Protocol 7

Mal was found in the garden, unhatched, and incubated by a black chicken. She¹ came later than the rest, towards the end of the summer, once they had already fledged and left the hen house. It was clear she was a mallard, not a muscovy, and with that the decision was made. A week later she was standing in our kitchen, peeping and looking around curiously, the hen house replaced with a Japanese apartment. We nervously welcomed her, like new parents, attempting to erase the chicken imprint and raise her with an affinity towards people (or at least us).

Mal loved the camera from day one.

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1. For the first four months or so we thought she was a he, and the pronoun change took some adjustment. [↩]

Things that are bizarrely out of proportion give me the weebie-jeebies¹. As a kid, weird images would pop into my head as I was drifting off to sleep, like a massively over-sized tire, and I’d go all weebie-jeebie. Usually I could counteract this by shifting position - laying with my face on the pillow and my butt in the air - which generally normalized size and stopped the spin. I’m drawn to Salvador Dali’s ‘The Elephants’ because it induces a very similar effect, and also euphoria, making me secretly want to own a copy so I can careen by it in bliss.

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1. Weebie-jeebies is, as it sounds, a slight variation on ‘heebie jeebies’ but with the nuance of wobbliness and vertigo. [↩]

It’s been two years and one month (give or take) since my last blog post. I took a break for a while though I’m not exactly sure why. In retrospect it might have been the silencing effect of button-down shirts, or maybe there just wasn’t much to say. If I wanted to be really self-deprecating I’d tell you I forgot how to talk. The truth is, as always, more mundane than that: I had a bad case of tunnel vision. You know the kind, so bad that even your mind huddles to the front of your head, right behind the eyes, and you feel like you are running all the time? I don’t think I have to remind anyone of the fact that it’s damn hard to write while running, and I’m nobody to buck convention. In the meantime, two years have slipped by with nary a peep, until this spring, when I remembered how to mosey.

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