Albatross Anecdote from Mexico

I keep remembering stories from Mary and Eddie's wedding in Mexico, stories that I would probably tell old friends and family in face-to-face meetings, if they were around in the moment I remember these specific stories. Bringing them here is pretty much exactly what this site started as: my anecdotes with the ether.

Anyway, one day we were down in the big pool. I was there, so it must have been past the main part of the day, since it would have been shady. I never ventured down to that huge main pool in full sun. Cass did, and spent so much time there he got his first really bad sunburn.

So on this particular day, something caught my eye up in the sky. It was a bird, and it was fairly high up, certainly soaring significantly higher than our five-story resort building. Big deal...so what?

Well, this freaking bird was enormous. This prehistoric beast with the outline of an ocean-going frigatebird looked like its body was a big as my large five-year-old son. Chances are low it was that big in reality, but, holy cripes, it was a giant.

It soared out of sight before I could get anyone else to see it, and I shook my head. No one would either believe me about how big I thought it was, or care that much anyway. 

The next day around the same time, late afternoon, it came around again. I think both Joey and Ron saw it and said, oh, yeah, that's that type of albatross they have around here. They said a worker at the resort or boating captain had mentioned it.

Moments ago I typed "Mexican albatross" into Google just to get an idea of what version of birdie it may have been, and the first picture that showed up was the exact outline I remember seeing:

It looks like this is a "magnificent frigatebird," which, while quite large and sharing with the albatross  the pelagic nature of its food source collection and general soaring technique, this bird is actually unrelated. Thinking that the outline was originally frigatebird-like gives me confidence in my growing sea-bird knowledge.

I also remember thinking that albatrosses don't share this wing silhouette. In any case: what a rad critter to see out its natural environs! 

Cartoon Connections to the Past

This past Sunday when the watching-witching hour descended upon our place, Cass asked to watch a Disney Special Spooktacular, starring Mickey and the gang. This iteration is from the Paul Rudish redesign, a redesign I'm fond of. Cass had already seen it at some point, but was excited to watch it again. When it started, what struck me immediately were the costumes of Huey, Dewey, and Louie:

Also visible in the picture is Horace Horsecollar, another of the Rudish callbacks to the history of Disney animation.

The reason Donald's nephews costumes caught my attention was because of another regular Donald Duck cartoon we have on the rotation, "Trick or Treat" from 1952:

The collection of Rudish shorts are peppered with little tidbits like this, sometimes momentary animated blips that show how much homework the animation team did, and make the shorts both rewarding and rewatchable.

Even in this Spooktacular there's a tiny joke that Mickey makes about captaining a boat (or something), where he glances at a picture on his wall of the steamboat from "Steamboat Willie" and says, "Isn't that right, Willie?" In response, the boat toots its smokestacks just as in the original from 1928.

It's good to see that sometimes people still care about their work, still want to push forward while being able to revere the past.

Sticker Anecdote from Mexico

Where we stayed in between Cancun and Playa del Carmen was billed as a "family friendly" resort, but it was still "Cancun: Party Mecca", and the Generations Maya had plenty of party-people: college-aged co-eds looking to have some fun.

Once upon a time I was definitely a party-person type, and now some folks might say I "drink too much" (even though circumstances have squashed that habit), which is just the remnants of the party-people youth. I get it, and I don't discriminate.

But I have kids, one of which is a daughter under two years old. She is rather sophisticated for being less than two, and she likes stickers. And she likes decorating me with her stickers. Like she did one morning before we left for the breakfast smorgasbord.

As I waited for the waffle lady to get me some waffle pieces for my two kids, a party-person girl, masked up and wearing the requisite bikini-and-shall covering get-up that helps them blend into the masses of similarly aged and dispossessed young ladies, approached me and mentioned how much she loved my stickers.

I had about six Paw Patrol stickers between my wrist and elbow on my left arm. I knew they were there even if I wasn't self-conscious about them. I thanked her and said that my daughter, too, loved them. She responded that, Yes, I'm sure she does.

The entire exchange took only seconds, and was easy to forget. I only really remembered because this past few days Camille found other stickers and got busy with them:

In the moment, in that breakfast space, for about thirty seconds I tried to make sense of the manner of the compliment. 

It reminded me of something else. But time goes on, kids grow, work never really stops, and Halloween approaches.

Wedding on the Yucatan

A Mexican wedding! Another Mexican wedding, I mean!

Corrie's sister, Mary, and her new hubby Eddie, pulled off their Mexican wedding caper. It all occurred at the Generations Maya Resort, outside of Cancun, on the eastern shore of the Yucatan peninsula. And by "all," I mean "we never left the confines of the resort hotel."

It had pools off the rooms, and we have little kids and specific health concerns, so the difficulties in exploring the area weren't as upsetting as they otherwise may have been. 

I mean, check out the place:

And here are the kids in that space between "shock" and "demanding":

The "water water everywhere" was quickly appreciated once the realization of the true weather conditions became apparent.

And that took about a tenth of a second upon walking outside of the airport at the Cancun Airport and feeling the reality of what the steward announced as we landed: "It's currently 93 degrees and has just stopped raining."

Yikes.

The heat and humidity were an oppressive fog, invisible except for the condensation left on every surface, the streaky dampness causing my kids to slip and fall. It never relented.

The transition from room to the out-of-doors was like going from meat locker to sauna. It's been too long since I've been in the chewy air.

Cancun is named for the Mayan phrase "ka'an kun", which is loosely translated as writhing pile of snakes, which is about as bad-ass as anything I've heard in a while. Jules Siegel, the former roommate to our man Pynchon moved his family out to Cancun back in the early '80s, long before it was a popular Spring Break resort mecca.

Of course, we never really saw any of Cancun. The resort was far enough south of the metropolitan area that when we did our COVID testing to be able to return to the States, we had to put "Playa del Carmen" as the location. This is the next town down by Mexican standards. And we never saw any of it, either.

The path in the shade of the resort buildings, on the backside, opposite the pool and beach and Caribbean, had a chain-link fence separating what I imagined was the original habitat and the resort: mangrove swamp. That is standing water, in case you can't tell. As I remember, mosquitoes weren't terrible.

Below is a view from the roof terrace party floor, where the reception for Mary and Eddie's wedding was to take place, a view looking south, with the Caribbean to the left and the OG swamp forest to the right:

I did eventually go swimming in the sea, but when I went down there to take some pictures I made it quick:

The beach was made of fine powdery pulverized coral, and behaved differently enough from sand to be...eh, noticeable...? 

The clouds in this place were always quite dynamic"

The great big pool in the first picture was never deeper than fifty inches, and the majority of it was less than forty inches deep. The most shallow parts, apart from the ten inch spots where the lounge chairs were, had windows that looked down at the passers-by who would have been walking through a passageway. I arranged, with a little effort, to get a picture of Cass---he underwater and me under the glass:

Corrie finally got to be a bridesmaid, and I was able to get a picture before Camille figured she needed to be held, ceremony or no.

A light drizzle had started falling when we absconded to the sand for pictures, and if you look close amidst the poor lighting and non-zoom-in I achieved, you can see Corrie planted in the sand holding Camille in her poofy flower-girls dress:

Cass, as ring-bearer, looked sharp as well, just like his older cousin Colton:

Corrie was able to get a good selfie of us all, along with Eddie's daughter Harper, another cousin that Cass adores:

I'm sporting the turquoise guayabera shirt I wore to our Mexican wedding back in 2008. I thought it made sense and had a nice symmetry.

The wedding ceremony was fast, and the drizzle kept us off of that roof deck party zone, and we had a more intimate time down at one of the sand-adjacent restaurants. The party/celebration of it all was very nice, and our love goes out to the newlyweds.

The last full day for most of us was Monday, as the wedding itself was n Sunday. This was the time we did more swimming, both in the pool and in the Caribbean. My time in the water almost exclusively looked like this:

Or this:

Camille had a great time in the water, even as she got ever more demanding about it. Maybe especially as she got more demanding. "DADDY! WATER!DAAAA-DEEEEEEE!" was how she'd approach the closed sliding glass door to our patio and pool.

Cass figured out the joys of being underwater, and going underwater with goggles on, which are invariably awesome.

As the porter was driving us back towards the main lobby of the main building complex as we prepared to fly home to Southern California, he asked if we wanted to see Maria, the crocodile that appears and begs for food.

Um...hell YES we want to see a croc! Or caiman or whatever. He pulled off at the Spot and his excitement was palpable. She was there just for us, and I got a picture:

Looking at the picture now is funny because it's not exactly obvious what we're trying to see. I didn't zoom in or take thirty pictures. I tapped the little button on my phone just the one time. If I didn't know that just above center nearly framed in the diamond from the fencing is a crocodile, I may never know what the deal with this photo is.

So...Cass's third international trip, Camille's first but third and fourth flights, and our first four-top airplane caper is in the books. Thursday to Tuesday, to the Caribbean and back, already shelved in the dream-like section of the memory banks.

But I will always remember this conversation Cass and I had:

During the reception I asked Cass if he had enjoyed being a ring bearer. "Yeah...I guess," he said with a grumpy edge. I mentioned he looked like he was having a good time. "Yeah, but I wanted to wear a suit, dad."

"A suit? You're looking fly boy; you got a vest, a jacket and even a bowtie! You're rocking that suit."

"No, dad, a bear suit, with the mask and the teeth, " and here he held up his hands, "and claws to carry the rings in with...a bear..." 

He'd wanted to be a ring-BEAR. I grabbed him and hugged him and kissed his mohawked head and told him that may have been the best thing I ever heard, that ideas don't really get better than that, than a ring-BEAR, and that hopefully next time we can make something like that happen.

Searching for the King of the Sea Monsters

Kids are great. Mostly. Well...mine are great.

I've found that since I stopped being a dick, my relationship with my boy has blossomed. He's no longer a dick; he's nicer to his sister; I don't have to yell at him anymore...it's amazing how powerful adjusting my own attitude has been.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.

In any case, the other day we were checking out a cool dinosaur-and-other-prehistoric-beast book (that uses a spindly sans-serif fonts for blocks of text they occasionally print over photos of OCEAN SURFACE) and we came across a picture of dunkleosteus:

Coming into its position as apex predator nearly 350 million years ago during the Devonian Period, this placoderm---er, armored fish and an early jawed critter---swam around taking bites out of whatever it felt like, even fellow dunkleosteus. It didn't have teeth, rather that bony-jaw-armor was actually sharp bitey-bone, and its jaw would snap shut like a paper cutter so fast the biteforce was nearly the same the T-rex. At 30 feet long (!!), this thing only feared other specimens of it's own species, and a proliferation of harmful algal blooms that would eventually choke off its oxygen supply and hasten its extinction.

In an odd twist, as a lobe-finned fish, the descendants of its tetrapod cousins would become us, and not the ray-finned fish that are the vast majority of fish in today's oceans.

My son was immediately obsessed with this sea monster. It had to be the coolest, toughest, and BEST sea monster ever. NOTHING could ever challenge its primacy as far as sea monsters are concerned.

Well, I challenged him, what about the mosasaur we watched the program about a while back? That was a pretty badass sea monster, too, right? A glint in his eye: recognition. The mosasaur...he said, his voice trailing as he tried to imagine the two meeting.

A few pages later in the very same book we found the spread about the mosasaur. It grew to it's status as apex predator and all-around badasss sea monster about 300 million years later, around 50 million years ago, after the non-avian dinosaurs had all vanished. The largest of which ticked the measuring stick around 50 feet (!!), meaning it was even bigger than dunkleosteus.

This bothered my son, as he clung to his feelings that dunkleosteus had to be the best. I mean, he doesn't even have teeth, rather sharp bone-blades that she snaps down as hard as T-rex, man! Also, I think he loved saying dunkleosteus, which is amusing, because he liked saying mosasaur also.

We concluded the mosasaur portion of the search with, "Well, it may have come down to whomever got the first bite it, because ol' dunkster could probably do plenty of damage with that chomper." 

This was satisfying until I reminded him an even older obsession of his in these matters: megalodon:

No glint in his eye this time, rather a full-on sparkle. Megalodon! That would show that mosasaur! A proper fish and all, megalodon roamed the seas around 25 million years ago, after the mosasaurs disappeared, and long after the end of the Devonian.

Clocking in at 65 feet long it was truly enormous. Would dunkleosteus just be a meal for this giant predator?

I tried to explain that this wasn't really a competition, since the disparate eras in which these beasts existed, and that it was okay to revere all of them. And that we should be excited that such cool monsters ever existed at all, and that we know about them.

AND, oddly enough, with dunkleosteus and mosasaur being nearly certain and mostly guessed for megalodon: it looks like all three gave live birth.

After this talk and realization, the day's activities went to his Hot Wheels experiments and which cars went however far through his rubber band-powered loop-de-loop.

I'll save xiphactinus and liopleurodon for next time. Turns out we watch our share (and many others, it sounds like) of ancient oceans and ancient earth science shows on Curiosity Stream.

That I can name five ancient sea monsters off the top of my head, along with basic facts like size and appearance (dunkleosteus, xiphactinus, mosasaur, liopleurodon, and megalodon) but couldn't tell you all of the Kardashian siblings names probably tells you how my screen time is spent...

Kindergarten Comes Once for us All

My son had his first day of kindergarten a few weeks ago, and while I saw many people posting pictures of their kids' first days of school, I refrained. Social media was flooded with those kinds of pics, and I felt like I needed to zig while everyone else zagged. Or some other cliché...

But, here I am, on my own thing, celebrating my awesome little dude, on his first day of kinder:

He had his hair shaved into the Travis Bickle for the mohawk effect, and does well by his masks. He's so big and tall, but you only really notice when he's around his friends, being nearly a head taller than most everyone at school.

His compassion is strong, and the violence against sister is mostly incidental and not by design. He's awesome and I love him more than just about every single thing in this universe. He's my favorite dude, and I hope that he starts to understand that we need him to infiltrate the patriarchy from the inside, as that's the only way we're going to bring it down.

We tell it to him all the time, so time will tell whether he's buying the message.

Keep loving books, Boy!

Random Writing Nonense

I was reading my Sunday paper this past Sunday and when I opened up to the book review section, a face was staring back at me:

The review was for Sally Rooney's newest book, but I am/was mostly unfamiliar with her work. The article writer mentioned that the galleys of Ms. Rooney's breakout work, Conversations with Friends, was well-worn when given to her, and it was suggested that as another young-millennial-lady, she'd likely enjoy it.

She did not at the time do so, and I was reminded of a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" comic strip about modern artistic types, with a category titled "How to Annoy Them" that I loved:

The one I usually think about is the Poet, and how to annoy a poet? Well:

Anyway, while reading this article, the idea of a 24 year old writer shooting to stardom caused mixed feelings in me: part envy, obviously, but then again I'd have to finish something worthy of attention, so...; and excitement, since non-genre writing can be a viable art-form for making a living (and maybe because it means people still read..?).

But I was looking at the picture of Ms. Sally Rooney, and I aid to myself: This girl isn't an American. I had a feeling, based on how she looked in the article's portrait, that I knew from which country she came. I made a guess, and then I looked it up.

And I was correct. She's from Ireland. Once that info hit me, whatever envy I had went away (for some reason) because to me that just made sense. I'm reading a novel right now written by an Irish lady, and Irish writers have figured prominently in English language literature for, eh, ever?

But I started to think back to this meme I sent my dad, in reference to a conversation we had once:

My dad and I talk about many things, but a few themes will usually emerge: the Simpsons; the Yankees; and literature. He had a contention one (and still may hold it) that if you were to rank countries or nationalities by how much they loved---or felt like they defined themselves through---their literature, that Russia would be in first place, while America would be whatever place last was.

The accuracy of that statement isn't the focus here, because, well, my dad is usually right about these kinds of thing and I haven't read enough Russian or French lit to make a sound judgement.

What I want to say is: where's the Irish literature joke in that meme? I mean, those aren't really jokes as much as generalizations, albeit silly ones. But like, it would be hard to discuss the Western canon of literature without the Irish contingent mentioned. (Also, is Russian really "Western canon" and not somehow an amalgam of Western and Eastern? Is that something inherently different about the content?) 

I even started to think about a bracket-type setup, but I didn't want to go into too many details.

But just going off the top of my head:

Irish:

• Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Beckett, Yeats, Flann O'Brian, Anna Burns

English:

• Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Orwell, Woolf, Jane freaking Austen, Shelley

French:

• Voltaire, Baudelaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, Sartre, Camus (he counts, right?)

American:

• Melville, Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pynchon

Russian:

• Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn

One major problem here is that the list above is almost entirely cis-gendered white men. Yikes. Literature must do better. That's another reason I didn't want to dive too deep here: it shows off some flaws in the historical record of an artform I feel I'm umbrellaed under.

Now that I've typed this nonsense up, maybe I can go back to going about my day, able to see different writers names up under national identities, all the while asking myself, where do the Bronte sisters go? They're Irish by birth, but grew up in and wrote mainly about, England...