"the true voice of spring"

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As I mentioned a while back, I've been reading RTP's Wild America, written with James Fisher, and I promised to give you some excerpts. Here's one that's been percolating in my mind since I first read it a few weeks ago.

After dinner that evening we had walked across the damp fields toward the clear plaintive birdlike peeping until the myriad voices almost shouted at us from the dark pool and then fell silent. To easterners this nostalgic sound more than than any other--more than that of any bird--is the true voice of spring. It is a voice of resurrection: "Spring is come!" Everyone knows the voice and is glad, but few have ever seen the tiny inch-long singer. Tonight, with the peepers, there were multitudes of cricket frogs rasping out their strident notes, and here and there a green frog gave its single croak, like the plucking of a loose string on some instrument....

These sounds that pipe and trill from a hundred throats on evenings in spring are love songs of the swamp. They are ancient music, for the frogs sang their songs ages before the birds did; they were here first.... This orchestration of frogs and toads is one of the outstanding things about spring nights in eastern North America.

I read that passage again last night as I snuggled under my six layers of covers in bed, and I could almost hear the peepers and the toads and the green frogs playing their symphony; I could almost feel the warm breeze and smell the damp earth of the marsh. We leave our windows open in the summer, and each night we fall asleep to the sweet sounds of the peepers.

Once last summer, a friend came over and we went out on the marsh at dusk with flashlights to look for peepers. We saw a beautiful brown one, his throat blown up with each peep, his tiny body dwarfed by both his huge bubble of a throat and the loudness of his call.

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Some people in PA are already hearing peepers, even though the ground is still covered in snow. I haven't heard any calls yet, nor have I seen any red-winged blackbirds, the other harbinger of spring on the marsh--though others in Central PA have seen some. I guess Penns Valley is a little behind the rest of the area, under its thin blanket of snow. But this passage, and the thought of the coming warmth and beauty and new life, makes me happy.

The stork has arrived!

and he's dropped off the newest addition to the beginningtobird family, Alan Rickman!

Here he is in one of my favorite performances, Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. "Page three-hundred-and-ninety-FOUR...."

I loves him.

...but clouds got in my way

Another in my clouds-that-look-like-other-things series.

These are a favorite: low-tide sandflats clouds:

For comparison to real low-tide sandflats, see this picture from Lillian and Don Stokes' blog.

Pet sounds

I took some pics of Nibble and Kisses and wanted to share with you.

I call this one "EveryNibble is Illuminated" in honor of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel and movie:

He's happily eating his "crack" or this special bunny mix I get him for treats--it has smashed nuts, dried fruit, sunflower seeds, etc. mixed in with pellets. Someday I'll try to video him doing his crazy dance when he knows he's getting his crack. Boy, can that bunny move!

Kisses has the cutest little paws, and I lucked out and got her asleep for these shots:

Sweet Kitty Kisses!

More Cooper's pics!

Here are a couple more photos from yesterday's raptor excitement at work. He first landed at my pal Niki's window; the light wasn't good on that side of the building, but I managed to get a decent shot of him through the window:

Look at how far around he can turn his head! I kept hoping he would turn his body around so I could see his front, but he didn't. Right after I took this pic, I pulled my camera down from my face (I always look through the little image thingie rather than the big LCD screen, because my old eyes can't focus on that tiny screen). Just at that moment, he lifted his tail and pooped! I missed it! I was so bummed.

So after about ten minutes, he flew to a spot a hundred or so yards away--right near the parking lot. I missed this, as there were about a million cubicles in the way, but he stayed low to the ground, maybe three or four feet high.

Here's the wide view of his landing spot:

He's there in the center. Cars were driving by every few minutes, and people were walking on that sidewalk, but he stayed in this spot for at least twenty minutes. This is where I got the bulk of my photos. Look, he blinked!

And here, I think he blinked his nictating membrane thingie:

Cool!

I waited and waited, hoping he would stretch his wings and take flight so I could get pictures of that, but he just kinda hung out there. Finally, I had to get back to work, so I left. I went back about five minutes later, though, and OF COURSE he had gone and I had missed it.

Raptors invade my work!

Well, a single raptor, and he was sitting outside the window right next to the building!

Here are some pics I got (way to go Delia, for remembering her camera!):

My ID is an adult Cooper's Hawk. Susan Gets Native -- what say you? And is that some recent blood/flesh on the beak? He sat out there for a while--maybe digesting?

It's an outrage!

Okay, The Onion has officially gone too far! What did owls ever do to them!?

Wonder how much it costs... just kidding! It's an outrage!

Friday Night Nibble on Wednesday afternoon

Oh, how I've missed you all! My opportunities to blog have been severely limited by work, school, and dial-up slowness, so here's a little Nibble to get you through the rest of the week:

Isn't he a handsome little devil? Apologies for the blurriness on the carrot photo.

FrankBlackFrankBlackFrankBlackFrankBlackFrankBlackBLACKFRANCIS

I saw Frank Black live in concert the other day. Yes. THE Frank Black, of Pixies fame. For those of you who aren’t intimately acquainted with me (losers), Frank Black of Pixies fame has pretty much been my musical idol for the past five years. I have a Pixies poster on my wall. There’s a stencil of his face taped to my bookcase at home. His songs constantly burn themselves into my iPod. I have a picture of his face (drawn in the style of Bill Patterson) tattooed onto my shin. He got me through teenagehood. So to say that I was excited would have been an understatement. I was essentially running back and forth through the corridors of Oxford, squealing ‘FrankBlackOhMiGodFrankBlackImGonnaSeeFrankBlackHolyShit’ like a little piggy, for literally days on end*. I counted down the days on my calendar like a small child waiting for Christmas, or possibly a Frank Black concert. Every other hour I would phone up my friend Ella. “Is it time to see Frank Black yet?” I would ask. She would respond with some drugged up drunken mumbles, pass out over the phone line and hit her head on a lamp. That would be enough to tell me that it was not yet time to see Frank Black – for even ELLA would stay sober for Frank Black. I was sure.

The day arrived. Doors opened at 7. At 6:50 Ella was drunk (we know Ella is drunk when she has a drink in her hand and is waving her arms about in the air, slurring, and doing her ‘sexy face’ which basically resembles everybody’s else ‘Oh God I’m having a stroke’ face). At 7:05 we concert goers were still sat in the college bar waiting for the rest of the girls to sort their fucking lives out – apparently they wanted to ‘eat dinner’ before going out. Bullshit. They shouldn’t have even attended. I was far too excited to even contemplate swallowing a morsel. Eating? Pah. You would have sooner seen me, I dunno, NOT attend the Frank Black concert. And that is a shorthand way for saying ‘not bloody likely’ because I bloody love Frank Black. Anyway they all took a sacred age to get changed. Frankly I don’t think it was worth the wait, because they were wearing the same clothes they usually wear on going out days, and their hair was only mildly more jazzed up than usual. POINTLESS. I’d got myself into the frame of mind by wearing the cool tshirt that my little brother bought me for Christmas. It had an amplifier for a guitar on the front, and on the side written in gold lettering were the words ‘Turn on Tune in Rock out’ which I frankly think sums up my entire life mentality. I’m just chill. I don’t stress about anything, I’m too busy ‘rocking out’ and ‘sticking it to the man’.

By the time the bloody females (I say females I mean LIABILITIES) sorted themselves out, I was getting so het up and stressed that we were going to be late that I was actually shivering and getting hot flushes. I thought they were reserved for women going through the menopoly. That was how stressed I was at the thought of being late to see Frank Black – I grew sixty years and swapped sexes and then had a symptom. I was dancing about being all high pitched and saying ‘COME ON COME ON COME ON’ and they were all ‘Do we even know where the concert takes place?’ and ‘What bus do we get?’ and ‘We suck, let’s walk slower so that Thomas misses the bitchin’ awesome concert’. Frankly the fact that we got there at all was a miracle. Luckily Tall Matt has a friend with red hair who knew the way to Oxford Brooks (don’t ask me what that is, some kind of polytechnic university as far as I can tell). Towards the end I was like ‘Forget this noise’ and just sprinted away from everyone towards the concert centre. It was dead romantic, I just imagined BURSTING into the concert hall and then Frank Black looks up and he sees me and he’s like ‘Tom, you came!’ all happy and then I get to join the band as a Bez-style backing maraca singer. That’d rule.

As it was, I BURST into the hall at 8:13 only to find some shit student band called Bono Mango or something – can’t remember – on. Turned out that Frank Black didn’t even come on until 9:45 and he was supported by shit student band 1, and some other band called Art Brut. ‘Oh yeah’, said one of the girls ‘I only came for Art Brut’. At this point I saw red and stapled a ‘loser’ sign to her forehead. Going to a Frank Black concert in order to see Art Brut supporting is like going to a Live Jesus live sermon in order to see the Scientologist Equivalent of Jesus (which is, as far as I can tell, one of the Martians from “Mars Attacks”) supporting. Anyway I quietly drank while Art Brut were on. And to be fair, they were not bad, singing songs about being drunk, not being able to get over your ex-girlfriend, being quietly unimpressive in bed, and being crap at dancing. Frankly though none of it really resonated with me, and I was far more excited about Blacko and his songs about incest, birth defects, bizarre arthouse films and retarded Mexican tramps. I was so excited, in fact, that I went to the toilet four times. This was because I didn’t want to need the toilet when Frank was on stage and I was terrified of having like, a tiny bit of wee left in my bladder that was insistent and irritating. The main paradox is that once I’ve been to the toilet enough times I start to get stressed about being thirsty, and worry that I’ll have an insistent thirstiness that will be offputting, so I drink three and a half pints of water and thus need to go to the loo again.

The result of the past three or four sentences about my water-retention problems was that I was in the toilet when Frank Black came on. I know this because suddenly the sound of bored crowd buzz died briefly down, before erupting in cheers. I stopped weeing and sprinted out of the toilets, desperately trying to force my penis back into my trousers, wailing ‘I’M COMING FRANK’. I returned to the front of the crowd, where I was met by a white dude with dreadlocks and some fat bald guy who I very briefly thought WAS Frank Black. But this was clearly nonsense because FRANK BLACK WAS ON THE STAGE. I WAS LITERALLY METRES AWAY FROM HIM.

And oh, he was beautiful. His bald head shone gorgeously. His belly was fat, but not like grotesque fat, just fat enough that he looked like he could take me down by jumping up in the air, making the ground shake, and then jumping on me. His fingers were plump and healthy. He was wicked. And then the music began!

It was all stuff from his new album. Which was ok, because they were all really good tunes that I had listened to it before and so vaguely knew the words. I guess it was all for the best actually because if he had suddenly launched into Mr Grieves or Hey or – heaven forbid – Debaser, myfavouritesongofalltime, I would probably have had a heart attack of excitement and died right there on the dancefloor. The current album was, in Blacko’s words, “a rock opera about a dutch impressionist”. YES WE HEARD HIM SPEAK. I heard the voice of Frank Black, the voice from Tame and Wave of Mutilation and not Winterlong and Monkey Gone To Heaven and that mildly irritating studio skit ‘You Fuckin’ Die’ from Surfer Rosa (which I still listen to). Firsthand. It was good. It was especially good when he bantered with the audience. I mean, Frank Black isn’t like the king of audience interaction – mainly because he’s singing a ‘rock opera about a dutch impressionist’. However, after he started playing the accordion, some knobheads in the crowd started shouting ‘get on with it fat man’. Frankly I was appalled – that’s like going to see Jesus live on stage and being all like ‘Oi, braceface’. It’s not even that clever of an insult: He’s a fat bald guy. That’s kind of his Thing. I wasn’t standing for it, but FB was all cool – “Yeah, I know in England you have, a sarcastic sense of humour” he said, and then played on his harmonica. It was badass. And he took the – admittedly insulting – crowd heckling so well that I though I would have a go. Not to be insulting, but just to request a tune. So when he’d finished his last song and was tuning up, I yelled ‘PLAY DEBASER!’ well loudly.

This possibly wasn’t a good idea. The fact is, I love Frank Black dearly as a god and as a friend. However that doesn’t change the fact that he really hasn’t improved much since, say, about 1993. Requesting a song from that period is likely to annoy him. It’s akin to going to see TS Eliot live on stage. TS wants to perform his latest poem, which is an interpretive piece of dance-poetry about racial disunity in Harlem, but then some drunk guy at the back of the crowd yells “Oi, do The Waste Land! April is the cruellest month, bitch!” He’d be annoyed. I would be. It’s like pointing out his failure to move on after The Pixies. I knew this, but I shouted “PLAY DEBASER!” all the same. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Possibly for him to be all like ‘Ok, I’ll play Debaser, but only if you come up on stage and sing it with me’ and then I go up on stage and sing Debaser with him and then I crowd surfed for a bit, and then we went back to his dressing room and did some blow and took turns with Elisha Cuthbert, or whoever the hot nympho starlet happened to be at the time. This didn’t happen. Instead, there was a silence for a moment. Frank Black stopped what he was doing (tuning his harmonica) and looked at me, for just a second. Our eyes met. We understood each other. And do you know what he said? “Shh”.

Shh.

I GOT SHH’D BY FRANK BLACK.

THAT’S RIGHT.

All of a sudden I started to glow from within. It was a glow that lasted me through the next week and a half. I walked on air. I danced with the angels. I was so happy I decided at that point to be good and kind and polite to everyone. My musical hero had told me to shut up. That was It. That was fucking It. I could die happy.

That was a happy day. :D

I love you Frank, and to prove it I drawed a picture of us:**



Do you like it?

*NB: all claims of literality may be falsified
** NB: I’m totally not gay

So much for birding, building

UPDATED--with pics. BTW we're having a big snowstorm today, and I'm hoping my calculus class gets CANCELLED. Keep your fingers crossed!
UPDATED AGAIN!--Class was cancelled! And I took a personal day today! I'll go out in a while and get some snow pix!

This weekend, I was supposed to go birding with my pal Roana, her parents, and some other bird clubbers, but we had a little problem with the weather:
Okay, okay, that's just a stock photo of a New York blizzard. Here's how it really looked:

All right, you caught me again--that's another photo taken in New York in 1888. Truth: I was so freaked out by the horizontal-blowing snow that I just didn't even think to take a picture.

Back to the point, however, I did not get to go birding. We were supposed to make a trip over to see a Bullock's Oriole that's been wintering near here, and then we were going to go OWLING! I really wanted to go, because the Bullock's and the anticipated Short-Eared Owl would've been lifers, and I haven't had a lifer in a while. But the snow was pretty heavy on Saturday, and on Sunday we had downright blizzard-like conditions. It was snow like I'd never seen before, and I basically stood at the kitchen window for about two hours watching it and hoping we didn't lose our electricity.

The other thing I didn't get to do was go to Lowe's during said blizzard to buy some drywall. See, we're re-doing the kitchen, and I had to tear down a section of the drywall after we ripped out a cabinet that was held in place by about three thousand nails:

That's six nails (each two inches long) in a space of about nine inches.

This -er- construction technique is typical of the Marsh House; whoever built this place believed in nails--lots of nails--as the solution to any and all carpentry projects. They also loved staples, those u-shaped brads that hold cords and stuff, and did I mention staples and nails? When we first moved in, we ripped out the carpets only to find that
1. the tacking strip was nailed down not just by the little nails that come already in the tacking strip but by 2-inch nails spaced every three inches as well. Lest that carpet be blown away, I guess.
2. the pad under the carpet was both glued and stapled to the floor; the staples occurred at a rate of about 15 per square foot. Not. Effing. Funny. But I digress.

So we ripped down the cabinet and pretty much put all kinds of holes into the drywall. That's when we discovered this:

While our house was built with plenty of wood and metal fasteners, it was built so long ago that no one thought to put in any sort of insulation. Not hundred-dollar bills, or an original draft of the Constitution. Not old magazines. Not newspapers. Not nuthin! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, our walls consist of barn boards covered by drywall! To be completely honest, there is another layer: ancient asbestos siding on the outside. Nice.

So--here's my hand, poking through a space in between the barn boards:

The kitchen is a pretty cold place right now, what with the wind blowing through the wall and everything.

But that snow was amazing.

Tennessee Tornadoes

If you'd like to help, please follow the links. UPDATE: You can also donate to your local Red Cross and earmark the funds for the tornado-torn areas.

What do birds do during a tornado?

I'm a rentboy!

I’m constantly amazed by the amount of female attention I get. For a man who spends the majority of his day lounging on a chair, wearing grubby blue pyjama bottoms and reading Something Awful, the number of girls wanting to make sweet love to me or go out with me or make me cups of tea or drop in for impromptu visits or give me correct change or tell me to repeat myself because the bar is very loud and they didn’t hear my order or say ‘excuse me’ when they pass me in the street or dance in my general vicinity at nightclubs or give me a half-hearted wave across the JCR… it’s pretty staggering. I mean I’m fairly sure the other day this hobo woman was giving me the eye, and when I went over to check to make sure she asked me for a bit of change in a voice that was frankly dripping with lust. I mean I didn’t give her any money but I think that pretty much proves my point – if it has a labia, it probably wants me*. I don’t know what it is; I guess I must just exude some kind of woman-friendly musk from my hair and groin. Yeah that’s probably it. But the fact of the matter is, I’m beating the women off with a stick (the stick has a nail in it). And do you know what? Frankly I’m getting sick of it. Sometimes a man wants to just go to sleep without horny 19 year olds banging down his door at all times of day and night and climbing through his window. And sometimes a man wants to walk down the street without seeing literally every female he passes going week at the knees. And sometimes a man just wants to have a pint in a pub without the barmaid constantly making eyes at him and asking him for ID or else he’ll have to leave. I tell you, men, the life of a pimp-ass fly ain’t what Snoop Doggy Dog makes it out to be on his documentary show. It’s bloody awful. It got so bad that I had to take emergency measures and so last Tuesday I briefly became a rentboy. And let me tell you, it felt goooooood.

It all began when a large law firm (I don’t want to mention it by name, because I’m sure they have people paid to just Google them 24/7, and I don’t think that they’d be that impressed at finding out that one of their Top Men is a mincing boy-hungry gaybody) held a recruitment drive at a nearby church or something. I don’t think that anybody came, and so a load of the lawyers happened to end up at our college bar (don’t ask me why). Anyway the bar was hustling and bustling like it usually does on a Tuesday, due to the special 75p shots – a promotion that is known as ‘Fuck, me liver’s fallen out’ Tuesday’ to all of Oxford. I was quietly drinking my triple Jack Daniels coke at the bar. I don’t actually like Jack Daniels that much, and I dislike coke, but I’d bought it as an experiment, and it was so cheap that as I forced the disgusting fluid down my throat, I just had to close my eyes and think of the profits (I think that this is what drives Catherine Zita-Jones LOLROTFLLMAO!!1!). Anyway this little bald chap was wanting to reach the bar, and being the gracious little man I am I let him have my space.

“THANK YOU THANK YOU!” he yelled, well and truly ella’d, (fyi, to be “ella’d” is my new word for that state of drunkenness in which everything seems like a good idea, and time and space start to quietly mutate in the corner of your eyes). “YOU ARE A GREAT MAN!”
I looked modest and wiggled my foot in a circle. Aw shucks.
“I KNOW WHAT!” he yelled, “I’LL BUY YOU A DRINK! FINISH THAT, WHAT IS IT? JACK DANIELS? NOT A VOD-QUAD? EVERYBODY SEEMS TO BE DRINKING VOD-QUADS NOWADAYS, I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.”
I was going to understand the principle of calling a quadrule vodka a vod-quad, and also point out that at no point in my life had I ever heard anybody say ‘vod-quad’, when I realised that he was indeed buying me a new drink and I should just shut my pretty little mouth and let myself be plied with it.

The little bald man, who turned out to be named… Paul (ish) then put £100 behind the bar, which started a mass orgy of students throwing themselves, lemminglike, at the taps, trampling each other, throwing punches, bottling their girlfriends, stabbing their friends in the back, etc, etc. I was already forcing down my new pint of Jack Daniels and coke, tears streaming down my eyes at the terrible taste, but the thought of the £2.25 it would have cost me had I not met Paul kept dancing through my mind. Paul, by the way, was talking to me some shit about how he was going to be elected head barman but missed out by one point. Then he surprised me by screaming ‘BY THE WAY I’M A HUGE FUCKING POOF’ at the top of his voice. I was eating an ice-cube at the time, and inhaled it, filled my bronchii with ice, and then started coughing wildly. I was somewhat unsure as to what to say – frankly it was akin to the first time I met a lesbian, and I accidentally said ‘lesbian’ in the first sentence and a half. However Paul did notice, being busy telling me how he used to bum the Organ Scholar, loudly slagging off the darts players, and eyeing up my fellow undergraduates.

“So, which of these is a queer?” he asked, slapping me on the back. I started choking again. Then I saw Max walking past wearing a brown shirt, and I pointed him out. Max isn’t gay but I saw comic potential. Paul’s eyes lit up a bit. “Oh, cool, cool. So, Tom, what say you get a group of friends and we all hit a club?”

Ok so I should have thought a little bit before inviting seven of my close personal associates – none of whom were gay – to go out clubbing with the most predatory gay man ever. I saw that somebody was going to have to take one for the team and probably end up being gayraped. I saw that it could all go tits up. However I also saw that Paul was probably the richest person in the entire college, and we would be set for the rest of the night. So I won’t lie. I rolled my eyes a bit, minced slightly and said “Oh Paul, that’d be wicked!” and batted my eyelids a bit. I then sprinted around the bar screaming A RICH MAN WANTS TO TAKE US ALL OUT AND BUY ALL OF OUR DRINKS FOR THE REST OF THE EVENING, HE’S ON EXPENSES IT’LL BE WICKED.

As it was, everybody was going to The Bridge. I have already expressed my disapproval at The Bridge in a previous blog – lame white people, girls with faces like a ham, the entire place makes me want to commit suicide, etc, etc. However, just as the horrible horrible Jack Daniels was easier to swallow knowing it was free, the ugly dancers, shit music, terrible décor, and fact that Lucia was on the dancefloor all paled into insignificance when it was all bought and paid for by a rich man with a company credit card. After covering the £5 entry fee and buying drinks for all nine of us (as more and more people started to cotton on and join in and slap his back), we all hit the dancefloor, at which point Paul and his gay mate who had also shown up started manically groping and grinding anybody who came near.

I admit it. I felt like a whore. I felt like a dirty dirty rentboy whore. I knew I should have stopped doing what I was doing. I knew it was wrong. But I also knew that girls do this shit all the time. I also knew that drinks at this club cost like £4 for a single, and it was so much easier to kind of rub Paul’s arm and then say “Pauuul, shall we get some shots?” and then he’d wink and kind of rub my back and buy everyone more drinks. SO YEAH I SOLD MYSELF FOR THE CHEAP THRILL OF FREE DRINKS. IS THAT SO HARD. TO TAKE.

As it was I didn’t take full advantage of the situation anyway – I’m pretty sure that we could have all been bought a suite at an expensive hotel had one of us decided to bite the bullet (you’re up, Maxwell). As it was, two things happened that meant that I left the club fairly quickly:

1: Paul like grinded me hardcore on the dancefloor. I realised at this point that I wasn’t cut out to be a fully functioning gay member of society and have an adult relationship with another man, so I kind of leapt sideways with a yelp and ended up:

2: … nearly bumping into Lucia. I tried to hide behind my friend Rich, but she saw me, and I saw her, and she sort of waved. I wish I had responded more gracefully, but as it was, I realised that I wasn’t cut out to be a fully functioning straight member of society and have an adult relationship with another female, so instead I started laughing hysterically, turned around, and sprinted out of the nightclub. According to my friends, Paul stormed angrily out of the club about five minutes later.

Maybe he realised that he’d overcharged the company card roughly 8 times the recommended limit. Maybe he suddenly understood that a load of greasy students had been taking the piss all night. Maybe he became disenchanted with his entire mode of life and went back to his hotel room to blow off his head with a shotgun. Maybe he realised that his favourite episode of Scrubs (seriously, gayest tv show ever) was being repeated on e4, and he simply HAD to rush back home to watch it.

Whatever. We all knew that he went off looking for me. Me and my fine-ass booty. So that’s another heart broken, Thomas. Seriously what is it with me? People just can’t help but fancy the pants off me.

*this is definitely true