Black Swan II

It was happy hour at the Black Swan and the masks had come off. Mark pressed Flora against the wall, crushing her overheated body. He mumbled in her ear — no doubt vaingloriously extolling his attributes, but she was too busy avoiding his foul breath to listen. She was parched and was reaching for her glass on the ledge, when someone knocked it over, flooding them both with beer and making a sticky situation even stickier. She was wriggling out of his grasp, when the fire alarm went off. Smoke was coming from the kitchen. And in the corner, someone coughed.

Inspired by Black Swans. Photo by Primal Frog.

Black Swans

    “May you live in interesting times.”
     This is a curse, purported to be of Chinese origin, although that, like everything on the internet, is debatable. Let’s at least agree that these are interesting times. Within the last two years we have experienced, in biblical proportions, droughts, floods, fires and pestilence. Now there is a bloody war, started by a man intent on reconstituting a fallen, unlamented empire and threatening nuclear war to get his way.

An unexpected event with massive, catastrophic consequences is called a “black swan.” They used to be rare as hen’s teeth. Now they come in flocks.

This post hearkens back to the days of Close Encounters of the Bird Kind, when avian conflict (and avian flu) were all we had to worry about. The photo is by Dorothe Wouters.

My Mixed Metafort

Furnishing my first apartment was a bit like assembling a puzzle with no box, a bunch of missing pieces, and the vaguest idea of how it should look. Particularly hard was the living room with its three doors leading in and two windows looking out; but in the end it all came together, a perfect picture I can still conjure up when I need it. Hey, I still have most of the pieces, and every few years, when the family’s out of town, I’ll pull them together like a pillow fort and spend the week living my best bachelor life.

Inspired by Inca Hoots and This Bit of Innocent Play. Image by Orbon Alija on iStock.