¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Foghorn Leghorn

"Good fences make good neighbors." -Robert Frost

Day 54, 2:31 A.M.: I still find the nearly ceaseless cacophony grating.  Let me correct that, it's not nearly ceaseless.  The generous number of silences are smartly timed to put a point on the often-frequent crowing, which leads me to put a question to you: who buys a rooster?

As you enumerate the list of candidates for rooster ownership, let me give you three groups of people who should never own roosters: 1) people who live next door to me, 2) people who live within earshot of another rooster, 3) people who live next door to my housemates (see number one).

Before we go any further, let's dispel some romantic notions of roosters that you may have.  For instance, the idea that roosters only crow at sunrise.  False.  A fact unknown to most people, roosters are ardent perfectionists.  In order to perform exactly as they desire for that key sunrise-crow, they assiduously practice throughout the day.  As a side note, it may be that since we live in a city filled with inhabitants from a great number of the world's countries, this particular rooster is announcing sunrises as they occur in various countries.  So, when the rooster crows at 9:30 in the evening, it's to assist any Fijians who may have recently moved to the neighborhood.  How considerate.

Another misconception is that roosters are useful animals, as they are inexpensive to keep and provide the key material needed for feather dusters.  This is a sophism, surreptitiously propagated by the multi-billion dollar feed industry to boost sales of under performing types of corn.  Two large costs to owning roosters that immediately come to mind are lack of sleep and higher fuel costs, as you are constantly leaving the house to avoid the repercussions of your bad choices.

This brings me to my next question: what have we done to upset our neighbors this much?  The only thing that comes to mind is that once in November it happened to rain for twenty minutes.  In my elation, I may have sat on top of our shared wall to better enjoy the mild downpour.  Our neighbor came home to see me sitting outside, and we had a seemingly pleasant chat.  Little did I know that, offended by my cordiality, he would stew during the whole of December until arriving at this sinister plan for revenge.  Speaking of such, if you have a good recipe for cockscomb soup, send it my way, as I may be in need of it shortly.

Rain

As we've entered the sandy part of the year, I thought I would post a few pictures from December when it rained two or three days in a row.  I should've been out of town with some friends when I took these pictures, but was violently ill after some bad curry.  The day or so before, a number of us went to an Indian restaurant in the neighboring city to have a going-away party.  Little did I know that, even though I wasn't leaving, I was to receive a parting gift.  I still can't quite eat lamb.

Afterward, as I was recovering from a vindaloo-induced delirium, I noticed that the wind was blowing through the window and it smelled like rain.  I went over, and saw that it was starting to rain.  At first it simply trickled, then suddenly all the rain that I had missed over the last four months began to fall.  A boy ran across the dirt lot in front of the apartment laughing and with his arms thrown wide open.  I have to admit that I started to tear up a little, a little because it had been so long since I had seen rain, a little because of the vision-quest level of food poisoning I had just endured, but mostly because he seemed so happy.  I decided to go up on the roof and take a few pictures.

If you'll notice in the first picture, there are no gutters or storm drains.  That's because it rains five times a year.  This may seem like a reasonable response on the part of the city planner, but the problem is that when it rains, a good bit of the city washes away.  By the time this storm was over, the puddle at the edge of the road had encroached within a few yards of the building, and a good deal of the lot was underwater.