Look at that beak! Dripping with pea gore. It took me some minutes to get even as poor a shot as this, during which he shook his head like a dog rids itself of water, which is why our house is spackled in desiccated succotash and why the beak sculpture isn't as bad as could be.

Reading: Anne of Ingleside

Moving: walked 2.7 miles to work, did a full circuit of weights, and walked a bit in the park with Haitch (twice in less than a week--we have to stop meeting like this)

Watching: magpies and goslings and clouds and Jim Lehrer

Listening: "Carry On My Wayward Son" on my internal jukebox. It's Egg's fault.

23 May 2001: Ingleside

This afternoon as I did my weights I was watching "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer." There was a segment on Boy Scouts and how some schools have stopped offering meeting space because of their discriminatory policies. The Boy Scout motto, or part of it, is to be physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. A New York City troop that doesn't follow the anti-gay policy was profiled, as was another in rural Maryland that does. Several of the Scouts and adult leaders interviewed who did subscribe to the policy were fat and not fit and how exactly are they following the "physically strong" bit? And no one explained how being "morally straight" and being gay counteract each other.

---

I had an anxiety dream about high school for the first time in months last night. My high school was its unlovable brown metal self but situated where Denver's Cherry Creek Mall is. I was in the physics classroom, the only time I had a class in that room and certainly one of my least favorite of the 25 I had throughout high school (a measure of discomfort). Also I was trying to take a French class al fresco, which didn't help my chronically poor oral comprehension. Also I was either surrounded by skids (the bad students who smoked and listened to Led Zeppelin and scared straitlaced moi) or in company with each the boy and the girl with whom I felt least comfortable, though as far as I know and remember only the boy actively was led and instigated the sport of tormenting lisa.

When the boy was new in second grade, he had cute little pink ears. I don't remember if the crush I had on him was immediate or developed when the teacher suggested I use his ear as a guide to what a half a heart shape should be. Or was that fourth grade? Grades were shuffled and I was in the same room for both of those grades, so I confuse more minor incidents. It is as innocent a blunder as sweet Mrs. Plimpton (second grade) could have made. She either really didn't get why we all giggled when a story she read us contained the word "bosom" or was superb at playing dumb--the latter possibility struck me as the more likely as I grew up. Contrariwise, Ms. Knapp was a new teacher, or at least new to Center School. Young enough not to be so anciently naïve as dear Mrs. Plimpton, she also was young enough not to realize how embarrassing such a suggestion would be to both the boy and me.

Eight or ten years later, immediately following our commencement ceremony, hurtling down the central staircase and outta that building after ripping off my vestments and checking them in at the office to conclude my last business with Regional District 18, I passed the boy on the stairs. I was giddy, I was free, I was out from under his thumb--just days before, he'd deliberately made me cry during rehearsal--I would never see him again. Light as air, I told him, "I just wanted to let you know that in second grade I had a crush on you." And I zipped away, not giving a flying fuck whether he thought I still had a crush on him (answer: no).

(And I did see him again; he came to the ten-year reunion. I didn't see him until late in the evening; we passed each other during one of my circuits of the gathering and exchanged nods.)

At the end of the dream, I was trying to go home but took the bus a stop too far and had to trek back and down a hill on my gimpy knees--my right one currently is unstable in waking life--but I was going home. I clambered over some boulders like those that tumbled behind the retreating glacier that shaped the town of my birth and found myself beside a pond, too small and in woods too dense to be as pristinely clear and free of murk as it was (a dream reality), in thick green deciduous woods with a deafening chorus of peepfrogs. Home.

So overall, a reassuring dream.

---

The reason I have "Carry On My Wayward Son" in my head is that Egg was complaining about her husband's fondness for '70s art rock--Yes, Kansas, Styx. When I first heard "Dust in the Wind" I thought it was mighty profound poetry and said so, and she said oh good, next time they come to town you can go. I realized that "Carry" works well in a Christopher Walken voice, like when he or a mimic read Goodnight Moon to a group of preschoolers on "The Simpsons" and scared them witless. Emphasize the line breaks and how syntactically unnatural they are:

Carry on
my
wayward son
There'll be
peace
when you are
done
Lay your weary
head to rest
Don't you
cry
no more.

Or maybe it's a better song for Captain Kirk.

---

Haitch came over this evening to give me birthday presents (chocolate and a gauzy scarf from Firenze and All the President's Men). She observed that Blake, shrieking with unrequited love over the napkins, hadn't changed in the months since she's seen him. She hadn't witnessed his bowing adoration of the candelabra yet or scaling of the towels yet--my towel now lives on the back of the bathroom door so Blake can climb an old towel on my old hook at will, and preen there littering the not my towel with dander and the buddy equivalent of fingernail clippings without grossing me out. Tucking himself against my foot is typical evening snuggle behavior, and finally finally finally after holding the camera there for minutes waiting for him to have a yawning fit, finally a half-decent picture of the buddy yawn. I hope I can content myself with that. Capturing him sneezing would be well-nigh impossible.