Dream of the Dragon

Category: earth

January 3, 2012

Sand tears and cockatrice kisses.

by Justin

MJ #3

Chicago visited the streets today. The wind off the ocean gusted at 40 mph and drove the temperature into the low 20s – enough to bring the first real nips of winter. The 10-foot spray of one inlet’s fountain lost its symmetry, bending hard to the south as if its hose were kinked.

A stone fawn (kissed by a cockatrice) crouched behind the weathered picket fence of a small yard, looking out across the street.

The following small sign marked the entrance to a restaurant, hailed locally as a great seafood dive: “Future National Historic Site.” It’s simple enough to be overlooked, as respectable and unassuming as a monument marker. But it inspires so many questions! Has this site been recognized by some national committee, and now it just awaits some formal opening? Are papers processing? Is someone betting that something of great historic significance will happen there? Did someone from the future plant it as a joke? A fortune-teller’s prediction? A prank? Where can I buy such a sign?

Odds are there was some famous landing of early settlers thereabouts, now celebrated by cheap drinks and seafood. The sign offered no elaboration.

Icarus cries sand tears most days – the product of launching himself wide-eyed at fallen frisbees. If he fails to catch it out of the air, he jumps into the beach itself with equal abandon. After each attack he coughs up a handful of slimy sand and his eyes are ringed by little crystals. The tears show up hours later, most often after a nap. Usually it’s one for each eye, a mixture of sand and salt water that solidifies at the edge of his tear duct like a soft stone.

This evening, for the first time, a sand tear formed and rested below the center of his eye.

Leave a comment
June 19, 2010

Oil and the whales.

by Justin

The situation in the Gulf remains incomprehensible to me – new and constantly rising estimates for the sheer volume of crude, the comparable flow of photographs depicting the assaulted ecosystem, the presidential addresses demanding 20 billion dollars from the villainous multinational corporation responsible . . . none of it contextualizes the travesty in a way that I can grasp. It’s too big. Almost too big to be tragic in a real way. Undeniably tragic, of course, but not in a gut-twisting, immediate way. At least not for a New York resident with no active link to the Gulf.

But this story drove it home. While the death of this sperm whale may not have been a direct consequence of the spill, the possibility that something so majestic and powerful fell to this negligence hurts. Sperm whales aren’t surface skimmers like their baleen-sporting cousins, they dive along the continental shelf hunting for food. Meaning they’re more likely to stumble into the black plumes of toxic crude oil. Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments
May 4, 2010

Watchdog Wonder

by Justin

I love this. In a time when journalism is on its deathbed and simultaneously in its infancy on emerging medias, MoJo’s Twitter alerted me to this little watchdog wonder.

People generally get less analysis, they spend less time consuming information, partisanship and propaganda are rising almost as high as during the days of Yellow Journalism. To combat this decline in depth and understanding jobs are being lost and papers fold under the pressure of the internet. Everybody knows how strange these days are. But what I appreciate most about the evolution of the blogosphere is the heightened degree of accountability. A number of sources, not just ProPublica, drew attention to the questionable allegiance of a source in this NY Times article. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment