July 2, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 9:00 am

Bird Species: house sparrow, northern mockingbird, American crow, northern cardinal, gray catbird, song sparrow, European starling, brown-headed cowbird

Things I Thought About:

• Oh, holy shit, it's hot already.

• Mogwai are covered almost entirely in fur, but you can't get them wet. Gizmo must smell like a dead butt now. He must be filthy. You'd spend all day cutting turds out his fur. No thanks.
• No thank you to the gremlins, and also no thank you to an E.T., or a Cat in the Hat, or a water horse in the bathtub. I might take a Pete's Dragon.
• Absolutely NO Drop Dead Freds.
• I have done my ankle PT two mornings in row. It took me second to remember how to situate the stretchy bands, it's been so long.
• Also, it hurts. There's a lesson here, but I don’t learn those.
• Brown-headed cowbirds are such interesting birds, but they take a pretty bad photo. They're around these days, but not especially cooperative.

• When I was little, I had an imaginary friend who was a ghost. Her name was Holly, and we were extremely tight when I was seven, the year I started third grade after skipping second and had zero real-life friends, only people who copied off of me. Probably no connection. I don't remember if I ever knew how she became a ghost; I did not get the impression she had terrible unfinished business. She was just a blond girl who was my age and who was a ghost.
• The summer after third grade we were driving as a family to camp somewhere in south Georgia, Holly with us, and, like every year, we drove through a town called Eatonton that was full of the most beautiful old antebellum homes, deeply problematic and gorgeous Greek revival mansions. My mother, in a stroke of genius, asked if I didn't think Holly would rather be a ghost in one of these houses, where she could really haunt them, and not just watch TV. On the way back from camp, I left her there.
• This broad is cracking me up. She should be holding a rolling pin.

• I have discovered a flaw in the "this morning walk isn't the real bird walk" plan, and that is that it is 87 fucking degrees at 9:15 am. No way am I going for a walk later.
• I bet this camera strap smells like a boys' locker room as much as I've been sweating into it this week.
• It would be wild, and I do sometimes consider this, if it turned out Holly was an actual ghost, and my mom did the work of a team of Catholic priests just by pointing out a nice colonnaded porch. I guess if I go to Eatonton and she's still there, I'll know.

BOTD: Northern mockingbird. I know he's been bird of the day kind of recently, but a couple of young ones were fighting with crows this morning, and it is always fun and crazy to watch that. It was two on two, and the difference is size is a lot. The crows were retreating to their own corner when I moved on, very slowly, in the heat.