escape from the bog

The Bay has toxic black mold in his apartment. This being not his fault, he's moving out this month and looking for a place to live, so we've been wandering around the city looking at possible apartments for him. The desirability of most of them hovers around maximum shitstorm level orange, though none more so than the one we saw this morning, which literally consisted of some prefab walls erected in the middle of some woman's garage. (The sole window looked out onto the back of her car, which was darkly enclosed in said garage.) The room was terrifyingly small, and had a shower stall positioned directly within it, with no door. You could pull back the shower curtain and see your entire dark, enclosed-inside-a-garage quarters. It could be really dramatic if guests were there with you. Still soaking wet, soapy, maybe with a shower cap on, you could peep in and out from behind the shower curtain directly into the main room bellowing Here I am!, insert a brief guitar interlude, and then follow with Rock you like a hur-ri-cane! while you were shaving. Likely applause would ensue.

"All is included!" the landlady announced proudly. It was the sort of place that would encourage one to build a rafter for the sole purpose of hanging oneself from it. But one could at least die knowing that PG&E, garbage, and water were paid for. I nodded cheerfully, imagining my dangling body poised from the rafter I would build after my Scorpions-inspired public shower was over.
The Bay was polite.
"You know, I'm looking at a few other places today... and I think I'm looking for something with gas heat, not electric," he said.
"You're looking for something with gas heat?" I said after we left.
"What? I was just trying to be nice," he told me. We were near the albino alligator at the science museum so I suggested we go there to restore faith in the world. Alligators can often do this.

I'm a member of the science museum, so in theory I can pop in and out whenever I want to visit the alligators, sharks, and penguins. This is the life I envision for myself -- frolicking through fields, encountering sharks when necessary or pleasant, passing by sharks, greeting sharks, encountering more, singing, whipping my frock around -- although sadly reality prohibits such fantasies from transpiring very often. In fact, since our visit was impromptu, we didn't even get to the sharks today. So much for the hip-hop parade of sharks I rely upon each day, in my mind, to make sense of this world.

"There he is," I announced when we walked up to the albino alligator. "He is albino and lying on the rock." One important function I fulfill at museums is the bald announcement of the obvious, perhaps a byproduct of leading tours of very, very small children around The Cloisters some years ago.
("This is St. Roch. Now, there seems to be something round and raised on St. Roch's leg! Can anyone guess what it is? No, not a donut... close. No, it isn't a bug bite, but even closer! Why, it's a bubon from the bubonic plague!" [bucolic cheers])
"If I lived in a bog..." The Bay began, and I kindly did not point out that he does live in a bog -- it has toxic black mold in it -- but he trailed off. We will never know now what The Bay would do if he lived in a bog. (Except we do know because he does live in a bog; c.f. my important function at museums.)