Tiny World

Jim at Ugly Luggage writes the funniest tags for the stuff in his shop. Like once for JB’s birthday I gave her a geode that someone had made into a little terrarium by sticking a wee cactus inside it. So: tiny world.

There’s a little backyard to my apartment and if I have the day off it’s nice to eat breakfast outside. Here’s the view from under the gazebo arbor-thingy Big Daddy built:

Gaze to the right, and this beast rises from beyond my neighbor’s wall.

Rumour is it’s going to be 22 stories. Also, rumour is that lovely old brick building with the ivy is a goner.

Fuck!

Within a two-block radius of my apartment there are SIX major developments in varying degrees of completion. Two of those projects are each the size of an entire city block. Sitting out in the yard isn’t the pleasant diversion it used to be–the clanking and drilling and pounding was so loud this morning I barely made out the 9 am church bells.

It’s hard not to think about When It Will All End.

When my mother was in town, she said, “If you could afford to live anywhere in the city, where would it be?” I gave her a perplexed look–“Right here, of course!” She said, “Well, you’ll have to move someday, when your landlord sells the building.”

I never want to move. I’m crazy about the birdlife in the yard. There’s a turtle who lives back there, too, who comes to everybody’s back door and begs for its favorite food, bologna. (Some kind of joke in here, but I can’t be bothered.) I never have bologna but it gobbles up sliced turkey. The first time my dog saw the turtle, she got the most astonished look on her face. Now the dog is dead (SAD!) but the turtle, supposedly 40+ years old, is still around.

(Remember how everything dies? And how when I was six or seven my mother tried to comfort me by saying, “You don’t have to worry about that [death] for a long time”? It didn’t help. I don’t know how mothers can live with themselves, knowing that by making babies they’re also making death. I’ll probably never have a baby, but if I did, the second after it got delivered, I’d be all, DAMN, I LOVE YA KID BUT UNFORTUNATELY YOU JUST OFFICIALLY STARTED TO DIE!

What the fuck!)

Anyway, I thought I had a picture of the turtle but I can’t find it. The shell looks pretty cool (talk about tiny world!), especially when it’s wet, and it has incredible sharp black claws and gorgeous red and yellow markings around its beady little 3-million-year-old eyes.

by Left Hook | 25 May 2007 | boring | Comments