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pigeons and trees
Monday, June 4 2001
This morning before work I rode my bike up to the Bagelworks on Wilshire for a cup of coffee and a cream cheese everything bagel, which I ate while sitting at a table out in front. I had nothing to read so I pondered the billboards instead, wondering why the electric-powered pigeon shooers had stopped. I've seen the shooers struggle against a strong wind and I've seen them set so ineffectually high that roosting pigeons were permitted to roost so long as they kept their heads down. But there was no wind. And there were no pigeons either.
I've heard almost uniformly bad things said about pigeons during my nearly three-year urban stint, but for my part I've always admired and respected these birds. Not only do I think them beautiful, resourceful and intelligent, but I genuinely like it when they are around. When I was a kid I used to wish there were pigeons living in the barn of my childhood home. I'd seen them congregating around the large horse and cattle barns of more intensive agricultural operations and I'd wondered why they wouldn't live with us.
Yesterday I saw a pigeon disappear into the little tube that juts out in front of a traffic light and I wondered if she was setting up a nest. I've known pigeons to nest in these tubes before. Usually you don't notice them in there until the light goes on behind them and you see their silhouettes against the red, green, or yellow. I wonder if the light or the heat of the light bothers them? I wonder which color bothers them least? The yellow signal is on for the least amount of time; perhaps they prefer that.
I think that all people, on some level at least, wish they were trees. Animals such as us may be able to move around, hatch plans, plot capers, and enjoy grunty animal pleasures, but we have an ephemeral vagabond quality to us that trees have transcended. Trees represent a sort of ideal state of capitalism, one in which roots are set in a good piece of real estate, prosperity is measured by height and girth, and creativity manifests in measurable units of pollen and seeds. And though trees don't go on vacations; vacations come to them in the form of storms and seasons.
John tells me that the girl he met at the bar in Q's on Thursday night has been calling him lately. By "calling," though, I don't mean using the phone to engage in healthy conversations. Sometimes she calls, doesn't say anything, and then hangs up, only to call up again and confess what just happened. You can imagine what John thinks about this. Regret is one thing but the regret that keeps on giving is something else entirely.
The online writer once known to his readers as "Spaceman" sent me an email today containing a link to yet another interesting article documenting the continuing dotcom washout. He thought of me because the story mentions CollegeClub.com in one of its several rise & fall vignettes. The trajectory is always the same: the paper millions, the indulgence of buying an expensive car, the "it'll turn around" mentality of 2000, followed by the glum realization that the whole thing was about as ephemeral as a dream. Trees understand capitalism in a way that chortling squirrels and grunting economists never will.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010604 feedback
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