Reflections and Eulogies: Prince George

The grey clouds to the east, casting the Cariboo Mountains in a relief that you couldn’t quite call sharp, receive the first trace of light. Staring east where the street drops off downhill, I see this night end in a frame of beetle-killed pines and darkened houses. A dusting of frost turns the grass into tiny, sterling silver blades that fail to pierce the soles of my boots. They do a better job on my mind.
Though, after yesterday, my mind seems suddenly vulnerable.
I make a fist with my right hand, then my left. The tendons, still stiff and sleepy, pull taught under my skin. My fingers are icy nubs; useless to handle the newspaper I just pulled out of the mailbox. I pull my shoulders back and attempt to stand up straight, meet the morning head-on with head held high. I’d be lying if I said this was easy so early.
The sulfuric pulp mill smell begins to permeate my senses and I grind my teeth at it. It’s better than the inexplicable rendered-meat smell of beef extract that seemed to fill the air yesterday—but not by much.
Somewhere in the distance a dog barks, a siren sounds, a car engine whines. This is Prince George in the morning.
And what I really want right now is a cigarette.

Back inside, my second cup of coffee warming my fingers, I flip back and forth through the five available cable news networks learning all I can about traders, guns and money. But my stomach tells me it’s far too early for lies and propaganda, so I turn the television off and go about preparing for my day.
I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I run my hand over the stubble on my head and jaw. I look at myself in the mirror. Every day there are surprises here. I am constantly saying to myself, “Is that a wrinkle?” or “Is that a grey patch in my beard?” or “Is that hair? On my back? Jesus!” At some point or another, male pattern baldness stops being a hypothetical to be thrown around when discussing cultural vanity with your friends and starts being a reason to make sure you never run out of fresh razor blades.
Sooner or later, we all fall apart. The centre cannot hold and youth does start to seem wasted on the young.
I throw on the black military style jacket with the too-long-sleeves, drape the green and black knit scarf around my neck, put my keys in my pocket and head out into the pale blue world.

On Central Ave my boots make a dry, crackling sound against the gravel—like hard rubber jaws crunching concrete crackers. And listen, if more than ten minutes go by on Central Ave and you haven’t seen a logging truck laden with evidence of the death of another acre of forest, something has gone horribly wrong. Somewhere there may be a driver standing at the side of a logging road next to an overturned truck praying help comes before a hungry bear who has yet to fatten himself sufficiently for hibernation.
In the southeast, where the sky is pink with the threat of another day, you can see where snow has begun to stick at higher elevations. Whether the sky is overcast or whether the sun has already won its daily victory over the stars for luminous dominance you can’t quite tell. What you can tell is that it’s not yet light enough for people to feel safe driving without their headlights and I squint into every pair of glowing orbs that approach in the vague hope that behind some windscreen or another I’ll see a face awash in something other than Sartre-ian anxiety.
Where the muscles of my back tie into my spine I am tight, bother and thought have conspired against my comfort here and I find myself resenting my own mind. But like I said, it does seem vulnerable lately.

Outside the mall I stop to tighten my laces. Down on one knee I watch an older man; svelte and straight—a Sikh with a turban and an impressive white beard—exit the mall and light a cigarette a few feet away.
I stand up and say, “Excuse me, sir, I hate to be a bother but would you happen to have a spare?” I put two fingers to my lips to indicate that I mean a cigarette.
He reaches into his coat, extracts a pack of cigarettes and holds it open to me. I take one and he offers a lighter.
“I like your haircut,” he says, smiling. “You know Buddhists shave their heads to deny their vanity?”
“Yes, and Mohawk warriors do it because they see their hair as a gift from the creator and they refuse to involve the creator in petty human conflict,” I say.
The old man nods. “That’s a lofty enough reason, we Sikhs keep our hair long to acknowledge the perfection of God’s creation. Are you a Mohawk warrior?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then why do you shave your head, spiritual reasons?”
“I’m an atheist,” I say. “I do it because it feels nice. And because I’m losing my hair anyway.”
The Sikh takes this in and considers it a moment. He plays with his beard and looks away; I take a few drags off the cigarette. Finally he says, “I wish I had your courage.”
“My courage?”
“To live without a god.”
Now it is my turn to look away, to play with my beard, to engage in thought. “It’s not courage,” I say. “Not unless you equate courage with honesty. It’s just an admission that I have serious doubts that can only be explained by denying the existence of a supreme being.”
“And doubt is good, in your mind?”
“Doubt is as close to holy as anything gets in my mind.”
“And you’re not afraid of doubt?”
It’s about this time that the truly bizarre nature of this conversation begins to dawn on me. I don’t know this man. I’ve seen him before, though. Close to my home, even. And were this conversation, under the same circumstances, taking place in Toronto or Montreal it might seem a little too strange for me to be comfortable. Frankly, I’d be alarmed.
But it’s not, it’s happening in Prince George.
I say, “I was outside on my front lawn at six thirty in the morning today, looking at the first little bit of light over the mountains. I walked here from my home near Spruceland. I watched CNN, CBC Newsworld, CNN Headline News, FOX News and CTV Newsnet for an hour this morning. If I were afraid of doubt, man, I’d never feel safe or comfortable or happy. It’s a choice—an active decision to be sure—but it’s the right one for me as far as I can tell.”
The old man drops his cigarette and grinds it out with his foot. “You know what I like best about Prince George?” he asks.
“No, what?”
“The ability after ten years to be surprised by the people and the conversations you can have with strangers. The philosophers of the entire country run away from degrees and come here, I think. The best of them, anyway.”

An hour later when I leave the mall I pass by my Sikh friend who is again outside having a cigarette. He nods at me and smiles and I do the same. Maybe he’s right about Prince George being a refuge for philosophers fleeing degrees and learning—but I doubt it. This is no place for the timid.

Slouching Deathward

This here is probably the final word on the writing of Slouching Deathward and anything I say after this will be about the process of trying to get it published. I am now finished the line edits and waiting for Monika to finish proofreading it to ensure I made no major flubs. Once that is done I will sit down and over the course of a day or two, make the final changes to the manuscript. So now is as good a time as any to make some final statements.

ON THE TEXT
What I’m going to wind up with is a highly polished story. I’ve never spent so much time revising, editing and rewriting. I’ve tortured over every single word choice, I’ve written and rewritten sentences, trying out different word-orders and I’ve spliced paragraphs together in a dozen different configurations to satisfy my desire to make sure everything is right and in the right place. As a result I’ve managed to whittle my prose down to the bare necessities. I’ve killed any superfluous plot points and murdered pointless subplots. What I’m left with is a stark and bare story that, had I wanted to waste my breath, could have easily been a 70,000 word novel.
This is a story full of short, minimalist sentences and unadorned paragraphs that (I hope) will move readers along at a good clip. I figure it’s comparable in length to Camus’s The Outsider or Orwell’s Animal Farm but could probably be read in about half the time because the sentences and paragraphs are so fluid.
Also, this is the first time I’ve paid attention to plot or attempted to use the device of suspense in any way. I dare say, I’ve almost written a page-turner. Lest that should come off as arrogant bragging, I’ll point out that I have, in the past, deliberately avoided writing anything that could be considered a page-turner. I feel that a lot of stories that have strong plot-driven narratives tend to develop plot at the expense of character development. Having always wanted to write character-driven stories I have often forgone plot altogether—particularly in short stories (in fact, I defy anyone to point out a short story by me that has anything resembling a plot). I tell my stories out-of-order and stay away from linear narratives to put the focus on the people.
I have done that here, too; albeit to a lesser extent. I keep the present events moving along in order but occasionally flash back to random points in the past to develop character. I think it worked well, though it’s not as complex as my narratives have been in other attempted novels, it works better.
And while the characters and the plot work together, each assisting the other’s development, I have trimmed back none of the ideas. I don’t beat readers over the head with my “message”; but it does underlie every single word of the story—it’s concentrated. I suppose that’s the advantage of choosing my words so carefully this time around.
Don’t let that scare you off, though. There’s still a very simple tale here about family, love and justice. You don’t need to be able to appreciate the deeper themes to enjoy the story.
Speaking of themes…

ON THE THEMES (WARNING: THEMATIC SPOILERS AHEAD)
If you’d prefer to discover the themes of the story for yourself you’d do well to skip ahead to the next section. However, I have been asked by a couple of people about the themes of the story so I will break my own rules and discuss it a little here.
I will not spoil the plot; I will only point out the hum of the generator.
I have been asked if this is a science fiction piece. I suppose, if you consider books like 1984 and Brave New World science fiction, then yes, it is. It is set at some indeterminate point in the future and there is some extrapolation on current technology. There is some science and it is fiction. Though I have to admit, I am prone to using Atwood’s term, “speculative fiction” as there’s no science in the book that I don’t see being developed today.
The major themes are represented in the title, really. “Slouching Deathward” is a mash up of two apparently separate ideas that seemed to follow the theme of my story. The first is Don DeLillo and his assertion that there is “a tendency of plots to move toward death.” The second is W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming.
As often happens to me as I formulate an idea and attempt to view it through the lens of my own philosophy, I find pieces of an idea strewn here and there in the literature I read and the news I see on television. I happened to be attempting to apply the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, to the economy and political systems when I read The Second Coming.
Forgetting the religious implications of the poem and thinking instead about what “second coming” implies—the end of the world as we know it—I began to get a sense of an understanding of entropy on Yeats’s part.
Entropy is, of course, the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder or a measure of that disorder. Lines in the poem like, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (which, at this point anyhow, serves as the epigraph to my book) and “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity” sort of gave birth to the story in my head.
So the title is made up of both Don DeLillo’s idea that all plots move toward death—an ending, disorder, entropy; DEATHWARD—and the final line of Yeats’s poem, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Hence: Slouching Deathward.
The ideas of chaos and disorder are explored throughout the story, every word weighted to add a sense of either order or chaos; and the feeling that we are moving form one to the other at ever greater speeds. Every system breaks down eventually—good or bad, there’s no escape.
Of course, as with everything I write, existential themes are explored as well; integrated into the examination of chaos. The idea of characters searching for meaning in an absurdly meaningless universe; choosing eventually to create their own meaning—in part by rebelling against the absurd.

All that being said, I am extraordinarily proud of this little book. I think it’s the best thing I’ve written to date and I hope someone out there will take a chance on it. I am eager now to write something a little longer and a little more complex. I am eager to attempt to outdo myself.
Soon the book will be sent off to publishers and I’ll start working seriously on something new. Now is the time to start wishing me luck on both accounts.

EMI/Capitol Records Trading Circle

Okay, what you have here is a list of CDs that either I or Monika own, released by Capitol Records or their parent company EMI (If the release is EMI, not Capitol, that info follows the album title in brackets. If the release is copy controlled that info follows in parentheses. If you can tell me a safe way to burn it, I will.):

THE 101ERS – Elgin Avenue Breakdown [EMI] (Copy Controlled, who would have guessed?)
BEASTIE BOYS – Check Your Head
BEASTIE BOYS – Ill Communication
BEASTIE BOYS – To The Five Burroughs (Copy Controlled)
BEASTIE BOYS – The In Sound from Way Out
COLTRANE, JOHN – Blue Train
DAVIS, MILES – Birth of the Cool
K-OS – Joyful Rebellion [EMI] (Copy Controlled)
MOTORHEAD – No Remorse 2xCD [EMI]
THELONIUS MONK QUARTET with JOHN COLTRANE – At Carnegie Hall (Copy Controlled)
PINK FLOYD – A Collection of Great Dance Songs [EMI]

Well, there you have it. I guess EMI/Capitol generally put out crap music anyway. Either that or this is reflective of my long-standing belief that mainstream, major label acts are crap anyhow.
The EMI catalogue seems especially bad though. Of the eleven EMI/Capitol discs Monika and I own, I can only strongly recommend four of them… and three of those are jazz albums.
Motorhead is, of course, always worth the trouble. The records by Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and Miles Davis are all groundbreaking within that genre and should not be left out of your collection.
Would it help if I remind you that Birth of the Cool is Lisa Simpson’s favourite album?

Here’s how it works: send me a blank CD or enough money to cover the cost of one plus postage and make a selection. I burn it, send it to you and EMI/Capitol doesn’t make a dime. Or, send me your list of EMI/CApitol CDs and we straight up trade burnt CDs. Again, no money for EMI. Fuck ‘em.

One More Time: FUCK THE RIAA

I’m sure when Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables nearly 150 years ago, the idea of Jean Valjean serving nineteen years in prison for stealing bread to feed his starving family seemed like an absurd idea and just the sort of exaggeration required as a jumping-off point to examine the issues he took on in that book. Especially the issue of justice.
But, as I have often remarked, the subtle art of irony appears to be dying a horrible death. I believe it started when the U.S. began building “Peacekeeper” missiles to carry nuclear payloads. It was probably kicked into high gear when it was decided to have an occupation army carry out “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.
How can anyone appreciate irony—let alone write effective satire—when reality is so far fetched? And now, even Hugo’s exaggeration is simply a banal reflection of our modern world.
Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two children, has been ordered to pay damages of almost a quarter of a million dollars for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs with the peer to peer networking program Kazaa.
Does it seem a little harsh? Well, from the language of the trial you’d never know what harsh really was. According to RIAA lawyer and prosecutor of this case, Richard Gabriel; “…the defendant violated the record companies' exclusive rights.”
Naturally, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that corporate entities (your Exxons, your Haliburtons, your Enrons and yeah, Capital Records) have the legal rights of a human being and none of the responsibilities.
Clearly, at least in the eyes of the music industry, their rights have been violated.

Corporations are in control. They make the rules, they buy the laws, they own us and our minds. And we allow it. And if we should step out of line, we will be punished. Corporations with more money than you or I will ever see have rights, and those rights will be observed. And you will pay.
How do you like that?
The following is the email I have just sent to Capitol Records:


From: jd.buston at gmail dot com
To: contactus at capitolrecords dot com
Date: October 5, 2007
Subject: A thank-you note

Hey Guys!
Congratulations on your recent triumph over The Forces of Evil—in this case a single mom in Duluth. I’m ecstatic for you and for the music industry as a whole. This will teach those lowlife music fans that have supported your pampered asses for years that they can’t stop now! Christ, I bet the folks on your board have at least a couple mortgages each to pay, am I right? BMWs don’t pay for themselves, huh?
You show ‘em, man. Let ‘em all know that the decrease in the quality of the music you put out and the exorbitant costs of CDs are no reason to think we should all just take the handful of worthwhile songs without paying. I’m so sick of these liberal-hippie types and their assertions that you guys are greedy-eyed monsters with no humanity at all. At least you have a sense of justice!
Who needs a soul, am I right?

By the by, in case you can’t detect sarcasm, what I really want you to know is that I will never again, as long as I live, buy another album put out by your record label.
Thanks for nothing, assholes.
David James Buston
Prince George, British Columbia

Next I’ll find a contact address for the RIAA. I’ll post up that email when I write it.
Sending that message was therapeutic. Felt nice. Maybe I’ll start sending more angry letters to corporations when I feel tense.
At any rate, if you’re as outraged as I am I would like to suggest you send a similar message. Here’s Capitol’s email address:

contactus@capitolrecords.com

And here’s the mailing address, send it directly to the president of the company:

Capitol Records

1750 North Vine Street

Hollywood, California 90028
Attn: Andy Slater

Also, I’ll be posting up later—maybe this weekend—with a list of all the CDs and Records I own that were put out by Capitol Records. The deal will be: send me a blank CD and I will send you a copy of the Capitol Records release of your choice! Why? Fuck them, that’s why!

Positive and Negative are Relative.

It’s times like this that I wish I could record my entries in audio format—if not video. That way I could begin this entry by heaving a sigh and go through it wearing my heart on my sleeve and remove any doubt as to my sincerity.
Because subtext, it seems, has become a problem.
Say what you will about the Youtube phenomenon of Chris Crocker, but he’s not that good an actor. He really does want you to leave Britney alone. Of that there can be little doubt.
This morning Monika and I were watching the news, as we always do. A press conference had been arranged by a group called—I believe—The Friends of Burma.
Now, you have to have had your head in a hole the last couple of weeks not to know what’s going on in Myanmar (colloquially referred to as “Burma” by those that originate from there) but, for the sake of bringing everyone up to speed, let me engage you with a short explanation:
Recently Burmese monks have been leading regular protests against the military junta that currently controls Myanmar. The most basic demand being made is that the junta give up power and bring in democratic elections.
The military government—as juntas are wont to do—has refused and has silenced the demonstrators. According to the Myanmar government, only a handful of monks were killed. According to journalists, the junta has hands big enough to hold thousands of bodies.
At any rate, these Friends of Burma asked the Canadian government today to divest from Myanmar and to impose economic and trade sanctions. It seems like a reasonable solution—very little to ask for in the grand scheme. Take your money and trade elsewhere. If Stephen Harper is willing to join George Bush on his witch hunt in the Middle East, why not take a few minutes (and a few less lives) to bring democracy to people who are actually asking for it?
Why hasn’t every country in the world already done this simple task?
But I digress…
Now, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I commented on the fact that all the speakers at the press conference were minorities—a French Canadian woman, a Burmese gentleman and so on—and said that Stephen Harper would not listen to them. Whatever I said precisely doesn’t matter. What matters is that Monika heard me opine, essentially, that they ought to give up. She was under the impression that what I meant was that, because they were a group of minorities, they would get nowhere.
This is a negative way of reacting to the situation. What I’d meant was to highlight the deeper problem—the inherent racism in the Harper government—rather than legitimize it by suggesting hopelessness. Because it is true that the Harper government, and all democratically formed governments, answer only to the people who elected them. Harper won’t listen to leftist minorities who won’t vote for him anyway. If you want Harper to divest from Myanmar you have to get the people who elected him (and who may re-elect him) to request it.
Get some Alberta ranchers and oil tycoons to make the request tomorrow morning and Harper will have pulled every Canadian dollar out of Myanmar by lunchtime.
But this is one of the many flaws of democracy.
And what I’ve learned in the last twenty-eight years is that to point out things like this, apparently, is negative.

I have been accused of negativity all my life. Because I am angry and cynical and my irony is often misunderstood, I am left holding the bag for all things cruel and hopeless. I am called a nihilist when I am in fact an existentialist. I am accused of being consumed with rage when I am actually indignant. I am called just plain negative when I believe I am being most positive.
But positive and negative are relative terms.
Some people see anger as a negative emotion. They see cynicism and scepticism as bad things. But where would the world be without cynics and doubters? Cynicism and doubt foster thought, and they cause questions to be asked.
In a world without cynics we would still believe the earth to be flat. In a world without doubt and anger minorities all over would have been eradicated. Without indignation and a willingness to make an obstacle of oneself we would never have had women’s lib, never would have seen the civil rights movement and I’d hate to think of what would have happened in Vietnam.
Without cynics and sceptics, forget science. Forget technology. Forget advancement and ecology and everything good the human race has accomplished.
Some people—people who like to think of themselves as “positive”—prefer to put a happy face on everything. They want to make lemons out of lemonade and put a good spin on a bad situation. And it’s nice that they want to do that. I know I do it from time to time to keep myself working, writing and living. I’m glad those people are out there because they make me smile when I need it most.
But to do it all the time is to delude oneself. And I doubt you could do a greater disservice to yourself or your fellow human beings than to accept that sort of delusion.
The reality is that sometimes when life gives you lemons you don’t want lemonade—so sometimes when life gives you lemons you give life the finger.
But it’s okay. It’s fine. If you’d prefer to make lemonade every time, go ahead. I won’t stop you. Just remember when you put your glass down and you still have your freedoms and your rights and funny, interesting books to read and exciting music to listen to and new gadgets to play with; when you still have breathable air and drinkable water; don’t forget to thank one of those awful cynics. No matter how you define the terms “negative” and “positive”—cynics and doubters are on your side, doing important things.
Please, don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without “positive” people. But it’s important that I make it clear that I believe “negative” people are just as important because someone has to be critical of the things we see and hear. And “positive” people are almost never critical thinkers. “Critical” is just such a negative sounding word, after all.

You know, I’ve heard that an artist has jumped the shark when he or she starts to explain his or her work. I should just put my words in front of you and let you deal with them. Unfortunately I feel the need, just this once, to make certain that I’m being understood.
I don’t think of myself as negative. I don’t feel negative and when I react to things in a negative way I know it and dislike the way it makes me feel. When I don the mantle of bitter irony, when I’m being cynical and catty and mean, I’m trying to challenge you or make you laugh (or both).
But if you don’t like it then stop reading me. If you don’t like to have your perfect little world threatened by the strains of harsh reality; if you don’t like to be challenged then by all means, go pick up a Mitch Albom book, stick your head back in the sand and keep pretending that everything is hunky dory.
But don’t call me negative for acknowledging the imperfections of this world and pointing them out. Because only in pointing them out can we begin to talk about solutions and change things for the better.
Your mother was wrong: bullies won’t just go away if you ignore them. Reality works the same way, reality is a bully.

Even the title of this blog has been called negative. “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide? Couldn’t you have called it something a little more cheerful? It’s just so negative.”
Well, I’m sure it seems that way. But I guess this where subtext becomes a problem. Maybe it’s true that we as a culture don’t understand irony anymore. Maybe we’ve lost the intellectual ability to examine the things we read critically—as a matter of fact, I’d say it’s almost a sure thing.
The irony exists, my friends, in that the rules I lay forth for the Thinking Person in their exploration of suicide are all the things I DON’T WANT ANYONE TO DO. The rules for committing suicide as a Thinking Person are not the sort of thing a Thinking Person should, or would, do!
Get it? It’s funny in a sad, bittersweet sort of way.
So no, of course, I don’t want the Friends of Burma to give up hope. Hope is all we have in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Hope is what keeps us alive.
The eighth rule in the Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
When the sign reads, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” do as it says. You won’t die right away, but you might as well have. You’ve been negated.

Live in a Depression

North, way north, of British Columbia’s hot spots of Vancouver and Victoria and Whistler and so on, is a hole. A depression. Within that depression is a town. That town is called Prince George.
The last days of September huddle for warmth between autumn and winter here. Two years plus one week since I arrived in Prince George I am downtown early on a Saturday morning. The sun rises orange and bright over the Cariboo Mountains, saturating the vibrant yellow and red leaves with light—contrasting painfully with a downtown core built in the seventies, awash with de-saturated, utilitarian colours.
I’m sure shades like apricot and golden-harvest seemed like a good idea at the time. But for millions of Germans, so did eugenics.
A curtain of steam rises from the still-warm Nechako River into the freezing air, hiding the cutbanks from view. A handful of Indians pour into the streets from a nearby shelter. One of them says to me as I pass, “Hey man, wanna buy some hard?”
I thank him and shake my head no, pulling the collar of my jacket tighter around my neck.
As I move down George Street between the courthouse and the city building I listen to the echo of my footfalls on the empty street. I stop a moment to peek into the window of a used book store. There is blood on the concrete here—I try not to think about how it got there.
I move on, quicker now, down Seventh, toward Victoria and the promise of hot coffee.
Every now and then I pass a modern building, something totally out of step with the rest of this town. All glass and steel, these structures serve little purpose but to remind people like me that we are 778 kilometers away from the clean, angular lines and the bright blues and greens of Vancouver. 486 miles from the bright lights and busy nights of Vancouver. An eternity removed from five dollar mochas, edible Chinese food, more book stores than you can shake a stick at.
In a completely different world.
Left on Victoria and into Tim Horton’s. A medium double-double. A quick, liquid dream about those five dollar mochas and then back out into the street.
The temperature before I left the house was four degrees below zero. The forecast promised it would get worse before it got better.
Without thinking I move through the parking lot toward the library. I climb the concrete stairs and go inside, letting the warm air and the smell of old books relax me. On the second floor I sequester myself away from prying eyes at the table furthest from the front desk. There I sip my coffee and stare out the window at Connaught Hill.
A raven, enormous and proud, alights on the balcony railing outside. I remember, briefly, how Raven turned himself into a pine needle so he could steal the moon. My mind wanders, I think about words to feed into the library catalogue computer: corvidae, Poe, Haida, myth…
I have learned recently, and perhaps too late to do me any good here, that the most important thing about being in a place is being there. In twenty minutes or so the Farmer’s Market will open near the courthouse and I will go buy organic grapes. But for now I sit by the window, watching Raven sharpen his beak on the steel railing, wondering what he’ll steal next.