koi crOwl me and the koi and may sun. they underwater. me drinking gallons. they swimming, me wishing i could dive in and join them. be one of them. 050511 ... past years ago, i spent a lot of time in a subterranean research library. access was limited, but i had copier codes. they'd let me wander the sliding stakes, getting lost in each day's new maze. the librarians had an office in a central hub. bright daylight bulbs and fake plants made this sanctus sanctum feel as if it was above ground with windows to the outside, a comforting but demoralizing lie. a local tech company went bankrupt. it was a major employer. lives destroyed. retirements evaporated. decadent campuses were sold off. the agency that owned the library bought one of the auctioned campuses. the new library was ground level, sky lights over the staff station, and just outside, in a stairwell, there was a pond with a waterfall falling two stories down. the pond was populated with contented koi. when we met, my now wife worked in this repurposed campus (but not in the library). the days i was researching in the library, we'd meet on break at the tim hortons in the underground cafeteria in her tower. to get there, i'd have to take the staircase past the koi, past a full gym, and down underground again. the cafeteria did not even try to replicate the daylight of the old library. it's staff left to make that shitty nationalistic (nostalgic) weak brew in dim concrete ambience. but love grows in unexpected places. years later, the building the library was originally located in was finally empty. as much as possible was recycled (wires, tiles, doors, etc, removed for reuse, asbestos removed to save hundreds of thousands of lungs). i staked out a spot to be watch the demolition of the tower. three pops and twenty stories and fifty years of life of thousands of people imploded in itself, crushing the fake outside of the old library. a labyrinth of knowledge gone. then again, the old librarians and their treasures were long gone, basking safely in sunlight with the koi. 220408 what's it to you? who go blather from