Pigeon English

I am sitting in post office square park, having a cigarette with the unhealthy birds that graze here.
They prowl by my ankles, curiously bobbing their heads as if to ask if what I have, they may have also.
Their feathers are brown, where once they were white.  I know this, because I have seen pigeons in other places, and was shocked to see them so different.
These ones have a dull sheen of disease, and I wonder if they know of their brothers and sisters who are free, who have clean feathers and strong beaks, who ride the wind to foreign places and fight with exotic predators for triumph and pride.
A homeless man approaches.  He throws a bucket of bread on the ground, and they swarm the scraps, pecking and praying at that sacrilegious shrine.
No.  They do not care for their kindred.  'Why should I go?'  They must think.  Better to grow fat and dirty with comfort and ease than to risk life and leg in the mysteries of the unknown.  'I have all I need right here.'
They finish their scraps and a few come back my way.
I try to tell them that cigarettes are not for birds, but I get stuck trying to figure out if they are really meant for humans either.

Overheard Conversations: The Gender Divide

I was sitting on a bench on the rooftop bar of 'The Order', rolling a cigarette and composing a text message when the conversation next to me caught my attention.

I turned slightly, so as to better eavesdrop, and from my peripherals I noted four people sitting around a table - two guys and two girls. They were all rather pleasant looking people, and it seemed to me that it was a double date.  

The two guys were involved in an earnest and impassioned conversation.  One of them, a taller fellow with a straggly beard and long, wavy hair said, "YES! But that's EXACTLY why time is our prisoner!" (This is what initially caught my attention.)

The fellow he was talking to had a more clean-cut and fashionable image - styled hair and clothes that emphasised his physique.  He eagerly nodded along as his friend said this, then twisted away to the girls, a bemused and enthusiastic grin on his face.

Now, to my left, and adjacent to these two chaps this whole time were the girls; perhaps in their early twenties, quite cute and dressed in low-cut yet respectable clothes.  The entire while that their male counterparts had been engaging in their philosophical musings, they had also been chatting, almost convulsively so.  It was a continuous bubbling of giddy and euphoric sounds; the shape of each word indistinct beneath the melody of their combined voices; a conversation of undecipherable syllables all dizzy and cacaphonic.  It was not unpleasant though, and appeared more to me that they were simply very good friends.  They actually were nearly sitting on each other, they were so close, and they laughed and hooted often.

Anyway - the fashionable man turned to them, and reached over to lay a hand upon the closest knee, drawing their attention.  

They shut up instantaneously and looked at him.

Eyes a'glow, he announced, "Ladies!" (And here he paused, revelling in his moment and beaming a wry grin of pride.) "Ladies - WE have been discussing - TIME!"

The girls looked at him, then looked at each other, and then looked back at him.  The closest one to him, the one upon whose knee he'd laid his hand playfully chirruped, "Really?! WE'VE been talking about SEX!!"

Prometheus: Reviewed by my dad and I over text-message.

Just one of many reasons why I love him.
P.S. Toot is my step-mum, i.e. dad's wife.

ME:
Welp - I thought Prometheus was as boring as batshit.  What'd you think?

DAD:
Batshit would've been wonderful! What the fuck was that all about? Toot kept looking at me to see if she was missing something. I said, 'No dear, it is just stupid.' :\

Overhead Conversations: Blinded by the Light

Girl:
(In outraged voice) I watched the transit of Venus today, and I think I fucked my eyes!
(switches to matter-of-fact tone) I was reading a little later that you can seriously damage your corneas from staring at the sun.

Long pause.

Guy:
(bewildered) Dude! You weren't supposed to just stare at the sun! Didn't you use goggles or something??

Excerpt from the Raymond Carver interview with the Paris Review

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver#.T7Za3X8MmaU.twitter

INTERVIEWER

What are your writing habits like? Are you always working on a story?

CARVER

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is. The “paddle-wheel of days,” John Ashbery has called it. When I'm not writing, like now, when I'm tied up with teaching duties as I have been the last while, it's as if I've never written a word or had any desire to write. I fall into bad habits. I stay up too late and sleep in too long. But it's okay. I've learned to be patient and to bide my time. I had to learn that a long time ago. Patience. If I believed in signs, I suppose my sign would be the sign of the turtle. I write in fits and starts. But when I'm writing, I put in a lot of hours at the desk, ten or twelve or fifteen hours at a stretch, day after day. I love that, when that's happening. Much of this work time, understand, is given over to revising and rewriting. There's not much that I like better than to take a story that I've had around the house for a while and work it over again. It's the same with the poems I write. I'm in no hurry to send something off just after I write it, and I sometimes keep it around the house for months doing this or that to it, taking this out and putting that in. It doesn't take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I've done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts. It's instructive, and heartening both, to look at the early drafts of great writers. I'm thinking of the photographs of galleys belonging to Tolstoy, to name one writer who loved to revise. I mean, I don't know if he loved it or not, but he did a great deal of it. He was always revising, right down to the time of page proofs. He went through and rewrote War and Peace eight times and was still making corrections in the galleys. Things like this should hearten every writer whose first drafts are dreadful, like mine are.