I was still stationed in front of the computer at noon, dressed in the same t-shirt and underwear that I'd worn to bed the night before. My tongue kept running absentmindedly over the clothy covering of bacteria on my teeth. I hadn't made it to the bathroom yet. When you're self employed and mobile, it's easy for your day to sort of collapse in on itself in stages. For me, a good day is waking up early, not touching the computer until I'm clean and somewhere public that serves caffeine, and then switching places after lunch. The next step down might be just making it to one of those places. Down one further would be getting to one of those places without the shower. Then never leaving the apartment. My room. My bed. Clearly, today wasn't going to rate very well unless immediate action was taken. So with the sort of quick, jerky movements you'd use to pull off a band-aid, I slammed my laptop shut and stuffed it in my backpack. A few seconds later, the bolt inside the lock of our front door slid in to its little female counterpart (do lock pieces get the same overtly sexual nomenclature that electrical sockets do?) and I was practically skipping my way down the stairs. It must have been eighty degrees outside. I figured I would head towards a subway stop and let my iPhone figure out how to get to where I wasn't sure I wanted to go just yet. What about the zoo? All cities have zoos, don't they? Surely New York has a zoo. iPhone, find a zoo. iPhone wasted no time in finding me no less than 3 zoos, two of which appeared to be figments of the internet's imagination. A zoo in central park? Prospect park? No, I don't think so. A petting zoo perhaps, but I was quite sure I would have spotted a full sized zoo in the middle of New York by now. I mean jesus, they're supposed to feature elephants. How do you hide an elephant? You cannot. Unless of course this zoo was underground. I pondered this for a moment, and decided that if the powers that be in Central Park were keeping elephants underground, I wanted nothing to do with it. I headed to number 3: the Bronx Zoo. It looked as though I was going to be on the 5 train for a very, very long time. I had come prepared. I wiggled my way in between a woman with astonishingly large thighs who was sweating and wincing (literally wincing) along to the beat of whatever was pumping through her headphones and a skinny dude grasping (but not reading) a very worn copy of Paradise Lost. Backpack on lap, I pulled out the magazine section of McSweeny's Quarterly, number thirty three.

A BRIEF DIGRESSION REGARDING THE GOODNESS OF TRAVEL

Jonah Lehrer is a science writer whose articles I have seen with increasing regularity over the past few months. He's young, has already collected a trophy case of impressive academic credentials, and likes to write about the brain. Apparently, he was going to be a doctor, but was too good at writing. Or something like that. The article that he had written for McSweeny's (hence the digression) was about how travel can be good for your brain's creative flexibility. He cited several scientific studies involving thumbtacks and candles (I won't got in to it here) which had practically proven that a person who has traveled a bit thinks 'outside of the box' more often than someone who has travelled less than a bit. I was thrilled, and planned to cite this to myself when the usual schizophrenic/bipolar arguments started to crop up before my next trip. (To be honest, one of the studies seemed to prove that the simple act of thinking about a foreign place was enough, which, though I would tend to agree, did nothing for the travel argument, so I'll leave it out for the time being.) We arrived.

THE BRONX ZOO

At this point, I think you should know that during every one of the fifty-four minutes it took to get from the Atlantic Avenue Station to the Bronx Zoo Station I was trying very pointedly to not stare at the human sitting across from me who was wearing an enormous parka, fur hat, equally enormous sunglasses, mittens, boots and snow pants. There was almost no skin was showing, and though I sensed that the body underneath all of those layers was female, it was impossible to be sure. She was staring straight at me the whole time. When we got off the train, she walked to the zoo as well. Except that while I was on the sidewalk, she was walking down the middle of the street. People pointed, cars swerved, horns honked. We were going to the ZOO. And after an hour of shrieking children, crying children, shrieking parents and sleeping animals, I left. The bronx zoo has very little to recommend it. I bonded with a baby turtle (I think) but so far as interesting animal viewing was concerned, that was about it. On the fifty-four minute train ride back, I read the next article in McSweeny's, which was all about a woman from Georgia who went to work on the South Pole for a while. She was a much better writer than Jonah, and - impressively - made the south pole sound like a pretty steamy place to be. My two favorite lines are as follows: "Nearly 17 000 condoms will be ordered for the season. That works out to about fifteen condoms per person. That will not be enough" "If I was twenty years younger, I'd bang him like a screen door." A young woman sitting to the right of me saw that I was reading an article about the south pole and took the opportunity to tell me that a) her friend was working in the south pole right now, b) he had just been attacked by a polar bear, and c) when attacked, he had been in the process of saving a little girl. Before I could reply, the guy sitting on her right said "That's absurd, there are no polar bears in Antarctica." I kept reading. When I got home, I played guitar until little bits began falling off the ends of my fingers (22 minutes) and then went downstairs to get a felafel sandwich and a beer. The whole process took about eight minutes. Armed with dinner and my laptop, I headed for the roof, which after the hot day was pleasantly warm against the cool night. With my feet dangling over the edge I ate my felafel and drank my beer, and then flipped over on to my back to do some thinking about airplanes. After ten minutes of heavy thinking, I still have no idea why airplanes keep their headlights on when flying. Will there be time to stop? Swerve? I doubt it. Then I pulled up a chair, switched on my laptop, and began typing. It was a good day.

Comments

Nate
Why thank you Ol Eagle Eyes, it's good know these things. I tend to think of airplanes as being so enormous and dangerous that airlines would want robots to do all of that, but now I know...

Jillian
The headlights on airplanes issue: Actually they have to have the lights on because contrary to popular belief, those control towers only guide the planes for a short time. Once you take off and are on your course you have to fly at a certain altitude, depending upon your direction. However, without the lights you'd be completely invisible. Other planes need to be able to spot you. Pilots spend a lot of time scanning the sky for other planes. Avoidance of mid-air crashes, you see. On an ego boosting note, they used to call me "Ol Eagle Eyes" when I was regularly flying planes. Ol Eagle Eyes...