22Nov / 2013

Cosmology

Odin tries to describe how he is feeling to his wife, on a mobile phone with a dodgy connection.

“I feel like I am on the verge of a panic attack.” The word ‘verge’ echoes.

She tells him to take a walk.

“I am taking a walk. I’m on the way to the store to get a sandwich for the crows. Here’s Huginn already.” Perched atop a Peugeot, a grey crow the size of a duck watches Odin walk past.

Odin buys a chicken sandwich and some honey-roasted peanuts, because he wants to see if the crows will eat an entire sandwich, and wants to have something left over for his own lunch in case they do.

He sits on the bench and in less than a minute, all three crows arrive. The black one, Muninn, is the cockiest. Odin puts a piece of sandwich on the bench beside him, then turns and tosses pieces to Huginn and the third crow, a smaller grey one. When he turns back, Muninn is already dismantling his sandwich a couple meters away.

Odin has to throw the third crow another piece because Huginn took the first two.

The third crow has no name.

Eventually all the crows have food.

They eat all of the first half, and most of the second, of Odin’s sandwich. Odin eats the peanuts.

It is an unnaturally quiet, grey day and Odin’s heart is beating wildly. He has no idea why.

What say the hanged?

The universe was made from the body of the giant Ymir almost fourteen billion years ago. It is thought to be flat, but you know what else used to be thought flat. It is 46 billion light years in radius. Beyond that, who knows.

Beyond that, the multiverse.

Beyond that, everything else.

Beyond that, an infinity of possible things.

An infinite number of worlds just like this one, and worlds slightly different, and worlds way different.

Worlds in which you see a strange, tall, black-haired woman at the store and try not to stare. Worlds in which you see her, and say hi. Worlds in which she brushes you off. Worlds in which you have coffee. Worlds in which you never see her again. Worlds in which you become friends.

Worlds in which pieces of an airplane land on your house and you are interviewed on the news.

Worlds in which you buy a used hat and don’t get headlice.

Worlds in which you bake an apple pie for Thanksgiving without a recipe, from start to finish.

Worlds in which you go outside in the dark to throw out the garbage and step on a hair brush instead of a garden clog and think a hedgehog is hiding in your garden clog and chuckle at your mistake.

Worlds in which you are full of electricity and don’t know why.

Worlds upon worlds upon worlds.

Permalink

12Nov / 2013

I looked in the window and saw you

Odin feels so bad! He hasn’t fed the crows lately. Either he’s busy, away or fasting and doesn’t go out at lunch. But today he goes out. It’s a spectacular, cold, sunny fall day. He buys a curry chicken sandwich and some peanuts and a bottle of water at the store on the corner.

He sits on the bench and eats half the sandwich. Then he eats most of the other half, but the crows don’t arrive. Perhaps they have given up on him, or migrated. He looks up at the sky, and sees a lot of crows flying here and there. He can hear other ones in the distance.

He throws away his garbage and walks back to the office. He holds on to what remains of the second half of the sandwich in case the crows show up, and one does before he has walked very far.

Here you go pal, says Odin, and throws him the food.

What say the slain?

I looked in the window and saw you eating dinner with your daughter. You were eating scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and watching Hannibal. At one point your daughter choked a little when a piece of jalapeno teetered on the edge of her windpipe. At another point she made a remark about how the two of you end up doing things like this, like watching Hannibal at dinner, or going to see The Evil Dead on Father’s Day.

You both smiled a lot, and laughed, even though both of you are fighting autumn depression. You like each other. You have two episodes of Hannibal left. You will watch them tonight. I looked through the window and saw that.

Permalink 2 Comments

08Oct / 2013

Guitar. Slingshot. Wonder. French toast.

Odin needs a new bag because his old one smells suspiciously of cat pee. Also, it’s old. So Odin could be said to be ‘looking for a bag,’ but not actively. He’s keeping his eyes open, is all.
It was dark, when he got up, and cold. Then, when he drove to work it was grey and murky and the woods were full of fog and he and his kid talked, again, about how ‘we really have to get up early one morning and take pictures. For real this time.’
By lunch it had warmed up into a crisp fall day and the sky was blue and colors were clear.
Huginn accosted him on his way to buy sandwiches.
He got a roll with baloney and whole wheat with ham.
Huginn walked beside him up the sidewalk the last block to the bench, waddling like a duck.
Odin tossed Huginn a piece of the roll with ham, but Muninn swooped down and took it. Odin tossed Huginn a second piece and watched him take it apart into its components, arranging the bread, ham and lettuce next to each other like a man taking apart an antique watch.
Huginn ate the ham, and buried the bread under leaves in the gutter. He ignored the lettuce entirely.
Muninn flew out of sight with his meal.
Then the birds came back for some ham on whole wheat, and repeated everything. Odin noticed they were coming significantly closer than they had at first. He wondered if they would eat out of his hand, but no dice; this turned out to be okay by Odin, because the closer a crow comes, the sharper its beak looks.
Muninn did hop up onto the bench where Odin sat to snag a piece of ham sandwich, though. He did it twice.
Then he flew out of sight again, and Huginn moved to the roof of the blue Skoda, where he again disassembled his sandwich.
What say the slain, asked Odin.
Ah, isn’t it a beautiful day, the air buoys you and you weigh not a thing at all.
Ah, this moment.
This lightness.
This light.
There is a place without signifiers, where when the sun shines, it’s you shining.
No words here to divide things up: no guitar, no slingshot, no wonder, no French toast.
Where when you kiss someone, the sun is kissing.
When you stand on the highest branch of the tallest tree in the woods and see the horizon, the tree is seeing.
And you bury your dinner under leaves you yourself have shed, and it is yourself you are burying.

Permalink

02Oct / 2013

Pitch dark

Odin whispers on the phone to his wife, and lulz.
She asks him where he is.
He tells her the name of the street. I’m taking a back route to the store to get a sandwich to split with the crows, he says.
He tells her he is avoiding them until he has food because their disappointed faces make him feel bad. He is perceiving emotional pressure from wild crows, Corvus corax, even while realizing they are likely incapable of exerting it intentionally. (Note: Huginn looks more like a Corvus dauuricus.)
He knows this is all homemade. But she is laughing too much to listen closely.
You have the gift of thinking like animals, she says.
I was thinking, he said, awesome how they fly right up now and stare at me until I give them a sandwich. I was thinking, look how I have trained them to eat!
When, in fact, etc etc, he says. Less a gift of thinking like animals, he said, more like a vulnerability to being pushed around by them. Look where our cats have trained me to let them snooze.
Odin tries to select a sandwich and write a text message to his daughter simultaneously but finds it really disorienting.
Sandwich selection requires too much concentration. The crows didn’t like the salami. They like the turkey breast, but not the arugula it contains. The curry chicken gives Odin food poisoning half the time (literally). He is not in the mood for ham, so salmon is about all that is left, if one is boycotting tuna (is that still a thing?), suspicious of bologna, and whatever whatever that last kind.
So salmon it is. And a turkey breast / curry wrap, to see how the crows react to that.
And some honey roasted peanuts, just because.
The crows accompany Odin the last block to their bench.
They like the salmon. They eat the filling and bury the bread under leaves.
Muninn flies his piece of the wrap fifteen meters away to eat it in peace, Huginn flies his to the roof of a nearby Skoda and eats it there, carefully.
Then he comes back, Huginn.
What say the hanged? Odin asks.
PITCH DARK PITCH DARK PITCH DARK.
The little boy rides his trike around the abandoned, haunted lodge. Playing with his toys before bed: PITCH DARK PITCH DARK PITCH DARK.
He writes it on a door in lipstick.
Why does his mom wear lipstick in an abandoned hotel? Who is she longing to impress, her insane husband or the external evil that has invaded him?
PITCHDARK.
She closes the door and glances in the mirror.
KRADHCTIP!!!
(Only, mirror-reversed too.)
Russian for what McNuggets are made of.
Like a chupacabra.
Like an insane asylum in a cement mixer in a paint mixer, those shakey robot things your dad used to have paint mixed in at the paint store when you were little.
Like a Republican congressman tapping his foot in the men’s room in a Mormon airport.
Morse code for: They have discovered my true identity, Control, pick me up. Retrieve me. Fetch me back to home planet. But Control is busy announcing alien dominion over their Earthen subjects, calling for subjugation via train station loudspeakers in two hundred Earth languages: ‘Bow down before our superior alien might!’ But no one understands train station announcements, and this is no exception, so the alien takeover fails.
Like that.
PITCH DARK PITCH DARK PITCH DARK.

Permalink

16Sep / 2013

Black dog

Odin is taking a walk on his lunch break. He’s skipping lunch today, so he tries to avoid crows as he walks to the tobacco shop to buy lottery tickets, because he doesn’t want to disappoint them, or make them feel rejected, talking on his mobile phone to his wife, mostly about how hard he is to hear when there’s wind, and something about their daughters.
He sees no crows on his way to buy lottery tickets. On the street that goes downhill past a guarded embassy and a school, he begins to think about something he thinks about a lot. He thinks about the phenomenon of misunderstanding one’s situation, of overestimating one’s success or good fortune. He wonders if he overestimates himself, or if he cripples himself by fearing he might be overestimating himself. He wonders if there is a name for this; how this relates to imposter syndrome; and if this misunderstanding of what is going on is limited to him, or rare, or common. On the one hand, Odin supposes not even George Clooney is as suave as George Clooney believes. On the other hand, Odin has to think about the black dog in a photo his parents took of him as a child. In the photo, a grinning Odin is holding up his arms. He thought the dog was dancing with him. What a clever dog!
Odin’s parents thought it was so funny they took a picture instead of shooing away the strange dog that was trying to fuck their child.
Odin thinks about that situation a lot.
Odin always asks himself, what is the black dog now?
Now what is the black dog?
There is a long line at the tobacco shop. They run Odin’s tickets through the machine, nothing. He buys two more for the next drawings and goes back out into the wind.
The black dog is not imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is, you think others think you’re better than you really are. The black dog is, you think you’re not as great as you think you are.
Odin can’t decide if it’s better or worse.
On the way back to the office Huginn, the grey one, lands on the grass strip between sidewalk and street and regards Odin.
Sorry, Odin says. Tomorrow. Then he says it in German, just to be sure.
But Huginn follows him for a while.
Odin wonders what sort of structure would make the best hideout.
Any structure where you’re not expected, he figures.
Odin is dizzy from not eating.
Tomorrow, he promises the crow.

Permalink

13Sep / 2013

Everyone needs a secret life

It’s not raining but Odin needs an umbrella anyway because the leaves are wet and they drip when the wind gusts. It’s cold too so he is not expecting the crows when he walks back to the bench from the deli with a ham and cheese sandwich, but there Muninn is on the roof of a yellow Volvo. Then he sees Huginn eyeing him from the gutter. The crows just appear, like one of those pictures you stare at until crows appear.
Odin is not very hungry so the crows do well. Muninn hops up the grass strip between sidewalk and street and hides some of his sandwich under leaves. Huginn buries his under leaves in the gutter. Do they find this stuff again? Odin wonders. Do they remember where they hide everything?
Odin watches them eat. They don’t like tomato, and they look at the arugula like, are you trying to poison us or something?
I am the man who has lunch with the crows, thinks Odin. This is the sharp tip of a secret life poking into my regular life.
What say the hanged?
Huginn tells him.
So this is what it comes to.
Why was not part of the equation.
It’s about time.
Huginn goes on for a while. Odin doesn’t even notice him stop, he finally sees him poking around in the gutter a ways up the street.
What say the slain?
It was a good, round life, they say.
My only wish is to feel the soft muzzle of a horse one last time. That velvet and the smell of horse.
Muninn looks at Odin.
Everyone needs a secret life. A great, abandoned room with a bed in the middle that no one knows about. A table to write and a view of water. A rusty lock with a secret key. A shower.
A place to go sometimes when everyone thinks you’re somewhere else.
When in fact you’re someone else.
Odin gives the birds the rest of the sandwich and goes back to the office.
Getting cool, he says to the receptionist.
Cold, she agrees.

Permalink

03Sep / 2013

Odin, it is said

Odin, it is said, feared Huginn might not come back, and feared even more the loss of Muninn.

Odin sits on the bench and wonders if he let too many days go by without sharing lunch with the crows.
Today: some sort of coldcut sandwich. Some incarnation of pork.
Huginn comes from the word for thought, Muninn is associated with memory.
Odin thinks about his uncle, calling his (Odin’s) niece and nephew “little girl” and “little boy” because he had lost their names.
Odin thinks about trying to remember a word in the car on the way into town this morning, and making light of it with his daughter. He still can’t recall what the word was.
He curses and an elm tree bursts into flame.

It’s not much of a sandwich. Odin finishes it and some honey-roasted peanuts and walks back to his office.
Near the office is a crow, but it is the wrong one and flies to a nearby roof and caws.
Today, the weather is still.
Like the calm before a great storm, but the weatherwoman on television, the one who wears different shoes every day, mentioned only the possibility of drizzle.
Zero percent chance of Ragnarök, she said.
But you might want to take an umbrella, just in case.

Permalink 1 Comment

← Older posts Newer posts →

Metamorphosism

Tag Archives: odin

Cosmology

I looked in the window and saw you

Guitar. Slingshot. Wonder. French toast.

Pitch dark

Black dog

Everyone needs a secret life

Odin, it is said