Burning the Midnight Oil Spill

Five thousand birds fall from the sky in Arkansas.  Officials say it might have been caused by New Year's Eve fireworks.  Really?  I wonder why it did not happen elsewhere.  Were the fireworks in this small town of Bebe particularly heinous?

One hundred and fifty miles away, 85,000 fish died.  Officials say there is no connection.

What the hell?  I'm waiting for the movie.  Do you believe in spaceships from other worlds yet?  The way things are going, I can think of no other explanation--for many things.  I think that is what's keeping me up at night.  Not "keeping" me up, exactly.  I go to bed fine.  I've just been waking up at midnight, one, two, three. . . then decide to get up at four.  I walk around like a zombie now.  I can't keep my eyes open during meetings.  I try, just as you do when you are driving and you can't stay awake and you sing out loud and shake your head--just before you end up in the ditch.  I raise my eyebrows high and nod my approval, but the lids just drop shut on their own.  I try to mitigate this by keeping one eye open, but the inevitable happens quickly enough.  So I shake my head, cover my eyes with my hand, and smile as if everything said is interesting, scintillating even.  I keep thinking that tonight will be the night I sleep, but each night is the same.

I shot this photograph last night.  There will be many more of this woman.  She has just moved here from Vietnam.  She wants to be a model and has been going to classes for that.  This was the first time she has modeled outside the school.  I don't think she understood thirty percent of what I said to her, but we went for sushi afterwards and she told me lots of stories about "home."  I will share later.  But one of the things she told me was that the Chinese fish commercially in Vietnamese waters.  They don't use lines or nets, she said, but they drop electrical wires into the sea and electrocute everything in the water, then just go pick the fish off the surface.  Total carnage.  Those Chinese are really inventive.

So. . . I wonder what killed all those birds?