pigeon

Bel telling someone we dated for a while.

I changed her name for this, but before I changed it I stared at it, and the longer I stared at it the less familiar it looked.

I wonder if going through these pigeons like this is in some way releasing them; touching them one last time then throwing the window open wide and watching them disappear into the sunset, or sunrise, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps the act of envisioning them, focusing on them, featuring them downstage in the proscenium of my mind’s clanky little traveling theatre, is somehow using them up, allowing the ink that is their blood to run out and dry up.

Well, I guess I’ll type this one out, even though I have no idea how to begin or why, so even if her name gradually morphs into something completely foreign to me, I’ll still have this record — again, not sure why, but, in the words of the flute professor at Mizzou who didn’t end up being my teacher, “It doesn’t matter why.” (That’s a different pigeon though.)

It turns out “how to begin” was by asking ChatGPT to help me make a fantasy name generator similar to the one I used to love on classic Mac OS, called “Imaginame.” It was tiny, simple, charming, and, unlike most old freeware/shareware programs I would still be interested in retrieving, seemingly utterly vanished from the web. After a few rounds back and forth with GPT’s editor, the result is here.

Speaking of LLMs, I gotta say, the coding thing is super cool. I hate the tenor and ferocity of the hype cycle right now, but yeah, things are getting interesting with “computers” in a way that, for me at least, they haven’t in quite some time.

Do you think the prevalence of LLMs and AI-generated text will make us start talking and writing more like an LLM chatbot?

Anyway, now that it’s hours later and I still don’t know where to begin...

Bel was an odd, ratchety avian creature, some five and a half feet tall, with a sawtooth edge to her voice, and a perpetually sardonic second-British-invasion smirk on her face. She was adjacent to my art/drama/alt/awkward/nonconformist-club friend group in high school. She was pretty cool I guess. Her dad was a lawyer but seemed like a very different species of lawyer than my stepdad. For one thing, instead of living in a California-lookin’ long, low, redwood house on the outskirts, her family lived right in the old historic downtown part of Cape Girardeau, in a rambly, quasi-Victorian house, almost painfully picturesque with a cobblestone patio and a high wood fence with just the right amount of dilapidation. And they weren’t even divorced!

She seemed to have a lot going for her, resources-wise. Last time I “talked” to her was in the early ’10s, on Facebook, shortly after my life fell apart, shortly before I quit using Facebook (partly because for me it had morphed into Capebook and I really didn’t need all the dumb details about all my former classmates’ dumb lives and I definitely didn’t need Farmville), and she seemed fine, but then everyone seemed fine online (unless their whole persona was based on not being fine, of course). Online, Bel appeared to be with it, on top of things, successful, still with that caustic but good-natured sense of humor.

Outside of school, the only two social interactions I remember having with Bel were during our junior year, I think: (1) when she had me and a few other people over for tea and snacks in that suffocatingly cozy little garden, and (2) a time she and I drove around aimlessly in my Malibu Classic, listening to my Simon & Garfunkel “The Concert In Central Park” cassette (which eventually degraded to the point of sounding like warbly garbage because I listened to it so often).

I had no romantic or sexual interest in Bel whatsoever. To the best of my knowledge, I never misrepresented myself to her in that regard, either. Nevertheless, one time we were talking with a few other friends and/or acquaintances, and she mentioned to somebody how she and I were friends, and then she added, “Yeah, we dated for a while, but...”

I didn’t say anything and the moment passed, probably because nobody cared, but — what? We dated? When!? I remember racking my brain, going over every stray mile of that bland automotive meander, trying to figure out what could have been construed as —

I never did figure it out. I wonder how she’s doing now. Every time I try to picture her, to get the details right for this, I get a sense of half-concealed sadness. I begin to conjure a visage with advantages, someone confident and brassy, sarcastic; I picture her all grown up now, with a McMansion and a normal family, much wealthier than I am, business-like, responsible, but — then behind all that there is a well of grief, a subterranean river of loss, and perhaps nearby, the small decaying body of a wood thrush, in an old oak forest, halfheartedly covered over with leaves.

I wonder what that’s all about?

The water table runs close to the surface, these days.

Around this time of year, end of the school year coming up fast, I start getting a lot of emails from struggling students. Emails from counselors too, “So and so’s family is going through a really difficult time right now; if you could make some accomodations...” There’s more of them every year. This morning, on seeing the sixth or seventh one of these pop up in my inbox, it occurred to me that I would like to be able to start out by helping all the ones who are going through a difficult time. Instead of making adjustments for the unfortunate as an afterthought, how about presenting or providing something from the get-go that would — I don’t know, just be there for them?

How do I do that? I think I have to do that. Better late than never; better now than later. Something is nigh that I cannot see. I’m missing something. Something is looming large and obscured, occluded. Something will be obvious later but is paler than foggy now. I know it’s there but I can’t identify it, can’t filter it out of the general background radiation. The elevators are going fast, up, down, sideways, out of control. The animals are behaving unexpectedly. Something is telling me we have to build shelters, for each other. We have to shelter each other. Anyone left out in the open will be torn apart.