By Dana Goodyear
We want this.
The end to sleeping, the bittersweet
arousal, the peeling back, the soft bath
in resin, the release. It can't come quick
enough, the hot touch that breaks the crust
and lets us go. Hear it now: a crackling,
as the woods begin to sing alongside the birds.
To cry out! To be transformed, like Daphne
back into a girl. Pine—as if our very nature
demanded that we long without relief. But the cone
is like a shotgun on the wall; it must erupt.
All it takes is one dumb fuck, trigger-happy,
with a six-pack and bad aim,
to generate the spark that turns the world to flames.
--------
Another from this week's New Yorker.
Daniel has his driving learner's permit! That is the happy result of more than two hours of dealing with the Motor Vehicle Administration office in Gaithersburg, which is so badly managed that it makes my local post office, which I know I have complained about in this blog, look like a model of efficiency and appropriate staffing. One sits and waits with no clue when one's number might be called; everyone is given a code beginning with a letter and no hint what the letters mean, like whether the Gs are for renewal licenses and the Ks for name changes maybe, so that the Ss were in the 120s and being called quickly while the Fs were in the 40s and there is no way to guess when one's own number might come up.
There's no sign either when one enters or anywhere in the waiting area indicating how long the wait is likely to be, so that people sitting there with screaming babies needing to nurse or older children in need of a bathroom or food have no idea whether they can get up for 10 or 50 minutes. After an hour and a half, I was thinking I'd vote Republican in the next election if they could clean this idiocy up, because I'll have to do this several more times in the next few years, to get Daniel his license, then to get Adam HIS permit and license. If the information people had told us coming in that the wait was likely to be nearly two hours, I'd have found it more tolerable -- I'd still have thought they were understaffed and badly managed, but I wouldn't have felt like a roomful of hundreds of people was being manipulated and given deliberately obfuscatory information.
Anyway, Daniel didn't even have to finish the legal test by the time he finally got into the testing room (which he left in less than ten minutes, since they were only managing to admit one person every half hour despite having lots of free testing computers); one is required only to get 85% correct to pass, and he got the first 17 out of 20 questions right. We missed the thunderstorm that made Adam leave the pool early.
We had dinner with my parents since we won't be able to have Shabbat dinner tomorrow, but before that we went to visit the baby bird, who seems even stronger, though he was a bit sleepy when we arrived after being out with Rose while she taught a dance class. He can hold onto people's fingers now like a parakeet would and was hopping around the way he did when we first saw him in the road. He keeps flapping his wings like he wants to take off but just isn't ready yet -- we are hoping this means that when the wings develop, he'll be able to fly as if he'd been fledged by his parents. Here he is with Adam being adorable:
Huzzah for Kagan! Futurama this week is about how cats have taken over the world and their plans to dominate the universe...how did it take the writers of that show so long to realize? Though it seemed phony to me, since none of the genius humans realized they only had to throw an aluminum foil ball into the midst of the cat conspiracy to send it into chaos! My cats were unimpressed, but then, they are unimpressed by everything except food. And the birds on the feeder outside, which is why they have not met the Itty Bitty Birdie!
No comments:
Post a Comment