Bird Dancer

Video Find of the Day

The title of this entry was the title of a painting I did, which I posted last September on Somewhat Art. The painting was inspired by a film I saw of a Marquesan dance in imitation of terns mating in air. I haven't yet found that film in a form I can embed, but here is a woman doing the Marquesan Bird Dance. Tilt your head left for maximum viewing enjoyment.

Marquesian Bird Dance

Reminders of Zino

Video Find of the Day

In 1990 I started receiving Social Security Disability Benefits for the first time. As usually happens, I was found to have been retroactively eligible dating to the time of application, so I was sent an 8 month back-check. It came to about $4,000. So I was flush for a few days. I bought caviar on food stamps. My love of habañeros dates to that time, as I experimented with gourmet jars of the pickled variety. And I spent an afternoon at the U-District's Fin & Feather Store shopping for a canary.

I was remembering the I'iwi that I had seen and heard when I was 6 months old. I couldn't get an I'iwi as a pet, but a red canary was an option.

As a matter of fact, Fin & Feather had a brilliant red canary. I listened to his song for two hours as I loitered in the store. The price was $100. I had it, but I wasn't in love. Everything was right. Red is my color. The song was gorgeous. But I just didn't feel it.

Around the corner there was one large cage with ten green singing finches in it, each for $20. All but one of them looked sleepy and bored. But there was one son-of-a-bitchin' crazy ass bird in their midst who wouldn't stop with the acrobatics and the smart-ass bird calls. I kept coming back to him. That was where the love was.

Part of my thinking was, I would only be getting one bird. I should look for a loner. This guy was interacting with none of the other birds in the group. All he cared about was his flips and somersaults and the sound of his own voice. Perfect.

That was February 2, 1990, which became Zino's A-Day (for adoption). I named him after violinist Zino Francescatti, whose music set Zino off big time.

Eventually I came to understand that when Zino sang his heart out it was his birdish way of saying to the world, "I am royally pissed. I just heard some noise. Was that the sound of a rival for bird babes? Because if there's a rival for bird babes out there, hear me roar. I will sing your face off asshole."

I've been looking for videos of green singing finches that would remind me of what prompted our director Tim Harris to say, after regretting letting me keep Zino in the office during a bout of homelessness, "Tweet, tweet, fucking tweet." I have found two.

The song on this one is almost identical to Zino's. Most of it must be genetic. But this one warbles more.

Finch Green Singer Song (Serinus mozambicus )



The next one is the only one I could find that shows the flipping behavior that Zino engaged in. You have to look closely or you'll miss it. The very first time I saw Zino leap to the roof of the cage and hang there for a split second before dropping backward to the perch, I shouted, "WOW!" He almost fell off the perch, and then did it again immediately. So I said "wow" again. So he did it again. So I said "wow" again. And I learned that day that you can NOT out-last birds at repetitive behavior. They are the Gods of OCD.

Note the title. It's the macho canario de mozambique who does this sort of stuff, i.e. the males. Also the term canario is more appropriate than finch, they are not true finches, but Green Singing Finches are generally believed to have been ancestors of the canary.

macho canario de mozambique cebando pollos



Oops! I lied! That wasn't the one with the flip in it! It's this one! Are you sick of Green Singing Finches yet? Feel Tim Harris' many YEARS of pain!

canario de mozambique de charla

The Freak

I don't know cars. Here's a picture of the car my parents used to run me over, taken when my Father first bought it. I wish someone could tell me the make and model.

It's also visible in two of these next snapshots. All these pictures were taken in a downtown Honolulu park the day I was released from Tripler Medical Center. It's amazing what a difference a haircut and a change of clothes can make. That's me, the same kid on the same day as in the shaggy hair and hospital gown from two posts ago. My Father was NOT going to have HIS SON looking like a GIRL anymore. The haircut was the first item on the agenda.

While we were getting my haircut, my Mother pitched a fit because the shoes that I had been allowed to wear on the hospital grounds were taken back by the nurse who loaned them.

When she got tired of complaining about that, she returned to the more important subject of telling my Father what a fool he had been in not killing me when he had the chance. Now, she said, they were stuck with "the freak" forever. She started calling me the freak when she found out I couldn't speak but could whistle exactly like a bird (complete with warbling.) She also called me the basket-case a lot. My Father would occasionally try to correct her but mostly gave up. Neither of them realized that I was understanding a lot of what they were saying. I got about every other word, and I was learning more fast. Just because I couldn't speak didn't keep me from learning the meanings of words, and I was obsessed with that.

When we left the hospital I was crying. I was terrified. I thought they'd finish killing me right away. By the time we got to the park for the photos I was calmed down and I could laugh at my Father's attempts to amuse me. That's what's going on here. You can see the process in the circular-cut pictures going from top to bottom. Top: uncertainty. Next down: warming. Lower: almost comfortable. Bottom: scared again. Whenever I looked at my Mother the fear returned. You can see why in this enhanced closeup. Her eyes and that grimace show exactly what she wants. She wants me dead. She's tolerating the little freak because she expects to get her way.

She didn't know yet how much of a freak I actually was. Because my parents were told that I wouldn't suffer any speech loss, when I did they decided together that the psychologists knew nothing. So they didn't bring me back for the tests and therapy they were asked to. As a result they were never in a position to be told that I had two major symptoms of brain trauma besides the obvious ones.

One, they wouldn't ever guess on their own. I came out of the coma with an eidetic memory. Not only could I phonetically remember a great deal of my first year the coma, but now I could remember every conversation and sound I heard during every day and play it back in my head at the end of the day or weeks later. My phonographic memory was near perfect. I also had a good photographic memory. But without being able to speak, and without trained psychologists observing me, my parents wouldn't know about it. By the time I learned to speak English, I was advised not to let them find out about it. Later my Mother suspected it and she would test me to try to confirm her guess, but by that time it was mostly gone.

The other symptom was found out right away by my Mother when she changed my diapers, but I don't believe she knew it was a symptom of brain damage. I had the condition made famous by John Waters' A Dirty Shame. At 16 months of age I was over-sexed. She discovered I would get erections from the smallest of stimulations. It was enough to just unpin my diapers.

The increased sex drive condition is quite common in cases of severe head injury. The eidetic memory condition is relatively rare but happens and if it lasts it can be identified as a form of Savant Syndrome. It's sometimes associated with left brain damage (my injury was to the right, but my development was reversed also) or limbic damage or both. Limbic damage is apt to occur whenever there is any severe head trauma because the limbic system lies at a focal point of the skull. It would have been easy to miss in a case like mine. The eidetic memory is believed to result when more normal "higher" mechanisms of memory are inhibited forcing the brain to fall back on more primitive mechanisms.

The fact is that having an eidetic memory is not an efficient way to take in information of a large range. In the long run it's narrowing. I'm glad I lost it eventually, or rather, that normal memory function returned and took over. That happened after my 4th birthday. So until I was 4 I reviewed every day's experiences in detail at least once before sleeping every night. As a result I have a very detailed memory from ages most people barely remember at all.

If I don't remember anything from a day or a week back then, I can be pretty sure nothing interesting happened, from my perspective at the time.

Believe It

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

There’s some pictures on floor L I think about a lot. Paul Dorpat, who does the “Then and Now” feature at the end of Pacific Northwest Magazine, gave us the photographs on the walls down there, including the shots of the women at the Union Hotel Laundry posing for pictures around the time of the Spanish Flu of 1918. You’ve probably seen them hundreds of times. They’re posing with happy smiling faces in this one; they’ve all got their masks on in that one, so we can’t tell if they’re still smiling, but I like to think they are.

One of the things I think about is that the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain. They called it that because Spain was one of the few countries of the Western World that wasn’t involved in WWI at the time, and they didn’t have wartime censorship. So it was reported heavily in the Spanish press and hardly at all in other places, because the governments at war didn’t want each other to know how sick their people were. Actually it probably started in the United States.

The masks the people in the pictures were wearing were made of gauze and meant to keep infectious microbes from passing through the air from person to person or from a person’s face to their hands. I don’t know if the masks were required in Seattle but I’ve read that some California cities required people to wear them in public. Stanford University has a website that reports this pathetic jingle was posted as a reminder: Obey the laws /And wear the gauze / Protect your jaws / From Septic Paws.

At the time scientists thought the Spanish Flu was a swine flu. Most scientists now think that the Spanish Flu was a bird flu that became a human flu, just like what everyone is worried about now. Many scientists now also think the gauze masks our ancestors wore during the Spanish Flu didn’t do a bit of good, in fact may have made matters worse.

So to put all of this together, the Spanish Swine Flu was really the Kansas bird flu, the laws requiring gauze masks for everyone’s safety were actually for everyone’s harm and inconvenience, and while I’m looking at these pictures and thinking this, every five minutes I’m blasted by sirens that are supposed to be saving lives.

Sure they are.

Caligula Was Exceptional, Too

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

[This was the first one.]

Hello. My name is Wes, I live on the third floor and sometimes I get ticked off.

For nine years, from 1990 to 1999, I had a Green Singing Finch named Zino keep me company in the various places I lived. I was even able to keep him when I was homeless because Tim Harris, the founder of Real Change, let me keep him at the Real Change office. Green Singing Finches, in case you don't know, are 3 and 1/2 inches long from beak to tail, originate from Africa, around Mozambique, sing, and belong to one of the subspecies of faux-finches that were used to breed canaries.

So did anyone ever complain about Zino in all that time? Of course someone did. Tim Harris complained. His desk was ten feet from Zino's perch and from time to time he was heard mumbling something like, "Chirp, chirp, @#$%-ing chirp."

But Tim Harris is the exception, and, let's face it, so are or were Charles Manson, Fabio, Pee Wee Herman, Howard Hunt, and Caligula. Are we going to live our lives according to the views of exceptions like these? Of course not.

I want a bird and the Union and DESC won't let me have one unless I get a psychiatrist to say I need a 3 and 1/2 inch companion animal.

Because I am honest, and because I won't say that I need a companion animal when I have an Anitra Freeman, who also lives here, to keep me company, weird exceptions like Tim Harris, Pee Wee Herman, and DESC's [Director] Bill Hobson get their way, and normal honest people like me and like you, the reader, never get what we want.

That's the way things are, and that's why sometimes I have to let
things out.