A Vanity Project

She won’t cuddle me

Time check - 3:30 am. Whole thing should be done by 4:10, comfortably before the early commuters. Drunk drivers or cops are always a possibility but you have to put it out of your mind, you can’t afford the mental space to be concerned. Everyone else on the road will keep their distance.

All windows down, sound is everything for following the early lines up onto 280. On the bridge sprint I’d roll them up to keep the wind from drowning out my click.

An hour ago, I timed a couple 45 mph brake cycles. I check before every run. If the brake pads have worn down it’ll throw off your whole timing, and then you’re left deciding whether to give up or try to account for the error in your head. Timing loss was the leading cause of runner deaths.

cats_the_movie set a 35:32 a week ago and now I’m #2. I haven’t been #2 since the run gained popularity a couple years back. I’m not gonna be the old defeated master in a fucking summoning salt video.

this is how they actually look

So I started listing all the birds I’ve tried and didn’t like going, “Chicken, turkey, duck, squab, pheasant, Cornish game hen, I didn’t like any of them.”

“What about ptarmigan?” the guy asked.

I kinda thought he was joking since that’s such a random bird but I shook my head no.

The woman though went, “What the hell is that?”

“Oh,” I said, “They’re a little ground bird, kinda bigger than a pigeon? They make a really cute call, you should look it up.” I refrained from saying that their tracks confuse people in the snow because they look like massacred rabbits.

I realized the man was staring at me and the woman was fully just lost.

“You didn’t expect me to know what a ptarmigan is, did you?” I laughed.

“I really didn’t,” he admitted. “I’m from up in Alaska so I’ve had them in stew, but no one knows what the hell they are.”

“I really like birds.”

“Oh. Sorry for eating them.”

I’ll be real I don’t know much about Phoenix Wright. But! I do know a lot about birds.

The mighty ptarmagin! Practically a feathered rabbit, these magnificent creatures are built for the snow.

Look at those boots! Wonderfully feathered. They spend most of their time as little snow lumps.

In fact, they’re very well known for the above phenomenon.

But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.

We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.”