bird

The next day, I googled one of my distant relatives. I found a podcast on which he proudly announces he killed 75 doves in a week. Why do we do that, google people we don’t want to talk to? The urge to hurt oneself with strange knowledge? The urge to humanize someone who is hard to understand? All that.

Doves are pigeons. All-white pigeons. And they are apparently good eatin’…?

They are used as a symbol of peace and/or sexiness around the world.

Noah sends one out (after Gilgamesh did), and when the bird doesn’t come back, it’s like, something’s out there. Or the bird was a dummy and flew so far he collapsed of exhaustion.

Probably not. Pigeons are amazing. They can fly 700 miles a day. It was only the telegraph that overtook pigeons for speed of communication. And there were still a lot of places without telegraphs, for a long time.

I drove out to see my niece in a play at her high school. Her sister was an usher, and when I walked in, she ran up to me, threw her arms around me, and yelled my name.

I needed that because my panic was getting triggered by the theater. (I’m Abe Lincoln!) My brain likes to short-circuit in restaurants, but theaters are also prime territory. I think they are both places where social things happen at a pace that is expected, and out of my control.

I realized, walking from my car to the theater, that it was very, very dark out, and I felt an echo of a panic I once had about dark. Not the dark, like the dark that had currently and oppressively fallen on us in November, but the dark that maybe there will never be light again. Many years ago, I was camping, and as the sun went down, I had this flash of darkness as unsafe. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to my neanderthal ancestors. I felt in my bones, no! Unsafe! Unsafe! As I sat around a campfire with a dozen nice people.

A couple of months ago I had some classic panic attack action at the movies, when I was trying to enjoy “Hamilton.” The narrative of a show can pull me in and help, but before “Hamilton” there was this long meditation on “Hamilton,” and its history, and I both knew all of the information, and was feeling my panic amp up gargantuanly. Shit shit shit gotta go how can I go what can I say when should I go

I went to the bathroom, did my breathing exercises, hated my life. When I returned to the theater, I had missed my favorite part, “how does a bastard/orphan/son of a whore”. Ah, well.

During the play, I grabbed my fidget on my keys, a strip of rubbery buttons that you can press up or down, inside and out. Mine also had two nubbins that were about to come off, and two holes. I focused my attention on my fingers and exactly how the object felt. I closed my eyes. No one would notice in the theater. It was dark.

I was frustrated that the songs and the story hadn’t scooped me up yet.

At intermission, I realized I felt totally fine.

During the second half, I enjoyed the show like a normal person.

Sometimes I wish I were a Vulcan.

Or an android.

Obviously, like Data, in that they can make a machine look completely like a human being except for painting its face with a healthy glow.

Everywhere the birds are flying, and birds are being shot down.

For Christians, doves (pigeons) became symbols of the Holy Ghost, aka the Holy Spirit. There’s a part of God that floats all around and is impossible to describe or contain. The only word we have for that, in our sophisticated age, is a delicate, one-syllable word: bird.