The snow came just in time to make the Winter Olympics feel suddently relevant and near by. My Italian Flickr friend thought the above image suggested a Bruegell.

Billy the Bag hung out in a Bodega in Brooklyn, behind the register on a hook with a stash of other plastic grocery bags. Mostly, he just hung there shooting the shit with his cousin, Carlos the Condom and his buddies Larry the Light Bulb and Mario the Marlborro Light. They liked to laugh a lot and make jokes behind the customer’s backs. They joked about the things they bought and how they dressed and the hang dog expressions they wore on their faces in the morning going to work and still hanging on their heads in the evening when they stopped back in off the N and R train. It was easy for Billy and his friends to laugh. They were just hanging out. They had no jobs and they had no faces.

Life was uneventful and nothing much happened at Tata’s Grocery untill one day a bird got into the store. It tore around the newspapers – careening past the canned goods. It really made a mess of things and Tata went crazy and chased the bird with the baseball bat he kept behind the counter to beat off the beggers and the thieves. Mario and Larry laughed at Tata as he smashed a whole family of beer bottles, but Billy was speechless. He’d never seen anything like this bird in his whole short life. It was beautiful. It caused chaos and that was enough for most of the gang behind the register, but Billy saw something else. He saw the way the bird seemed to break the shackles of the earth, the way it darted in and out and up and down with all the simple ease of smoke. It was miraculous. Billy watched in awed silence untill Tata magaged to herd the bird back into the street, where it hung out for an hour trying to figure a way back in.

Billy didn’t know what to call what he’d just seen, untill a customer came to the counter that afternoon to buy a forty ounce of Carey The Colt 45.

“Heard a bird flew in your window,” said the customer.

“No,” Tata answered. “He didn’t fly in the window, This bird had the balls to walk right in the front door, but he sure was flying all around the place once he got in here…. No pennies asshole.”

“Flying,” Billy thought to himself. “Flying. That’s what they call it and That is what I’m going to do. One off these days I’m going to get out of this hell hole and I’m going to fly.”

He was like a different bag after that. He was more serious now and kept mostly to himself. If Carlos, or Larry tried to bust on him, he’d announce in an important voice, “Fellas, hanging around here may be all well and good, but my handle to God, one of these days I am going to fly.”

Billy was not alone. All the bags of Brooklyn learn to fly in winter, if only for a moment.

The restaurant was loud at lunch with Bud standing around telling one of his stories. Bud wouldn’t shut up. When will he? He was going on and on and Mr. Vance sat at his usual table. He tolerated Bud with a causual smile, not to be rude, but he was looking out the glass door where he was the first to notice the bird. It walked right in off the bright street and through the dining room, into the kitchen and out the back door. The old pidgeon was as casual as you please, like it was his normal short cut, like he owned the joint. Everyone shut up and just watched the bird…. Even Bud. We were speechless.

“Nobody order the fucking chicken,” bud finally said. “It’s too cocky.”

I’ve been mixing metaphors in my mind all morning like a sleepy Marshall McCluhan. The sight of seeing the cable man pulling up the cable like Queequeg pulling in a harpooned whale and the way his motion seemed similar to a man peddling a bike (only with his hands) Got me thinking about Internets(sic) and fishing and sailing and the spouting of a whale and the spinning of a wheel. I was thinking specifically about where did belt drive machines evolve from in the industrial revolution and I think it is the rigging of ships and fishing tackle (though chain drive may relate more to the gears of milling). “Is the white whale just a cloud of steam?” Is technology one big fishing trip? I started thinking of that man on the roof pulling on a cable that is wrapped around the earth and spinning it just a little faster with each pull and a little faster again. (It’s a good thing too, because I don’t think anyone can really look at this experiment without DSL or cable… tell me if I’m wrong). Then I thought of us all on this electronic ship and that guy is up there in the rigging with the ropes and the wind. Someone should write a shanty.

Well the chestnuts went into the archive and Sunday I did a sort of old school blog entry and IT IN place is almost a year old, all of which combine to remind me that there are a lot of nice chestnuts floating around in the archive… so I will try to make occasional links to the past… like these that echo recent entries:
chestnuts
tunnel
La Bagel Delight
bagel as empty world and the crazy door… only blue

or bowl?

The interesing thing about the above passage from The Brooklyn Follies, is that so far it’s the only store, or restaurant name in the novel that corresponds to a real place in Brooklyn (the rest are invented). I always thought it was a bizarre name for a bagel store … but the bagels are fresh and warm out of the oven.