Inasmuch as which.

A long story cut short leads me to being at a petting zoo recently, where were kept hostage some goats, alpacas, and silkie bantams. The birds were in enclosed, transparent tents to keep people out--somewhat like those flynets that people enclose themselves in to keep nonpeople out--and this pheasant kept squawking out. An old woman stepped up and asked of it, "Now, what are you talking about? What are you talking about?" She was wearing orthopedics and a cashmere sweater, with dangling earrings and brightly painted fingernails. A few children ran past her, wearing their toddering run which at any moment could become a stumble. They were given ice cream cones filled with pellets to feed the goats and the sheep, and chased them around trying to do so. "C'mere goat! C'mon," a soft, high-pitched coax that was not seen so convincing. I leaned against the fence and said to the donkey next to me, "People sure are funny, aren't they. Talking to animals as if they know and will respond in the same language, while knowing that they won't." He looked at me without saying anything, and rubbed the goop of his nose against my sleeve. "Well, I don't have any treats for you. I just meant that it's strange, is all."

Hares in the open.

From every moment of exchange we leave each other with baskets of impression amidst our empty cases of expression. We have these weights hanging about us as we rub about one another.

After one of those moments, while walking my dog home on a late afternoon is a woman with random, useless objects like signs and old license plates for sale on her front yard. And she beckons and calls me to come over to purchase things, and asks me whereabouts I live. Oh, over on Oliver Street, I say, next to Alice Street, and yes, it is a very storied neighbourhood I have moved to, you're quite right. She asks me what I am studying at school and then returns my answer with that blank face: her features seeming to all gather towards the center, mouth closing and eyes changing to give that usual reaction that makes you realize your tedious description has gone farther than they wanted despite the fact that they asked. Then she asks me, with a bit of a titter, if I am gay--well, no, and what made you think so? What does a gay person look like, anyway? My shirt, with the top button undone. My glasses, which I have still been getting used to myself, and am now standing a few steps back in that process. I ready myself to step away and to bid her a pleasant evening, but she preemptively blurts out how frank she is, how she is just very frank, which had made her lonely in China and lonely here, too, when she moved from there years before now. And how this frankness was also given example by asking a lover if he was going to kill her while he was angrily driving out into the night's countryside long ago, after she learned firsthand that he was involved with another woman. Now she is very afraid and very hurt, for she is forbidden to even knock on his door.

Here I am thinking now of the ways that people attempt to drive straight through moments of discomfort which they have produced by papering over it with their own deep and personal objects for discussion. As if to stamp out that ruddy grey distaste that flickers and is brought out in the other person, to accede and peel themselves in ways explicit and sweet rather than implicitly deleterious. The way people make jokes about themselves after giving insult or tell these secret wrinkles to ones who in any other conversation might have left with only a basket of hi-how-are-you's. What I am thinking now is an unfinished thought, but, as with our Danish prince, there's the rub.