fieldnotes62

Groundhog or fox. Monday, July 4, 2016. Valley under the highway overpass. Hit by a car. Does death make us malleable or indistinct? Is it the great equalizer? A waiting room in Hell. Where have you been my bonnie young one? The ass end of modern infrastructure in decay. Who would choose to build a world in this image? What you do for the least of these. We go through this world with a pretty shaky understanding of various animal genus and families. A sound recording isn't like a photograph any more than a beaver is like a sparrow, but still the desire to see the universal in the individual is persistent. But there’s no point in arguing with what people like. You can’t convince anyone to pay attention and love something. All the time you’ve wasted on those who weren't worth the bother. Addition and subtraction don’t mean anything until you finish the equation. You call this hair? Is it any wonder we wrap ourselves in clothes? It’s hard to keep looking. It’s difficult to balance the notion that I’m no different than any of these creatures, with the awareness that I’m not them- I don’t know what the world looked like to them, what their consciousness of the world felt like; what they would have seen when they looked at me. I have an animal stubbornness. I am a nervous animal. I’m getting tired. Stay focused- that’s a lesson you used to learn in the days of film photography. You’d have a roll of film and develop it and realize nothing was in focus. None of the pictures you had were the ones you thought you were taking. Is that the allure of a photograph? It’s an answer without the limitations of a question. A garbled hypothesis before the benediction. I can hear those church bells ringing. I can hear that lonesome train a crying. I can hear the highway roaring. All up and down the line it’s Independence Day.

Possum. Monday, July 4th, 2016. Valley in front of the wooded cloverleaf with the drainage stream. Deadly transitions. The wilderness is closed down. Spiteful congratulations. Detective work is logic-based. Honest mood assessment and a frank aesthetic pronouncement. All in a day’s work. I don’t take holidays, ma’am. The failings of a naturalist and city planner. The highway sounds like an ocean of sand endlessly roiling our contentment. Tide’s coming in- take to the hills. Crime scene photos of a vandalized museum exhibit. More nautical metaphors. Little picture/big picture. There are questions with no answers, and questions with answers- the ones without answers are the ones that need you the most. This is where the need for prioritization becomes critical. Short-term survival mechanisms. A wish as a promise.

Sparrow. Monday, July 4, 2016. Outside the train station/parking garage at the university. Flew into glass? Everything’s locked up but the machines keep humming. There’s death in falling, life in flight. Imagine being a pretty, little thing. A brief accounting of my ignorance. Conjectures are made in an attempt to fight off the topor of an oppressive summer day. What does it mean to be a witness? What are the costs and benefits? What do I have to offer? How is a universe built? Have I ever enjoyed holidays? Negative space and the modern temperament. Is the world our shadow? Are we its? The infrastructure of brutalism. Alliances are formed; allegiances acknowledged- victory awaits. Trying to imagine what the landscape looked like seen through those two small seed-sized eyes. What would my brain look like next to a sparrow’s brain? The brain of a horse? An elephant? A whale? A polar bear? Where are our memories kept? Condolences, apologies, and farewells as we grab hold the canoe’s gunnels and push off from shore.

Blue Jay. Sunday, June 26, 2016. North Mountain in front of the run down Victorian house with the porch. Hit by a car. Wild manicures. At the count of three you will forget any of this happened. We are robbed daily. Cosmology and the foundations of the scientific process. Who notices us? What would I have made of life and death 500 years ago? Would I have thought about these animals at all? The constant breeze through the trees makes it sound like a cassette recording of scratchy LP. All our attempts at preservation add up to a confusing, obsolete and noisy loss. The libraries are burned. The texts are placed inside clay jars and hidden in forgotten caves. What is it like to know so much and to wait, and wait, and wonder if you’ll ever get to tell anyone? Will you ever find anyone who even speaks your language? Nobody will ever know what it’s like to fly. Is this why we’ve given up? Is it why we feel different than the world around us? We plod the earth knowing it’s our grave. Give thanks to the Blue Jays, after the last glacial period they helped spread oak trees. What have you done?

Squirrel. Sunday, June 26, 2016. Valley by the concrete stairs to the house that doesn’t exist anymore. Hit by a car. Timelines of decay. Lost arts, dead languages and the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Does anyone else but me think about these long vanished landmarks? What animal wouldn’t lose its mind listening to the constant undertow of cars and airplanes and motorcycles and lawnmowers whirlpooling around their head? Halfway thru another harsh year. A camera has an intention. Thumbing my nose at the winners. Have I given up on trying to make something pretty? A near death experience. The importance of raising one’s voice when necessary; so much depends upon. Too many subtractions make the equation impossible to solve. They say an animal has no sense of shame, but have you seen someone riding a motorcycle lately? The melancholy of arriving too late to the party. Miss Dickinson regrets her absence. Something else to think about and hold in my mind on the bike ride home. A curse and a tender farewell.

Squirrel. Sunday, June 19, 2016. Upper Mountain near the old Telly Savalas house. Hit by a car. Infrastructure priorities and consequences thereof. A neighborhood where people have the money to live in houses that don’t all look the same. Down to the cities in trains. A strangely oppressive environment. Some rudimentary notes on flora and fauna. Do little kids still look for 4 leaf clovers? Do they still rub dandelion heads under their chins? Summers before air-conditioning- the windows all open as people play Rummy 500 on the screened-in porch. Nobody eats until father gets home. All those people are gone. Nothing survives once you leave. I’ll never know what worlds this little grey and white squirrel took along with him. I’m burying these nuts in the hopes that someone in some other season will dig them up. I wish I had more to offer this perfect little animal.

Squirrel. Sunday, June 19,2016. That private road that runs up between the highway and what used to be a quarry. Hit by a car. Nature, Art, then Commerce- a timeless triptych. Observations and apologies. There are hundreds of different types of animals that you’ve never seen sleeping. Who designed our Sunday routines? Family, God, and commerce. Fun in the sun. I feel like I dropped out of society somewhere around the age of 6. As a kid I remember watching on the news and reading in Mad Magazine about “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” Only one of those appealed to me. What did Walt Whitman do on a Sunday? Did Emily Dickinson take a solitary walks around Amherst, killing time until supper? Did she outlive her father? Did she ever go swimming? Trying to describe the built world is a tedious battle. Where are all the skeletons of all the animals that have died? Why aren’t we constantly stumbling over little ribs and skulls and femurs no bigger than parts in a model kit? I wasn’t made for the summer- by the beginning of April I’m already longing for October. Like a big, clumsy, lumbering, depressed corallary to a butterfly, my season is short- who knows how I get through to another year. Oh, well, not much to do but feed the rabbits and listen to the wind.

Earthworm. Sunday, May 29, 2016. Laurel near the old train station. Eaten by a robin. A scene a child could have painted. It’s reassuring to have a purpose in this world. Tools for living. Do worms have a social life? What’s it like under there surrounded by all that dirt and dark and damp? Could a worm dream? Do they know another worm when they meet? In death the worm ascends. How did we become such strangers in this world? Have we gained anything in our forgetting? Less than 10 miles from here the remains of Thomas Alva Edison lay buried under a big stone slab- I wonder if the worms have gotten to him yet? Come walk down to the river’s edge with me; watch as the birch canoes slip away towards the marshes and the swamp. Climb alongside as we reach the mountain escarpment. We lay low in the sun on the warm rocks and look out over the valley. Beneath us a figure travels the road into town. At our backs a footpath cuts through the meadow and into the woods; offering the promise of refuge and renewal. The unseen falls awaiting our arrival. No need to hurry.

Little orange tabby cat. Sunday, May 29, 2016. Day before Memorial Day. Route 46 near the diner where they’re doing construction. Hit by a car. The shape a life takes. Don’t believe the television cop and detective shows featuring troubled geniuses and super-computers- there is no algorithm for violence and destruction. Oppressive thoughts in anticipation of the heat and the light and the people. Science and folklore. The flattened affect of a weary observer. By the end of this I’m confused and slow and lost. What if Nick had gotten shot, and Gatsby had lived on? Would that book ever have been written? Who would want to read it? Am I the Nick for all these little Gatsbys? How many books did Fitzgerald have in him? Sometimes when I’m doing these I feel like I’m waiting around keeping them company until the ambulance shows up. It never does, and, on a certain level, I’m the only one there all along. Imagine if you were a little tabby cat and could see yourself in a mirror- wouldn’t you love how beautiful you are? I feel like I let this cat down. I’ll try to do better next time.

Little squirrel. Sunday, May 22, 2016. Grove near the round sparrow. Hit by car. The avenue of heroes. Violence is a confusing and ugly addition to any vista. I don’t think I like the sun. Garbage is strewn across the landscape like lines of poetry. People are a disappointment. All hail the little guys, the young ones, the old ones. Quitters never win, and winners never learn. Do elephants really go to the same place to die? I sound depressed.There are no answers in graveyards, only questions. Is this what Alan Lomax would’ve sounded like if he was only given a microphone and a Ouija board? The constant swirl and swell of noise is an undertow pulling us into a panicked numbness. Lightly, up above, as if seen from the bottom of a lake, the birds offer tiny, distinct, starlight specks of sound to help you navigate to a better world- an older world. LinkedIn profiles of the saints; references upon request. Another one you probably need earphones for, not that they will help.

Sparrow. Sunday, May 22, 2016. Grove in front of the cemetery, across from the pool club. Hit by a car. The nomenclature of affluence. The challenges of accurate dating and classifcation. Nature is fluid, and we are but stubborn phonograph needles and hand-held cameras. There's a lot of noise in the air. Migratory patterns of temporal conditions. Holidays for the dead. Flowers, flags, granite, grass, and concrete. Dreams begin in memories. Another goodbye, another summer. Can any of these animals hear me?

Squirrel. Sunday, February 28, 2016. Carlyle by the railroad tracks. Hit by a car. Lying on his back. Iconic images from the Golden Age of comic books. Baby Superman leaves his collapsing planet. The distance between the tall grass and the woods, and the paved suburban street, was first mapped by Thomas Cole in 1836. The Iron Horse was once a marvel-a machine with an animal spirit. I was wrong on both accounts-it is Rachel Whiteread. The necessity of a job well done. Or done at all. Questions and exclamation points. Setting suns, great American pastimes, and a reason to carry on. The signposts remain, but the ground they were anchored in is gone, gone, gone. Left alone on the American continent. Go East, old man.

Skunk. Sunday, February 28, 2016. Glenwood near the little Sir Walter Raleigh house. Hit by a car. Middle of the road. Violent senses. You know it when you see it. Why does the uncaged bird sing? I want to be up when everyone else is asleep. Killers and gatherers. Sometimes a heay load is too much to carry. Gin a body meets a body. My needs versus Nature's zeitgeist. General musings on climate, planetary orbits, the singularity of the individual, and where to drop the needle on the record. Distractions and defense mechanisms. Whitman walks among the marvels of a new America. Mr. Skunk, he dead. Odious odors. A sentence is passed, and the world moves on as we make our final farewells.

Cat. Saturday, January 16, 2016. Valley in front of origninal site of 19th century Dutch farmhouse. Hit by a car. A cartographic record of heartbreak. Sponsored content, hip celebrities, and taking over bird sanctuaries. Bitter rambles on a bitter cold day. Our ancestors revered animals to the point that they crawled into dark caves and taught themselves how to draw and paint. Violence creates confusion. Your podcast listener is reassured by a familiar name. The totemic power of a well-designed website. Drop-down menus and cross-platform, scalable art are the Ariadne's thread to safeguard our passage thru these chaotic times. How many deaths are too many? Three seems innumerable. The hierarchy of innocence. Do animals subscribe to the "great man" theory? Self-pity in the built world. Shovels, excavations, and the relative safety of a long gone landscape.

Cat. Valley in wooded hill behind college. Sunday, January 3rd, 2016. Cause of death unknown. Black and white cat in a gray sad world. it sounds like there are jets flying in my head. Ishi ponders who to turn his jantiorial keys over to as the museum at UC Berkeley is converted into condos. Some blurbs for your RSS feed. Dreams and nightmares are things we fall into. Our final resting place. Priorities and speculations. A curated curse upon all our houses. (insert music bed here)

Have You Seen This Cat? November 15, 2015. Cooper and Valley. A terrible world to love. Please help. Typography and graphic design as formalized anguished echoes of loss.

Cat. Friday, January 1, 2016. Valley in front of old Victorian house. Hit by car. A plump little belly and a sad equation. The road to Calgary is paved with gold intentions. A disappointed world. Straight talking PSA's. The seven secrets of successful people. The magical thinking of a doomed year and unspoken fears.

Squirrel. November 15, 2015. Valley in front of opera place. Hit by car. Confusion, murder, and nostalgia for a time when people used to go out dancing for fun. A reading from the John Muir police blotter. The comfort of metaphors. End of season, everything must go. Wishful thinking amid a dry, cold wind.

Shiba Inu- Lost. October 18, 2015. Bedford and N.9th. Orange fur. Scuttling leaves, chirping birds, the search for a lost epoch, and the brutal indiference of Moloch the Developer.

Franchesca/Chica-Missing Person. Lorimer and Metropolitan. October 18, 2015. Repost Me! Take a picture. An hourglass you can never flip over.

Squirrel. Sunday, November 1, 2015. Valley in front of the bus stop by the cemetery. Hit by car. Sometimes you just have to let the wind say what it wants to say. Things I learned from New Jersey.

Skunk. Wednesday, October 14, 2015. Valley in front of where the big, fancy white house used to be. Hit by a car. It always sounds like it's raining. Widows, ghosts, and lonesome train whistles. When there are no more answers, the only thing left is questions. Natty Bumpo stuffed and whimsically mounted for your mild, knowing bemusement. The sheer pleasure of terror and transience. Don't hide your candle under a bushel, use it to burn their playhouse down.

Calico Cat. Wednesday, October 14, 2015. Valley across from woods. Hit by car. 7 months to a year old. Exquisite, indiscriminate, singular. Lost in the maelstrom. After the deluge, what? Winter approaches and a sweetheart departs. No literary device is going to soften the punch.

Starling or Blackbird. Valley in front of cemetery. Sunday, October 11. 2015. Hit by a car. A violent death. A resting spot in the valley of death. Brutalistic headstones and Gilded Age statuary. The infinite possiblities in a finite world. Raise high your battle flags.

$ Reward $. Stolen Guitars. September 7, 2015. Train station near cul-de-sac. Reverse engineering heartbreak. Our spirit animals manifest, enthrall, and then disappear into the miasma of the built world. All roads lead to impermanence.

Groundhog. September 7, 2015. Upper Mountain between Iris gardens and the Badlands house. Hit by car. Sad greeting cards for bad jobs. Fun times at summer's end. A quarterly meeting of a local chapter of Ethnographers and Antisocial "New Documentarians Collective." Papers and powerpoint presentations are given covering diverse topics such as masking, ritual and celebration, and "the other."

Skunk. August 30, 2015. Valley across from banquet hall. Hit by car. Born in spring, died in summer. The inability of maps, legends, XY graphs, or basic geometry to hold your hand at 3 o'clock in the morning. The promise of colder days. Frankenstein terrorizing the countryside in his SUV. What can a microphone catch when words fail? Our workshop held amid the splendor of Big Sur will teach you the skills you need to transform tragedy and pain into an Instagram worthy career. Or join us for our special three day conference on diversity in public media held this year in St-Tropez, France. For those on a budget, be sure to reserve your pass early and qualify for the "Difference Makers" 3% discount.

Northern short-tailed shrew. August 24, 2015. Norton near pretty yellow house. Hit by a car. It wasn't a mouse-I'm no Charles Darwin. I'm being beat down by the summer and the noise of man. Listening with headphones is suggested to make sense of my drowning whispers.

Sparrow. August 10, 2015. Valley near Glenwood. Hit by a car. An American pastoral landscape. Bones strong enough to lift you off the ground. Bible quotes, tote bag rewards, a journey round the sun, a litany of dissappointments and a sad goodbye.

Little dead bird. Saturday, July 4th, 2015. The road thru the college past the power lines. Hit by a car? A victim of gravity? The ever shifting state of Linnaean taxonomy. A brief description of two competing powers. Fossils, geographic records, and the destructive footprint. Perhaps it all went to hell the minute we stopped worshipping the animals we painted on cave walls, and replaced them with outsized avatars of ourselves.

Goldfinch. On the road in the nice cemetery. June 21, 2015. Hit by car. Art imitates death. Mysteries real and manufactured. So much depends upon a small goldfinch. An axe is ground and futures are assessed. The world is robbed daily, but the puzzle and triumph of the goldfinch remains constant.

Missing- Petey. Aug, 25, 2015. Upper Mountain and Laurel. Missing- August 24. 17 years old, indoor cat. Friendly with strangers. Sick with worry. Does something have value if it doesn't have a focus sentence? If every story has a twist, no story has a surprise. All I want to do is scream, but it sounds like my voice is getting quieter and quieter. Where are you, Petey?

Juvenile Robin. Sunday, June, 21, 2015. Valley near Macopin. Hit by a car. It's Fathers Day in the networked universe. Is the only way out, in? Or is it the other way around? Are the dead orphans? What did Herman Melville do for fun on a Sunday?

Robin. Mt. Hebron near railroad crossing. May 31, 2015. Hit by car. A storm and summer approach. The Flying Dutchman creek and the unspoken realization that the whole hip taxidermy/Morbid Anantomy thing is dumb and sad. A bird is missed.

Irridescent Blackbird. Saturday, May 30, 2015. Valley in front of chained off driveway. Hit by car. The ghost of Wallace Stevens wanders a spoiled American landscape.

Robin. Tuesday, May 19. 2015. Hit by a car? The private road above the pond near the old quarry. The days are too long and too hot. Does a spiral jetty arc towards the shore or away from it? The failure of modernism versus natural decay. Things we learned from New Jersey.

Sparrow. Norwood Ave in front of house with big white dog. Sunday, May 17, 2015. A little guy hit by car and wet from the rain. Optical illusions. Icons, archetypes, confusions, and profound mysteries.

Squirrel. Norwood and Alexander. Sunday, May 17, 2015. Hit by a car. Abraham Lincoln swims the Potomac. Maybe what this country needs is more ugly, clinically depressed Presidents- ones that would walk in solitude through the captial's streets at dusk; past poets, nurses, peddlers, and folk heading home from work.

3 bird eggs. Sunday, May 10, 2015. Underneath the stairs of pedestrian overpass on highway. The uncertain remains of life or death. Understanding the natural world in an Age of Digital Reproduction.

Deep black bird Sunday, April 26, 2015. Laying in the stream by the railroad station. Cause of death unknown. Finding your place in the circle. Life lived in the thickets. Gestures-empty and otherwise.

Sparrow- either attacked by a hawk or cat, or hit by a train. April 13, 2015. Train platform near Laurel Pl. The things we leave behind. Hank Williams and the unbearable lightness of daylight. Trigger Warning: There is no mention of Miranda July in this posting.

Sparrow. April 7, 2015. Valley Rd in front of convent. Hit by car. T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams wrestle to the death under an indifferent downpour.

Raccoon. April 4th, 2015. Hit by car on road behind the resevoir. Twigs, leaves, trash and plosives. Roads without names. The wind in the pines. Confessions of a crime scene witness. The problems of cultural reassignment surgery. The teacup is slowly emptied, yet we grow more and more thirsty. How can you light out for the territory when it's the most populated state in the country? Always finish up on a satisfactory high note; everything is temporary except loss.

Possum. April 3, 2015. Upper Mountain Ave between train station and Iris garden. Hit by car. The living Bible in an age of post-mechanical reproduction.

Squirrel. Hit by car. Notch Rd in front of non-descript ranch-style house. March 29, 2015. Major trends in 20th century art. Ce ne est pas un écureuil. Ce est un écureuil.

Rat. Hit by car. Highway in front of Ford/Kia dealership. March 29, 2015. Stiff, brittle, dead. The twin lenses of location and context. Humanity a virus that spreads in an ever widening gyre.

Squirrel. Hit by car. Upper Mountain Ave in front of ramshackle Victorian. March 22, 2015. A death with no entertainment value. Defiled but not degraded. Like trivial gods we recreate the natural world in our own diminished image.

Deer. Valley Rd in front of cemetry. March 25, 2015. Covered with blue vinyl tarp. Cold and raining. All paths lead to a burning Rome. Don't believe the movies, all of the monsters are outside of the graveyard. A geological time scale as slow, gravitational descent into the glittering, white hot center of the cultural black hole. Why aren't the planets in constant revolt? The Golden Age of Podcasting a galaxy of ever diminishing suns that throw only shadows disguised as light. Come to our listening parties in the nearest citadel of the Creator Class. Like us on Facebook and rate us on iTunes. This one's for my sizzle reel.

Either a deer or a groundhog or a raccoon or an opossum. Febuary 12, 2015. Valley Rd in front of Greek Orthodox Church. Too far away to see exactly what it is. The bureaucracy of loss. The complex calculation of distance, scale, and animal gut instinct. The persistence of place.

Deer. Feb. 12, 2015. Valley Rd in front of Dutch farmhouse. Hit by car. Honey and cinnamon fur. Every little piece adds up like snowflakes, but nothing melts away. Car tires on brined roads sound like cannonballs rolling home to Sebastopol.