monkeys raze there were two brothers. they owned an antique store on pelissier street. my dad said it was like stepping into another world. they had furniture and glassware and jewelry. they had beautiful paintings. they had a grandfather clock with a staircase carved into it. he didn't spend a lot of money there, but he bought a few things. the brothers would always give him something for christmas. one year they gave him a little white ceramic hippopotamus with a green ribbon tied around its tail. one of the brothers died. the store closed. the brother who was still alive told my dad it was prostate cancer. he grabbed my dad's hand and said, "you have to get a prostate exam. promise me you will. promise." his eyes filled with tears. he wouldn't let go until he promised. he didn't keep his promise. we see the surviving brother in the park sometimes. he has a wispy grey moustache and kind eyes. he always sounds like he's asking soft questions about hard things. everything about him is gentle except for his walk. the way he walks makes me think of something peter told me about sailing. his eyes went somewhere else when he talked about what it was like to feel the wind move his body and the larger body that held him, a body made of wood and carbon fibers. he said there was nothing like it. feeling the earth guide him where it wanted him to go and hearing the sound it made. rising up out of nothing. he called it quiet power. one day the man who used to own the antique store with his brother was wearing a green t-shirt. there was a screen-printed monkey on the front wearing headphones. we told him how much we liked monkeys. about a week ago he walked past us on the path and put something down on a bench. he smiled a funny little smile and started walking away as fast as he could. it was a little monkey figurine. it was eating a banana. it was carved in 1985. "is this for us?" i asked him. "three days!" he said. "three days i've been looking for you!" he walked away. i named the monkey mordecai. today we saw him again. he was twenty feet away. as soon as we made eye contact, he set something down in the middle of the path and started walking away again. he came to the park just to do this. i jogged over to where he was, but by the time i got there he was already in the parking lot. i crouched down and picked up another monkey. this one was six times the size of mordecai. it was made of metal. it looked old and wise. there were two holes in the bottom of its body. when i tapped a fingernail against its side, i could hear the sound resonate. like a soft question being asked. "we'll get you back!" i shouted after the man who gave us these two new friends. he threw his head back and laughed. 210930 ... tender square checked in “book of symbols” for this because i was curious! here's some choice passages: “it is easy to see why, throughout our history, monkeys and apes have been the objects of our projections and thus our worship, admiration and sometimes our derision. their social habits, physical appearance, brain development, behaviors and talents have made the comparison to ourselves tempting and apt. almost every major pattern of social organization exists in the world of old and new world monkeys and the lesser and great apes. “swinging from the shadows of humanity’s ancestral tree, ‘monkey’ speaks to the ambivalent fantasies and images of our animal origins—to both their romanticized pristine perfection, and to the ridiculous untutored hilarity of their instincts and antics of our ‘monkey mind.’ mischief-makers who nevertheless ‘seek’ a code of conduct—like the three legendary mystic monkeys who ‘hear no evil, speak no evil and see no evil”—monkey embodies humanity’s plight, caught between the amorality and literality of instinctual expression and the drive toward social and emotional evolution… “the sixteenth-century buddhist story ‘journey to the west’ or ‘monkey’ tells the adventurous tale of a monkey who finally became a god. always a nuisance to man and the gods, hampered by drunkenness, foolishness and pretensions—but nevertheless in search of wisdom—monkey uses his powers of trickery, perseverance and his lust for life to attain both immortality and an everlasting place in the chinese pantheon, as the ‘god of victorious strife.’ as with his cousin—the trickster hermes, god of magicians and the transformations of alchemy—monkey both shows us up as fools, but as a personification of instinctual activity also offers tremendous blessings.” (262) 211002 ... raze this is fascinating to read. and honest to god, we've got a sculpture of the three "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" monkeys sitting on the spice rack in the kitchen. i don't even know where it came from. seems like it's always just been there. 211002 ... unhinged hanuman (the monkey god; may be misspelled) bibi monkey on youtube 211003 ... tender square is the text messed up for everyone else? for some reason the quotation marks are all appearing as strange symbols. 211003 ... unhinged no messed up text here 211003 ... raze once in a blue moon i've seen an em dash or a quotation mark turn into what looks like a japanese character when it's copied and pasted from somewhere else instead of typed directly in the "says" box, but everything is looking normal over here today. could it be a browser issue? blather can be funny like that sometimes. i still don't understand why my em dashes on "punk" went all goofy on me, changed into the em dashes they were supposed to be when you posted there, and then when i responded to celebrate the change, they turned back into floating question marks again. 211003 ... raze he did it again. we were about to round the corner just past where the newsom twosome like to hang out when we saw a tall squirrel up ahead, standing to the left of the path. it wasn't moving. "it must be really deep in meditation right now," my dad said. we got closer. it still didn't move. "i don't think that's a squirrel," i said. "i think it's something else." i crouched down and saw it was a sculpture. the largest one yet. it looked like brass that had been painted black. it was a tower of three monkeys, with the two on top each sitting on the shoulders of the monkey beneath them. the first one was covering his eyes with his hands. the second monkey covered his ears. the third covered his mouth. see no evil. hear no evil. speak no evil. there was a bowl in front of the monkey on the bottom of the pile. a shallow basin sculpted from clay. it was empty. a place to store the words he couldn't speak. the man whose name i still don't know saw us walking, saw where we were headed, and got there long before we did, leaving his gift so we wouldn't find it until he was almost gone. by the time we saw him, he was the entire length of the park away from us. there was no way to close the gap. we waved. i want to give him something back. i want to thank him for all he's given us. but he's too cunning. too quick. "he's like a ninja," my dad said, laughing. "a monkey ninja." this sculpture makes music, just like the last one. in the base of the thing there's a hole the size of a quarter that acts as a resonating chamber. i tap the back of the top monkey's head with my fingers, the one who refuses to see, and he sounds a perfect d sharp. i sing the note into the hole and hear it swell. 211024 what's it to you? who go blather from