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late November bats and moths
Tuesday, November 26 2019
I had a vivid dream this morning set in a museum where the exits and entrances went through tight cavernous passages that had to be crawled through. In one place, a bridge across a chasm had collapsed and one was forced to somehow cross the chasm without it. Later in the dream, I was out in a crowded grassy courtyard similar to a college quad, and some official from the museum came up to me and indicated that I would be the museum's web developer were it not for the fact that I had Alzheimer's disease. Evidently I'd given that as my excuse for not being able to do the job. The tour of the museum had left me inspired, and now I was sad I'd gotten out of working for them.
Today was warmer than it had been in weeks, and as I drove home this evening at around sunset, I saw a bat flitting around above Hurley Mountain Road. We've had some hard frosts, and I wouldn't expect bats to be able to find much to eat so late into the Fall, but later I saw a large moth on the outside of the brownhouse window.
To her horror, today Gretchen found out that Ken Burns (yes, that Ken Burns) had just done a whole documentary on prison education. The documentary prominently featured the Bard Prison Initiative and Gretchen's erstwhile boss Max Kεnner, who okayed Gretchen's marginalization in the program, a decision that forced her out at some point back in 2012. Gretchen has had a lot of bitterness towards Max and BPI in the years since, though she's remained good friends with many of the students and some of the professors. Tonight Gretchen had drinks with a friend who knew more about this new Ken Burns documentary, and it turned out to be the product of the sort of social incest that we all know exists but rarely see laid out in detail. It turns out that Bard's President Leon Bοtstein has a daughter who works closely with Ken Burns, and that daughter became romantically involved with Max Kεnner (the head of the BPI program). The two got married, and their first baby, as it happened, was this documentary. For Gretchen, this is just more evidence that there is no justice in the world. She's happy prison education is finally getting its due, but she's hurt that unjust forces conspired to make it so she wouldn't be there when it happened. Anyone who has ever had a pang of FOMO will understand.
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