corners! the harvest of American entitlement! pigeons!

It's getting to the point that, if someone asked me what the one perfect symbol of my time in Paris has been, I would be sure in answering "pigeons." I didn't chose this. It's just that they are everywhere, and in general, although I know that in the mind of any American- and I know because it is in the Constitution- has a space in their heart reserved for hating pigeons. Hating their poop, especially when it happens on your head at your little league soccer game during the only five minutes they subbed you in; hating their oily quoffs of ruffled neck quill, that are sometimes pink and green, which is for some reason even more infuriating, maybe because that's a really archaic, out-of-touch color scheme; hating their uncertain, clumsy, explosive body maneuvers, whether they be aggressive kicks, or wing shudders that seem to begin a sentence but swallow the rest, or neck jerks that are, in a human form, that guy who only dances with the upper right region of his whole body and doesn't make eye contact with anyone, and when he finally does pretends that he's stopping because he felt like it. Pigeons also have googly eyes. The kind that you used to use elmer's glue to stick all over computer paper with feathers and glitter. Pigeons really just look like big, googly-eyed transvestites.
But I am having trouble hating pigeons here. My afforementioned pigeon friend, at SacreCoeur, was really charming. And I've met others, who really just carry on, and treat their awkward kinesthetic bullemia like the Locomotion.
Today, I saw about 18 pigeons brawling over two aluminum foil sandwiches. Which was funy, because either before or after, I was thinking of the smell of my brown-paper-bagged lunch in my backpack in Elementary School, and I still can't describe exactly what it is or how it makes me feel, but there two sandwiches, comically of ambiguous identity, like two mummies plummeting on the deck of a bucking pirate ship, getting gang-raped by about 18 peckers (well,). Sans bitterness, sans facetiousness, I profess with total satisfaction, that this is the most excitement I've seen since I've been here. The pigeons all had the most trippy coats of mail. One was a really bovine pigeon, and another was a sewage pigeon, but they all fought with equal dignity. All aggressive in suit of one of the two sandwiches, while the other, literally identical, hid behind the pack. It looked like a really bad commercial about a sale at IKEA, dubbed in pigeon. It all climaxed with the dislocation of a piece of crust from the guts of the tinfoil, spewing about eight of the pigeons in the direction of the vagrant white bread. The clump of pigeonsteaks vomited their wings forward like broken wind-up toys and assaulted the crust, considered by humans to be the Mustang of regions of sandwich bread. The interjecting tributaries of human boots, wrathful in their leather, abnormal enormity separated various pigeons from their honeymoon with the scrap of meal, but finally, a pigeon that looked like institutionally lit dust achieved the bread and stole it to solemnity, perched on the deck of the Best Western, or to a wise pigeon, paradise.

My day was great. I decided to skip class, which was not easy, because we had an actual day off yesterday, but I felt so tired when I was waking up. I know that's not a new weird fad that I started, but I made the decision, and because I made it, there was no point in regretting it. I ended up needing the sleep. I slept until 1130, tallying up 12 hours that left me still a little damp. I'm always fighting some sickness. I showered, put together breakfast, and then, intending to spend my first afternoon dans La Louvre, I hopped on the 10. Naturally, bumping into Shakespeare and Co, my day changed. I spent an hour in the store, which I left as a whole different guy. My first impression of it, besides that it looks exactly like my Dad's house, was that it smelled perfect, like lavender and old wood. The shelves are huge and imperfect, but still totally orderly and primped; like a weird genetically engineered child of my two homes. There was a shelf dedicated to "Lost Generation Writers" at the door, and beautiful Canadian/English receptionist, a hollowed out stone firepit canopied by a glass display table, and disjointed rooms, elevated at different altitudes, like a hiccuping staircase. I ended up buying "Look Homeward, Angel," with the intent to read its 500 pages in the next weel (I've read the first 5 and I know it's gonna be a big deal change in the way I look at everything) and come back.
I wandered back into the plaza, and was delivered out of a couple of alleys into place St. Michel. I coincided with the beginning of a show by Les Parpaings Perdus, a horn ensemble from the ETPS. Holy shit. I'm going to post videos later tonight, but it was so awesome. They were one sound, and it was a really pretty sound. They all dressed in construction worker outfits, which I discovered via the InternetMachine later was because they are architecture/construction students, and they choreographed each of their numbers with movement: jumps, walks, dances, and turning into a human snake.
Then I walked for an hour. I looked at the day, which wsa overcast and blue, like a yingyang. I ended up at Tabac, my new favorite cafe. It's a New York restaurant dropped in the middle of a plaza at the Sorbonne, with a huge tent and really reasonable prices. I had 50cl of Stella and Oignon Gratinee. Then a crepe before the metro home.
Some days just don't need the commentary. Some days teach you that beauty doesn't need to be anything, and you don't need to be anything to be with beauty. Smiling because you made room in your mind for it, and you can feel like morning is always touching you. You are able to smile because you are strong on this day.