friend R at the bird hospital—not because i needed to check facts, exactly, but because anyone who knew what i was talking about would know where i was talking about, and i wanted her blessing.

she called me from her long-overdue vacation and gave it, and told me Secret Owl Things about my other feature, and let me know, when i finally screwed up the courage to ask, that bird ben, the northern cardinal i've loved for a a decade, died last summer. i don't know how to write about that, and imagine i won't for a long time; knowing ben changed me in a way i might not understand until i'm very old, if i get to be very old. i do know that R's three-part benediction—you've done right by swans, i trust you enough to tell you confidential things about the owl, we can remember ben together—felt a bit like permission to take full height in this version of myself. i wonder sometimes if she knows how badly i wanted her to see this identity all those years i cleaned cages and wrestled geese, and i know that one of her great gifts is to speak to the people we want to be on our best days. i don't mean that i'm a few inches in the air like the snorer uptrain (who's still at it!), but i have had occasion to say yes, yes, that is what i meant.

02.03.24 [on the J train]

i've had a run of really wonderful reads at the start of this year: turning into a shark, swapping bodies with your spouse, defeating conversion camps, it's all been lovely. speculative fiction makes me itch to write strange things, though not to write fiction—i have tried that a few times and everything about it feels wrong. which is lucky, really, as i then get to enjoy others' stuff with absolutely no skin in the game. on that, though, i had a funky twinge yesterday that is leading me to look into the possibility of writing a nonfiction book? it would not be a collection of essays, nor would it be a memoir; it would have a principal and lots of secondary subjects that are not me, and you would just smell me in the structure and language, or maybe, maybe i would lean a bit into a framework like the one in preparing the ghost, where the author talks about the first photographer of a giant squid and also, semi-related, about his own working out of an ice cream truck in chicago. i will probably spare posterity stories of my slinging health food in orange county, but maybe other glimpses could end up in there? more importantly, the prospective subject spent significant parts of her life close to new york city, so if i decide i really want to dig in on research—a copy of her out-of-print midlife memoir is on its way to me now*—i could make a lot of initial progress without shelling out for plane tickets or making myself vulnerable in, i don't know, residency applications or whatever. i am still not at all sure that writing and especially selling and marketing a book are things i truly want to do, but i know i want to read this memoir to see if i like the idea of spending a lot more time thinking about this woman, and that's something?

the owl pitch i mentioned last month landed, speaking of writing. it landed this past wednesday because my editor missed my email the first time and then had COVID, so the time-sensitive part of the story is spoiled, but i get to spend the rest of the month thinking about owls—for money, and that's the dream, really. yet another bird pitch flew out of me about a week ago, and before that another about a world war two pilot and candy, and if all of them hit, february is going to be a bit of a shit show—but perhaps it's time for me to develop the ability to juggle passion projects instead of packing them in the tissue of better-paid busy work. the ceramic flamingo i ordered after embracing a flamingo in the bahamas last fall was bubble-wrapped just beautifully, and it still arrived on our doorstep with a broken neck.

*ETA as i finally get around to uploading this written-on-the-subway post: it was getting weird that the memoir i mentioned hadn't arrived as of today, so i checked my alibris account and realized i hadn't succeeded in buying it. it's finally en route for realsies! since i'm updating, i can also now report that the other bird pitch also hit and i finally got a weird no about the pilot, like, monday, february 20th. i'm a little shocked at the rejection, as that pitch was really good, but juggling three semi-recreational stories this month would have broken me. i am at peace.

12.23.23 [on the F train]

it is too early to make good decisions! the anti-abortion extremists who harass patients outside the far-flung clinic to which i am en route would never yell something like that and i'm not about to suggest it, but–they wouldn't be incorrect? i nearly grabbed the wrong train just now as i was congratulating myself for waking up without my alarm for this morning's escorting shift. of course, i'll never rise naturally because birdsong summons and the sun warms my bones or whatever; worry is the only thing that gets me up without assistance. i don't mind that so much, as it sort of means that the worst moments of my day are inevitably the very first ones. once i know i won't sleep late i can pose for the river with the cats and contemplate late-stage capitalism with my microwaved day-old coffee. we are staying put for the holidays as we usually do, and it's even lower-impact than in previous years: we'll go out to a movie on christmas eve but aren't doing one of the fancy dinners i invariably hate. i still haven't figured out how to strike a balance between joe's interest in complicated-food-and-drink-related celebration and mine in comparative frugality (in that context, at least) and temperance, but i hope we're getting better at meeting each other halfway.

i didn't think i was going to have much free time here at the end of the year, but work is mostly done? i have to turn in a revised draft of my MUSHROOMS IN SPACE! essay back in over the first week of january, but it feels like the tweaks my editor and i talked about aren't going to break my head. i'm hemming and hawing over what my next passion projects (or at least the ones that i pitch instead of just accepting) will be and...meh? it was humbling to eat it with my first new yorker humor submission, though my dad made a valiant attempt to console me with the repeated story of how some friend of his has submitted hundreds of thousands of cartoons to them and is still waiting for a nod. i appreciate his point, but i am a very special girl and this is totally different.

speaking of special girls, my favorite former staffer from the bird hospital, a woman i haven't seen in person since well before the pandemic, popped up in my instagram feed as a full-fledged (heh) urban ranger in central park. i have absolutely nothing to do with that, but hot damn did it activate my proud-auntie parasympathetic system! one day you're swooning at the smell of crow blood in front of a gal and the next she's in your phone delivering a totally polished minilecture about weird duck season. i'm very curious to know if she's blown the whistle on mouse park, i.e. the spot where we'd sneak behind some trees and release the mice we'd caught nibbling on bird seed in the hospital's basement treatment room, but my feeling is that i should let sleeping liberated rodents lie. god i'm happy for her.

12.29.22 [on the 6 train]

it's warmed back up, and we're headed up to the bronx zoo - by 'we' i mean my local family minus joe, who is a good sport about excursions like these and no fool when given an elegant out - to look at lights, i think? my yen to craft enrichment piñatas for tigers up there was the beginning of my many years as a volunteer at the bird hospital; i tweeted about how my DIY skills were unimpressive to zookeepers and a friend who did wildlife rehab out on long island introduced me to my local bird people. i still haven't been back up there to volunteer since the winter before the pandemic, and i still can't tell you if or when i'll go. i know i miss being in a basement full of pigeons, and i know i don't miss sharing space with indifferent high school interns and, let's be honest, newer staffers who don't know what i already know how to do. i also miss the bad old days before best practices started including drawing a curtain around the waterfowl tank so human oglers don't disturb the birds. it is good and right to do that, and to speak as little as possible when handling patients and to discourage especially friendly ones, and it is fantastic that a big batch of tristate-area teens is learning that pigeons aren't voodoo dolls or garbage. i acknowledge this! i also miss slipping into the songbird flyway and having ben the cardinal swoop down to land on my shoulder and sing the song he only ever sang for me, which wouldn't ever happen again anyway; he's lived at the founder's house for years and years now, and he might not still be alive. i gave my beloved nonprofit bookstore a chance to evolve into something good after some unfortunate changes, and while i'll never be allowed to accidentally molest wildlife again, maybe i should give my relationship with the hospital a chance to heal into something different-but-serviceable. you know, like a pigeon's callused stump after its foot self-amputates. but i am a sentimental old goth and i also enjoy not knowing when i've done something for the last time. my dad and i happened to walk past the hospital earlier this week - it didn't dawn on me until it was about to happen - and i felt like i was driving past an ex-boyfriend's house. there were turtles in the window, but none i recognized or could greet by name.

12.16.22ii [on the F and L trains]

[a thing i'm trying. is carrying a journal on the subway the new longhand blogging? we'll see.]

i haven't seen footprints on the ceiling of a subway car in years, so i guess showtime and/or demonic possession is out of vogue. i haven't started wearing a mask again yet. do i really believe i'm not endangering anyone or have i lived long enough to become the villain? i was sure of the latter when i heard pixies' "gigantic" while returning a lamé-detailed blouse at the fifth avenue j.crew a week ago.

i read an excellent poem this morning (molly brodak's "in the morning, before anything bad happens") that i found both moving and inaccurate. brodak wrote of birds on the wing that couldn't believe their luck, but in all my years of wildlife rehab support at the bird hospital i never saw the birds we released (or any birds) look fortunate in the air. they looked focused. birds i've seen look like they can't believe their luck when they're swimming, even if they're sinking because they aren't yet waterproof.

when i dream of flying i don't feel fortunate, either. i feel like concentration is just barely keeping me aloft.

delibird, the seasonal pokemon, started spawning in the city this week. it took me a long time to realize its name referenced gifting and not bodegas; if i catch a shiny one i'll name it bodegavian anyway.

02.17.21

in a recent attempt to develop a substantial team lead in imaginary-zombie-related competitive step counting i headed north on the promenade along east river park this sunday and realized pretty quickly that i wanted to take a long, long walk. in fact, i wanted to walk all the way up to central park and see barry, the goddamn adorable barred owl who's been appearing around the park and charming people off and on since october. i follow a not-insubstantial number of bird enthusiasts on twitter, so barry pops up in my feed several times a week, at which point i pump my fist at my laptop and chant BA-RRY! BA-RRY!, frightening the cats. as far as i can remember i've never seen an owl in the wild, you see; we didn't really have owls in our especially-paved part of orange county when i was growing up (unless you count david bowie in labyrinth, and, okay, that's fair). to me barry is even more exciting than the unnamed(?) snowy owl folks have been seeing in the park since last month, even though she's the first snowy spotted there in 130 years — i saw a snowy up close and at length when we tended her at my bird hospital a couple of years ago.

anyway, i walked and walked (and walked and walked — per social media barry was up around the loch, which is at the north end of the park around 103rd street) and tried to leave my phone alone so that it wouldn't die before i had a chance to take shitty faraway pictures. i approached a few hikers on a random icy path in the park: have you seen...the barred owl? "there are a bunch of people back thataway who seem excited, i don't know." i passed a partial sparrow, pink and chunky. i passed a whole northern cardinal, ten feet away and puffed up like a durian. then i totally saw barry, and it was just like when joe spotted david bowie in the mezzanine at a pixies show, though barry wasn't wearing a hoodie and sneakers. respectable jareth cosplay, though.

manhattan bird alert (hush) tweeted yesterday that barry is likely a female, given the pitch of her hoots. after hearing that i dove into Bird Internet like a fox after a mouse beneath the snow and spent the next hour listening to barred owl recordings; i learned to my delight that ornithologists transliterate their calls as "who cooks for you? who cooks for you-all?" and that barred owls are also called hoot owls because their hoots are characteristic in the same way that concord grapes are definitively grape. matty and steve were reasonably tolerant of my attempts to who-cooks-for-YOU? like barry at them all night, which does sound much better than BA-RRY! BA-RRY!, i would imagine.

11.27.20

i have developed my brand successfully enough that a friend sent me a link to a times piece about a rescued swan that was spirited to the bird hospital via bike, subway, ikea bag, and so on by another friend. longtime readers, and that would be all of you, i imagine, might remember my mentioning a favorite from said hospital a while back; that would be her, the teal-plumed virago i've known for most of the years i've headed uptown to my pigeon basement. since i haven't been there since february, i didn't know until reading that piece that she's left the staff to do something else (officially, at least, since she's clearly still muscling birds across town); that's the kind of news you end up acknowledging you're glad to have received at a distance, as you can't say with any confidence what your face might have done if you'd heard it in person.

volunteer friends at my bookstore, in turn, had been making noise about getting together for the past several weeks (the store has been closed since mid-march and shows ominous signs of being closed for good; that's another story), and none of us had contact information for A, a septuagenarian english UN lifer who lives out on roosevelt island and feeds me books like siegfried sassoon's memoirs of a fox-hunting man. no one was sure of his last name, even; why would we need to be sure of each other's last names when we all knew precisely where we'd coincide every week? someone had the vague idea that another former fellow volunteer might have his email address, but i decided that wasn't good enough and started digging around in old gothamist threads on posts about roosevelt island for commenters who sounded like him and shared his name. eventually i found one that began with Bunk! and sounded appropriately tetchy, so i cross-referenced the last name i found there with some neighborhood directories i found at another site, found a couple of phone numbers listed with an address on the island, then called one: alors, there was A's unmistakable accent in my ear! it's so lovely to catch up with you, i sang, i've read so many dreadful books since we saw each other last! (talking about books you've cherished is marvelous, but talking about the rotters is even better.) A and his wife have mostly retreated to their home up in ulster county and he wasn't able to come down for the first confluence of volunteers at a garden near nyu last week, but i did see V, who brought along the just-published german hardcover of her memoir about running a cinema on virgin gorda in the '70s and was very patient when we all insisted she pose at length with it. we'll coincide again soon, though we're going to have to do it at someplace like a museum; while it's temperate to the point of being uncomfortably warm indoors today, the city is conceding the season soon.

03.20.20

i found some songbird shit on our stump/table on the balcony this afternoon! this is a huge deal: we're up on the eighteenth floor, and we're lucky to see an occasional gull wheeling by on its way across the river, like, once a fortnight. pigeons like to roost and even nest on our neighbors' air conditioning units just a floor or two down, but not ours, never ours.* why they will not let us love them is beyond me. but: a pea-sized clump of healthy songbird shit (nice hue and consistency, buddy)! some little fella made it all the way to our place and took some time for reflection! it was, in all seriousness, thrilling—even when i spaced out and plunked my glass down on top of it, then carried it inside and to our coffee table. passerine traveler, i salute you.

i haven't been up to the bird hospital for—checking my volunteer login calendar—two months, and only twice this year. i was traveling in january and february and scrambling to file articles before and after each of those trips; i then got a tattoo at the end of february and felt i should take a week or two to myself before splashing it with bleach and, you know, songbird shit. i'd get messages from the volunteer coordinator (for the first time since i started working there!) saying that they had so very many interns that, for a couple of weeks, they didn't need any more hands on deck. then the city started taking coronavirus seriously.

as of last week, the word was that two volunteers could share the basement space with staffers at a time, and the hospital was eager for those volunteers (and the interns were long gone). i am not worried about what would/will happen to me, but i am very concerned about my many elderly neighbors, so i was trying to game out a way to commute a hundred blocks uptown without taking public transportation. a citibike halfway, then a couple of miles each way on foot? all of it on foot? i could do that, joe and i have walked the length of the island several times, but i'd have been tired-ish by the time i got to the upper west side, and it's both intensely physical and very delicate work. you can't do injections or tube-feed babies when you're wobbly. then we got a note from our building saying that several of our neighbors have tested positive, and that we should spend as little time as possible in the hallways and elevators. i'm already buying groceries for one of our friends downstairs, and i decided that i couldn't justify being a potential vector. i don't know how new city policies are going to apply to the hospital now that most of new york is shut down. i realize that worrying about baby birds at a time like this probably makes me a monster. it has been so long since i've been able to take care of them.

we are about as comfortable as two people can be in a pandemic: two adults who've been together for donkey's years, two dependents we outweigh quite handily that are satisfied with meat-paste and Warm Objects That Hold Still, one job with benefits that can't disappear and another that is flexible enough to carry on plausibly for now. three of our parents seem to be behaving sensibly, and the other seems at least sort of susceptible to peer pressure from me, my sisters, and my stepsister. i am keenly aware of the privilege dripping from every bit of that.

i still think, every now and again, about the website reviewer who called me trite and insular back in 2001(-2?) when my posts about 9/11 didn't acknowledge world events to her satisfaction. nothing about what i do here has ever been a particularly snappy rejoinder to that; all four of you know that this is something else.

our friend TJ is/was the house DJ for the red sox, the pats, and the bruins, jobs he began to cobble together after years of writing the sox to say "here i am!" in what i imagine was a very frank black voice. in this new world of ours, he's started streaming uncertain times, a radio show he started last week and is now helming from 10-noon(ish) ET so far on weekdays. he has always been very gracious about my distant exhortations to play bowie at fenway, and he played "peace, love and understanding" after we talked about it online a few days ago, and i cried. have we talked about competence porn here? TJ's show is competence porn.

here's a song for les and / here's a song for les and ray.

*neighbors two floors down have gone so far as to hang a plastic owl from their kitchen window to try to keep the pigeons away. i don't know if it's working, but it's an utterly delightful silhouette to see when i look out and down from our kitchen window.

07.13.19

the dirty dozen {instagram accounts i appreciate}

01 @drlindseyfitzharris: a medical historian; i have yet to read her book on joseph lister and victorian medicine, but it's on the list for later this summer. posts fascinating, disturbing images of everything from shrunken heads at the warsaw ethnographic museum (processed with rocks and sand over fires, then worn around warriors' necks) to the french death mask that became what we know as the cpr doll. captions are mini-essays.

02 @secondshelfbooks: a boss new bookstore in london that focuses on rare and rediscovered books by and about women; sold me a boss inscribed copy of eavan boland's object lessons when we were in town this spring. a+ source for zelda fitzgerald's thoughts on breakfast, gorgeous woolf editions, modern dances for english ladies. go to there.

03 @asari.wildlife: turkish wildlife photographers abdullah and pinar; they said hello a year or so ago after i uploaded a few images of patients at the wild bird fund. what could be finer than glamour shots of long-eared owls, european bee-eaters, and common kingfishers? learning to greet them by their names (kulaklı orman baykuşu, arıkuşu, and yalıcapkını, respectively) in turkish, obvs.

04 @gatheredgrown: nate's the brother of a friend of a friend; he and his wife, emily, live on a small lake in rural northern minnesota and make, well, everything? it's hard for me to see things like the knife he forged and sheathed in a rawhide beaver tail, but it's impossible not to appreciate their craftsmanship and commitment to sustainability. i learned the term "competence porn" the other day; this is legit competence porn. bearpaw snowshoes! mukluks! a damn canoe! i try not to think about the bear fat in the birch syrup cookies.

05 @vandervonodd: the first and last time i wore a corset—for a rasputina concert with dirty uncle paul—i ended up freaking out in a denny's on el camino, a literal and spiritual place to which i hope i shall never return.* vander von odd (aka antonio yee) won the first season of dragula and makes me want to wear corsets and wigs and this cursèd dress, and to drop $350 on a victorian mourning collar. in a world where marilyn manson keeps whatever his version of a low profile is, vander von odd saves me.

06 @fiance_knowles: south african textile artist danielle clough last sold some of her original embroidered rackets when we were in india last fall, and i wanted one so badly that i spent almost a full day in goa trying to figure out how to jump into her online store as soon as they dropped (reader, i failed). she embroiders rackets, scrap metal, surgical masks...and shows the backs of her projects, oh my heart. look at these fucking portraits.

07 @drinkingwithchickens: i have yet to watch the second or third seasons of stranger things, but when i do i will put on my big bartender pants (a thing) and make kate's tribute to barb ("rum, curaçao, coconut water, and lime, with a drizzle of blood orange grenadine"). she'd be a wildly talented and entertaining garden-to-glass mixologist anyway (hi, peppered rose paloma and honey basil julep), but she has all these chickens and she shoots them with her drinks. a ginmaker i know checked out my instagram feed a few years ago, took note of all the birds and beverages, and gently steered me over to kate's. other boozestagrammers, please try harder.

08 @hannahflowers_tattoos: i follow a lot of tattoo artists (surprise), and the local ones in particular are dangerous as hell: why, i could be at kings avenue in fifteen minutes if i wore my running shoes. tasmanian artist hannah flowers is a leetle safer, as she's london-based and her work would require a big commitment (from both space-remaining-on-my-body and plunge-into-a-new-style perspectives), but not much: i gasp every time i see one of her art-nouveau / art deco / vargas-inspired women (and she's fantastic with animals, too, gulp). while i admire the traditional tattoo aesthetic, its female nudes tend to get me down; hannah's, on the other hand, feel like characters rather than objects. her skill with color and white detailing, particularly in faces, is flat-out stunning. okay fine, i kind of want a lady.

09 @isopresso_balloon: self-taught japanese artist masayoshi matsumoto spends between two and six hours weaving balloons—and that's it, no cheats like adhesives or embellishments—into critters like violin beetles, octopuses, colossal squids, snow monkeys...i'd say clowns, please try harder, but it's irresponsible to encourage clowns.

10 @TheAmandaWoods: amanda woods, an australian writer i met on a press trip in turkey,** has carved out a magnificent travel niche for herself: she's the flame-haired queen of super-fancy transportation (like the belmond grand hibernian, singapore air's new 787-10, the belmond royal scotsman, the venice simplon orient express...yeah). beat envy is rare for me, but i have a thing for trains, and she takes the kind of trips i thought joe and i were going to take when we booked a "deluxe" cabin from milan to berlin. i bet she has to solve murder mysteries on her trips all the time! happily, she's such a lovely person that i can just enjoy her agatha christie-ing vicariously and without rancor.

11 @angeladeane: angela deane's ghost photographs give me life; in my last year as an editor in an office i got myself through lulls and frustrations by paying homage to her with wite-out and magazine spreads in my cubicle. we actually own a print of one of her older works, and as soon as i get around to actually pulling it out of its mailer and framing it i will tell you precisely which one it is. strong work with witches, too.

12 @tasteofstreep: self-explanatory, and immensely satisfying.



*costumes and denny's and i have a weird past: at some point high school friends and i went to disneyland on halloween (which was free if you dressed up and got there early enough), and i dozed off at breakfast and woke up without the faintest idea of why i was wearing a nun's habit. harrowing.

**that shot on her homepage is from our cave hotel in cappadocia, my all-time favorite digs. we attempted to go rogue and take a hot-air-ballon trip one morning, but it was too windy.

02.22.19

i've been reading advice for future corpses (and those who love them), a book on death and dying by a writer who's (among other things) a buddhist and a palliative-care nurse.

The lovely Japanese film After Life is a fable about where people go right after they die; it turns out to be a run-down hotel in the country. People arrive one by one, a little disoriented. Each person is given a room and told they can stay until they pick a single memory in which to live forever. Once they pick the memory, the staff re-creates it and the person settles in and disappears. Some people choose immediately and happily fade away. Another person spends days reviewing the jerky black-and-white films of his life, trying to pick one. A few people have no happy memories and just sit on their beds, lost. A few others find it impossible to decide: their lives are full. (One of the key parts of the plot is what happens to the ones who can't decide.)

When I showed After Life to a group of people, we did what every viewer will do, and thought about which memory we would choose. I was struck by the common thread, for me and for many people: it was the moment after. Not the adventure, the experience, the unfulfilled desire, but afterward. The moment at the end of a good day when you are going home and are a little sore and sweaty, you are getting hungry, your feet are dirty, and you are going home to rest.

i turned to joe in bed. "hey, can i tell you something?" he was almost asleep. "no, no! well...okay." "my book is talking about a movie where dead people have to choose the one memory they'll live in forever, and mine would be when we were standing in the rain in the garden in oxford." "oh. that's really nice. i thought you were going to tell me about a dead duck."

10.16.18 {in italy}

roma! it's just before seven, and the lip of morning light beneath the cloud cover is a shade that is only for sophia loren. i sealed my fate when i said we were not traveling in the direction of my proclivities, sort of: no matter when i turn in, i pop up at, say, four to consume weird quantities of gorgonzola (Night Cheese has become a thing, we've expanded the lyrics). we aren't due at the vatican until half past two, but i hoped i might catch an early dawn glimpse of the hawk moth that visits our rooftop garden at dusk each evening. his proboscis is so impressive and his darting-and-hovering so precise that i was sure we were seeing the world's tiniest hummingbird, but he is merely a comely example of convergent evolution, it seems. the internet tells me that on d-day in normandy, the armada saw a swarm of his fellows flying across the english channel, and they're considered a good omen. he certainly augured a glorious night of opera on saturday. opera! the things we begin to love as our beards grow long.

we visited the cats that live in the ruins where caesar was murdered across the river. they are trapped and spayed or neutered when they first materialize among the columns, and the littler and more adoptable ones are brought inside to meet potential guardians (not americans or canadians, alas, for the sanctuary staff are wary of countries with a lot of kill shelters). many others are free to roam the archaeological site and bask like the turkish cats i met in ephesus a few years ago. an australian reporter on that press trip with me would scream in terror each time a calico arranged herself beneath our cafe table to make eyes at her kebab. still no sign of the black cat our host mentioned, one who lives with neighbors and likes to visit the folks at our place. ("he has a collar and is friendly. do not hurt him?") i have night cheese for you, black cat! so much night cheese to give!

gulls and those devastatingly handsome eurasian magpies one meets in cities like this one perch on the television aerials that sprout like century plants and queen anne's lace from the rooftops around st. peter's basilica, and they seem to have a long-standing beef with the church bells next door. it's understandable, really: the bells don't seem to announce anything in particular, so their calls don't sound especially clever. i think of the "flirtatious starling" mozart met in vienna a few centuries ago that sang him a variation on the piano concerto he had been whistling (no. 17 in g major)—one he preferred to his own version, they say, and he held a funeral for it when it died three years later (he did not arrange a funeral for his father). a tame starling lived at my bird hospital for a few months before relocating to a sanctuary upstate and developed the charming/unnerving habit of trying to clean our teeth as we tried to clean his recovery room. it could be that i will never develop a winter cold again, as i suppose i swapped spit with every bird lover on the upper west over those months, or i might start eating meal worms? insects are the future of protein, they say, but i tend to give meal worms to chickens. when chapulines turn up in oaxacan food i make joe eat them. he will fare better in the end times than i will, i suspect, though i am better at making myself understood in languages i don't speak. i have chapulines for you, ragtag bands of survivors! so many chapulines to give!

06.13.18

today i granted my first interview to a foreign journalist: my friend and fellow bookstore volunteer V asked if she could chat with me for her spanish class, for which participants must quiz and profile people. it's a very competitive class, she said, and she thought she had a real ace in the hole with the story of me and my wild animals; she asked if i could send her a few of my photos of ben bird, of randy the opossum, of the hospital lobby teeming with ambulatory waterfowl. "one of my classmates told the story of a wild night of dancing when she was in cuba in the '80s," V said. "she and her girlfriends just hit the floor with a group of men they met, then exhausted themselves, waved to their partners, and headed back to their tables. someone turned to her: you knew that was fidel castro, right?" godspeed, V.

06.12.18

we have an especially small canada gosling at the wildlife hospital who can't mix with the other young waterfowl (or even the chickens), try as he would; he's come near to being pecked to death or swallowed whole more times than i can count (looking at you, gulls). he was sequestered with the juvenile squirrels in reception when i was around last week, and he was down in the basement with us today―bad news, as far as i'm concerned, as it is remarkably easy to mistake a little bird for a patch of floor.* an hour before i left for the afternoon, A released two juvenile crows from the darkened operating room they'd been sharing with an opossum―they needed the fly time we'd been giving the pigeons, and dog toys (fantastic corvids!), and a chance to mess up the pharmacy. mostly they wanted to give the laundry corner an edward gorey soundtrack, and the little gosling, how he wanted to imprint on those teen crows―each time one paused on the floor he'd spatter over to join its black train. you know that they'll kill you if you keep that up, right? everything is rejection to an orphaned gosling; why wouldn't you try to shoot the moon?

i would like to stay up for news of #mprraccoon this evening, but election nights and wildlife rehab have taught me that most things end badly. but why wouldn't you try to shoot the moon? there's cat food aplenty on the roof, exquisite one. give 'em hell.


*ben the cardinal, my best bird, broke his shoulder a few years ago when he mistook a staffer's shoelaces for worms and she in turn mistook him for a patch of floor. his woes have accumulated since then and i should probably talk about how he is doing now, but that is the sort of thing i write and delete late at night. he is dying, okay? he is dying.

04.05.18

i pride myself on being a really fucking solid volunteer. whether i'm shepherding indie-indie movie types to their festival sheaths, keeping a guy with the methadone nods awake as i ring up a masticated infinite jest, or mopping swan shit out of a stainless-steel cage—i am your man.

the way in which i support the folks at the wildlife hospital is especially important to me because they are so clearly what i wish i could be. i introduced myself to a girl young enough to be my daughter there a couple of months ago and asked her if she was a vet in training. "since birth, practically," she said. same here, if i had a backbone, if i could dissect or euthanize anything. all i wanted as a little girl was to be a veterinarian—my sister agreed, at age six or so, to be my receptionist—and i knew so, so early that it would never happen. i covered my parents' station wagon with snot one christmas when we passed on an ugly tree; no one would take it home, and its death was meaningless, meaningless. middle-school biology classes were non-starters. i could be a blue helmet, or something.

my friend and her daughter came to visit the hospital today, and i spent a half hour walking them through our treatment rooms, offering up iridescent pigeons for petting, apologizing for poop, so much poop on the floor. i offered to clean the whole isolation ward after they'd left because i knew we had been in everyone's way and i want to continue to be a really fucking solid volunteer, and because i was grateful to the staffers for giving me room to introduce my people to what i love. isohelpful for cleaning the iso room. after an hour of just staggering efficiency, i swept birdseed from beneath the chambers i'd disinfected, and my broom caught something. it caught on a big old glue trap, a glue trap full of mouse. not a dead mouse, his tail hogarth's line of beauty, a mouse that had yet to pull his body apart to attempt to get away from the organ-mangling glue trap, which is what mice do and what glue traps do. i pulled the trap from the broom as i walked into the lobby. WILL SOMEONE DROWN THIS MOUSE. my favorite hospital staffer has the name i would give a child, if i had a child. "you mean, will we—" YES.

when i was small and my mother found live gophers in snap traps in our yard, she'd drown them, trap and all, in a bucket. my five-dollar pet mouse, esmerelda, became a cauliflower whose tumors bumped against the wheel in her cage, and i asked her to take her to the vet to put her to sleep, and she did.

i busied myself for half an hour before confronting my favorite, who asked me to join her on the stairs and told me that Mouse Park—our collective dream of catching pests and releasing them, surreptitiously, away from the center—had never really worked on a grand scale. she told me that the contagions associated with the mice killed our birds—i knew that, i know that—and that the mice eluded the humane traps, and the (comparatively humane) snap traps.

a rehabber, P, sedated the mouse in the glue trap and euthanized him; that is the YES, that was the only YES. that is the YES for half of our patients, be they raptors or possums or, almost, the one rat we splinted and released a few years ago. i loved and love my hospital because they dignify creatures that many people abhor, and i have also cut up a frozen mouse for little kestrels we've rehabbed, and—

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds—just
seeing him there—with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking through the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
---I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevys passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

(gerald stern, behaving like a jew)

02.17.18

Italian fathers, farmers, and country veterinarians repeated these processes for over two hundred years, the curtain of secrecy drawn more closely in some provinces than in others. But the sin of unnecessary dismemberment was punishable by excommunication everywhere, so the altered boys all came to choir ready with excuses. It was most fashionable for gelded choirs to blame their injuries on swan bites or, in [18th-century soprano Carlo Broschi, known only as] Farinelli's case, a horse-kick to the groin. In the 1750s, every last one of the soprani in the Sistine Chapel was an alleged victim of a wild pig attack.

(from "hey big spender," in elena passarello's let me clear my throat)

we had what we called a swanami at the wildlife hospital this winter; at one point five mute swans jostled for space in reception, in the waterfowl room, in the pool. it was a bit like having five pantomime horses in white turtlenecks knocking around the center; swans are always something else in disguise. "i love him," R once said as a massive swan nipped at her arm. "he's such a bastard." i've racked up a few swan bites in my time, but i wouldn't feel comfortable saying they were capable of making off with something important, greek myth and my limited understanding of historical pants aside. then again, what do i know? last week i didn't realize i had warm pigeon shit on the end of my nose until i looked down and saw its vapour trail on my scrubs.

01.31.18

And what a vertigo she must have created for the trapped and the crippled who saw her escaping. This stocky dove, this fist with wings, tamping down the contaminated air in her ascent, pushing away all that was lost and clearing a space for all that is home. A pigeon in the air, lifting out of the trench, is a gray flag of possibility, a final opportunity for the doomed to pull their heads up. A pigeon in war is a chance to keep imagining.

Then a shell exploded underneath her, killing five men and sending the shocked bird to the ground. And that descent is the last recorded remembrance of the 77th's last pigeon by any lasting member of the Lost Battalion. Perhaps they all turned away because they couldn't stand to watch further, and this is why no 77th saw the moment when she relaunched her body—one eye just gone and one leg hanging by a tendon, tin tube still affixed. Nobody saw her wobble in the air toward Mobile Message Unit #9, twenty-five miles southwest, picking up speed as she flew. And since nobody saw her, no 77th doughboy could possibly imagine what was going to happen next.

(from "war pigs," in elena passarello's fucking extraordinary animals strike curious poses)

true story. cher ami's message:

WE ARE ALONG THE ROAD PARALELL 276.4. OUR AR ILLERY I S DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.

cher ami delivered a total of 12 messages in the american sector at verdun during world war one.

12.28.17

when you look down at the invalid pigeon curled against your chest and realize her white head is pink because you kissed it.

10.03.17

one of the wildlife hospital staffers asked me if i'd been using my name tag to sign in at their new tablet kiosk in the basement treatment room. i haven't, i said, though that would give them a formal record of my tardiness, and that would be something. "well i guess since you're at the highest level of training already, your hours don't really matter. although maybe you should wear the tag in case new people don't know what you...are?" "in case they can't see the waves of power rolling out from my body?" "...yes?"

09.12.17

the dirty dozen {twelve things i learned in tonight's squirrel-care class}*

01 "talking to them is OK, because they will eventually turn on you."
02 squirrels born in the fall aren't as healthy as squirrels born in the spring.
03 in the last stage of weaning, squirrels eat pumpkin mash (lab block dust, baby cereal, and puréed pumpkin—NOT PUMPKIN PIE FILLING).
04 "someone gave a squirrel pumpkin pie filling by accident once. he was really excited, but it didn't go well."
05 squirrels like to sleep in makeshift polarfleece hammocks.** "of course they drag all of their crap into their hammocks."
06 ADR in a veterinary chart = Ain't Doin' Right.
07 squirrels should not have KMR (kitten milk replacement), which has too much protein and will give them terrible diarrhea.
08 squirrels should have squirrel formula (fox valley), which is much better but can still make their hair fall out if you don't wipe their faces and arms after they nurse.
09 "is the squirrel nervous? try a burrito."
10 you can help a nursing squirrel that's aspirated milk blow its nose by covering its face with a tissue, putting your mouth to said tissue, and inhaling.
11 if maggots are crawling out of a squirrel's ears or eyes, you have to put it to sleep.
12 one turd is not enough.

*do not use these points to care for squirrels! call your friendly local wildlife rehabber.

**i knew that part.

08.25.17

at the end of a long night a few christmases ago, my baby sister told me that she and my brother-in-law were going to start trying to have a child. i told her in no uncertain terms that this was a terrible idea, for the earth with humans as its miserable stewards had a few decades left at best. it was a monstrous thing to say, and joe reminded me, as he always does, that i sound crazy when i talk like that. i apologized many times, though i haven't really forgiven myself for receiving their news that way.

erin, the friend who introduced me to the wild bird fund years ago, told me about her long island conservation and education group's offshore, overnight whalewatching trips—she'd be on the second one of the summer, and i'd have a chance to meet her in person—and i suddenly and desperately needed to go. i mucked around on the group's website for a while and then just called to ask about coming along. i got the society's president, artie, who'd been watching the comey hearing all afternoon, as i had. "it's nice...to be talking about whales right now," he said.

i packed up the sleeping bag i'd bought for my first ragnar last fall, wrapped an oversized plush peep in a pillow case, and filled a duffel bag with tank tops, pajamas(?), trail mix, candy. a bunch of sunscreen and prescription seasickness patches, per my stepfather's instructions. erin, as magical in person as she's been on the internets all these years, collected me from the platform at montauk and drove me to a grocery store, where i added a five-gallon jug of water, a couple of dutch rolls, vegetarian sushi(?), and a bunch of bananas* to my rations. we were to leave montauk at six to reach martha's vineyard by midnight, where we'd drop off a handful of commuters and pick up a few more watchers, then spend the night chugging out to the great south channel. our boat's hold was full of navy bunks, but it was traditional to drag one's mattress out to the deck, she said. it sounded like the rime of the ancient mariner to me, and i thought of the halloween in college when paul hung an albatross made of packing tape around his neck.

the perseid meteor shower was at its peak that first night, and spots on the top deck went fast—except for the raised ones, the big crates full of life preservers, so i flopped my dusty cot mattress down on one of those. it thrummed and rocked as the wind streamed over us, and i felt like an infant marsupial nestled against its mother. i was unconscious long before we reached martha's vineyard.

i woke up at dawn, soaked with dew, just as dolphins began to embroider the surface beside the boat. soon pelagic birds gathered on the water for bait fish, like truffle flies, and then—

joe and i went whalewatching in iceland a few years ago, at the end of the season when most of the humpbacks had migrated far from that part of the north atlantic. we saw a single juvenile, a straggler, at a distance, and our local guide's joy eclipsed any disappointment i might have felt at the ocean's stinginess. i was thoroughly unprepared for the great south channel, where the waters receded from the humpbacks' barnacled snouts, dozens of them, like fog rolling down a mountain range. a whale surfaced perpendicular to our boat with a great briny bellow, presented us with its ageless back, and dove beneath our feet. i sobbed.

i have been sprouting an avocado pit in a little sake cup on top of our cookbooks for the last several weeks. joe scoffs: we'll have avocados of our own in something like 12 years, he says. i once asked my sister what she would give up if forced to choose between avocados and the feeling of swimming in the ocean and being taken up by a wave just before it breaks. you're getting me where i live with this one, she replied. i would like for her son to have my avocados.


*"you brought bananas on this boat?" the captain said as we played cards in the galley. "seriously?" i did a bit of research when i got home: bananas bring the worst kind of luck on a fishing boat. no banana muffins, banana republic clothing, banana boat sunscreen.