Cookies, Pale Bridges and Baby

I'm out of hit points, stamina, low on mana. My diurnal other half finds me waking up late on the couch and going to sleep early in the floor, time passing without balance— avoiding people when I can. Though some of my behavior unveils itself only for winter, it's also my "chronotype", as Till Roenneberg suggests. Unfortunately, I'm nocturnal. I am meant to creep around in the darkness.

Alligators are also mostly nocturnal. They do their hunting around dusk. I'm reading a lot of suggestions online that warn to keep a flashlight near if you live in an area with alligators. Do people scan for flashes of yellow alligator eyes floating along bodies of water? It sounds magnificent, just scary enough.

Alligators are swimming along disguised as logs in order to sneak up on some meat. I'm creeping around the house hoping not to step on a groaning floorboard in order to sneak up on a crunchy cookie or two or seventeen. I'd like to share a cookie with the gator. Chocolate chip. Maybe peanut butter. I wonder if he would appreciate the crumbly sugar. More likely than not he'd probably just eat me instead, and that's no problem. Chances are there's a really good mincemeat pie recipe calling for actual meat, or I could be one of those vogue cooks who throws bacon on a sweet scoop of vanilla ice cream to make it "edgy." He might like that.

The point is, neither of us have self control. Be it drugs, cookies, the works, we are predators.

I'm at the zoo again.

I pick the right path this time.

Over the barricades.

At the bridge.

The snow is light today. It fluffs up like powder bunched together at the face of my boots. I pace back and forth on the bridge. The cables of the bridge are dusted, just like the ropes, rails and rods. And the rocks. The would-be small river. This living space for this alligator is so so small. Otis's rock looks like a tiny naked Oreo suspended on a small cloud of milk. Cooookie.

I'm not a solitary television watcher, but China made me a lonely enough person to get into it. The snow today reminds me of all those skin product commercials in Handan. Skin like milk, the commercials would say. Get the skin of an egg white in two short weeks, they'd say, gallons of white liquid pouring against a pale sky blue backdrop. They'd advertise products for skin-whitening with models white like a bleached corpse. But this is the culture there, a culture we used to follow. Though it's not like we're better now. We've got orange paste and bronze makeup to create the darkening effect. Paleness is beauty when it means we don't have to work hard outdoors. Tan is beautiful when it means we don't have to work hard indoors. Keeping a dream in mind, maybe soon every color will be the new beauty.

Skin is whack.

The tracks from one side of the bridge and the other look like a couple four-wheelers have passed through. It looks like a lot of people have come through, but today nobody has broken the rules but me.

They are my tracks.

I'd paced back and forth, thinking about getting the best view of Otis's home, thinking about Chinese values, thinking about being tired of thinking, but really, I'm just trying to get over this bridge. The bridge of my life, the bridge of not finding my alligator, the bridge of you-name-it.


Before I left the zoo, I decided I ought to ask the visitor's office where they'd taken Otis.

"This is probably a strange question, but do you happen to know where the alligator is?"
"Which one? The baby or-"

Which one? The baby?

"Um, Otis."
"Oh, he's being held in a separate commissary. Off exhibit."

The use of the phrase "being held" made me think along the lines of "what are you in for?" I appreciate this explanation, intentional or not. In Otis's apparent prison, I'm sure he was feeling a little less than energized. No sunlight to speed up his coldblooded metabolism. Nowhere to make tracks. No bridges to cross.

And a baby?

I didn't even want to think about what a "separate commissary" looked like. How could his winter space be any less elaborate than the gator bathtub on exhibit?