The same Pink Lady Slipper that I photograph every year at this time
This week I went to a smoothie place in a gym that I always end up going to when I’m hungry and want to keep meandering around town. When I looked at the menu something felt off. That’s when I realized that my familiar smoothie place had been replaced by a new one. This one was exactly the same, just had a different name, logo and offered very slightly different smoothies. It was as if someone updated the OS of reality: I could navigate the establishment with microscopically less friction, but it gave me the unsettling feeling of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity. Any rough edges had been smoothed over; a smoother smoothie. I ordered the thing that closest approximated what I used to order and it tasted more or less the same.
Once I start noticing doubles, twins and dupes they seem to proliferate everywhere and at any scale.
For at least a week a confused bird – it’s black, but not a crow, I don’t really know that many bird types, maybe a catbird? – has been flying into different windows of our house over and over. It will pick one window and bonk into it, seemingly all day and all night, then move on to another window. Last week it chose the window in my son’s room and now that window has hundreds of beak marks on it. Maybe it gave itself brain damage. Maybe it’s an Echo and Narcissus situation. Maybe it is in love with windows. Love makes one look crazy and so does extreme narcissism. So does flying into a window over and over.
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