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2020-11-03. birds outside a stairwell

Every day at work, I take the stairs, first up to the second floor to clock in, then sometimes up to the third if I have lunch to drop off, then all the way back down to the first floor, on every day except Monday, when I work all day on floor two. At lunch, I go back up the three flights of stairs to the third floor to make and eat lunch on the terrace, then I go down to the second floor every day except Friday, when I work all day on floor one; then of course I walk all the way back down. Each time I take the stairs, I take the one stairwell in the middle of the building, next to the main staff elevator. I rarely take the elevator because (1) I'm hale and I want to stay that way, and (2) Covid has made me even more wary of spending time with someone in a small moving metal room.

The stairwell is a fairly standard one, with a tall tower-like construction with a stair winding around the inside. The stairs are gray and covered in a gray non-slip surfacing, and the bannister is a gray-painted metal, I assume steel. There is a landing on every corner of the stair as it winds up the tower, and I try to wait on these to let someone pass going the opposite direction pass me, because, again, Covid has made me weary of passing too closely to anyone. Besides, even if I weren't particularly worried, it seems like common courtesy in these uncertain times to keep my distance.

There is also a window that runs the height of the tower, narrowish in comparison to the tower itself, though probably around four or even six feet wide if measured. I suppose it is actually a couple of windows on top of each other, since there are sills on which plants with long trailing vines, about half of which look dead, sit in their pots. I did see someone watering the plants once, and they look generally healthy, aside from their dead parts; however, I'm not much for plant care so I could be completely wrong. I usually only half-notice them, from the corners of my eyes, anyway: I tend to take the stairs two at a time and watch their surfaces for where I need to step, so I don't take a lot of time to look at the window plants, or out of the window at all.

Today, while walking up the stairs to lunch, I happened to look out of the window, again in passing, or maybe something caught my eye and I glanced. I saw two dead birds on the awning of the staff entrance door, a mockingbird and possibly a sparrow, though I'm not completely sure (I'm about as knowledgable about birds as I am plants). Their bodies were bent in that way that always signals death; I didn't see any grease prints or other indications of where they'd hit the window, though I assume that's what happened: I can't think of another reason two birds would be dead on an awning outside of a window. The scene made me pause for the slightest instant, as though I were a ball hanging at the top of its long lobbed arc by a child throwing it straight up. Then, like the ball, I returned to myself, and began climbing the stairs again.

Something about it seemed important, or somehow a portent of something else happening. Today, as those of us living through it know all too well, is Election Day in the United States, and in a lot of ways it feels as though it may be our last, or our last meaningful one, anyway. I tend to think apocalyptically, and when I do I'm always reminded of some quote, or maybe just an idea, that "every generation thinks it's the last one," so I try not to go too far down that path. But there are a lot of factors that feed into the fact that this election is different than others, and not in the way every election is different: there are a number of debts coming due, and we're running out of time to pay them. At some point, the balls that were upthrown -- when we shipped Africans to the New World to do our jobs for free, when we shifted toward a petroleum-based economy, when we augmented that economy with a military-industrial complex that shares its driver's seat, when we discarded the Fairness Doctrine in favor of a well-oild propoganda machine, when we decided to focus on quarterly earnings instead of long-term dividends, when it became easier to save the rich a few dollars rather than help the poor make needed improvements to their lives -- have to come down. I've been waiting for them to come down for as long as I've been paying attention. It feels as though the time is soon.

But the birds have nothing to do with any of that. They didn't fly into the window to warn me of the impending Doom of Election Night; they flew into it because they didn't know what glass was.

Maybe that's the parallel we can draw here, the reason why, today of all days, I happened to glance and see the birds and they struck something inside me that rang out. I've been feeling anxious these past four years because I feel like we're rudderless, or better, like some of us can see the iceberg as we approach it, but others see nothing at all, or want to see nothing so badly they convince themselves it isn't there, and those are the ones in charge of the rudder. I don't know which it is. But either way, it feels as though we're heading straight for this Doom -- window or iceberg, whichever -- and I'm stuck on the lower decks, wondering what's going on up there and why we're not moving aside. I don't know -- to be honest, I have serious doubts -- if tonight is going to start steering us away from that Doom, but either way, I'm not sure it's not too late. Not enough people see the glass, I think, to dodge it.

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