A Monkey Weekend

Phaye is having a weekend sleep-over with Space the capuchin monkey. She’s doing part of Tom and Sia’s capture and cataloging of the Being & Nothingness Cams images while keeping Space and fed and occupied. He’s starting to act like a real monkey, making soft hoots, then eeking shouts, moving constantly, pulling everything apart.

Phaye looks like her hair exploded. Space has been grooming her and is having trouble dealing with her long hair. He’s terrific at getting to her scalp and checking for tasty bits, but then gets his nails caught in the curls and pulls until he gets his finger free. Phaye has a headache.

She asked where the hell Space's “parents” are--it’s not like he’s a hamster. I agree. Really, if you owned a monkey wouldn’t you notice if he was gone?

Monkey Update & Coffee Research

Space the capuchin monkey is still here and we’ve had no response to Phaye’s “Monkey Found” flyers except for a kid calling to ask if we really had a monkey and if he could see it. Tom brought in an inflatable mattress and Phaye stayed last night to take care of Space and guard the office. Even so, when I came in my monitor was cracked and there was poop all over my chair. Dirk asked if we shouldn’t get a little harness from the pet store, but we thought that could only make Space squirrelly. Space is more like a toddler than a monkey—a diaperless toddler. Without talking to one another we all came into work loaded down with cleaning products.

On non-monkey subjects, Tom and Sia have decided that having black coffee and bananas together tastes like cigarettes. We all sat down and had a tasting, but I don’t think each of our opinions carry the same weight, since Sia is the only one who smokes. She’s started smoking lovely pastel cigarettes with golden rings around the filters. She’s also alternating real cigarettes with clove cigarettes; the non-smokers are deadlocked on which is more disgusting.

We thought that the best way to evaluate the banana/coffee premise would be for each of us to smoke a cigarette, brush our teeth, and then try the combo again, but, of course we don’t have toothbrushes. I also remember that last time I tried a cigarette I got so dizzy that I had to sit down on a hot, gummy sidewalk outside of a liquor store. We’ve left the assertion up in the air for now.

The happiest being here, with no opinion and nothing on the line, is Space the monkey. He played on the floor with trashcan liners and had bananas with us, but we are not giving him coffee. Phaye said she'll sew him a little beret, but I said that’s a big no can do. People who put clothing on animals get sent to hell. Tom pointed out that the absence, presence, or provability of hell, god, mankind’s existence and blah-bi-di-blah (I didn’t catch all of it) made my dressed-animal certainty dubious. Sia said that there really shouldn’t be a contented being around here: that Space needs to demonstrate gloom, a background in philosophy, wear a beret, smoke, or start drinking coffee. Philosophy, after all, does not deal with how peachy life is.

The Hole in the Office Floor

A Capuchin monkey (Cebus ssp.) in a leafy environ that is not my office

The prairie dogs gnawed through my home office floor and escaped on February 2. After they left, I plugged the hole up with hay and made a masking tape “X” over it. When I got home last night the floor was a fine, smooth, solid wooden floor again.

At work this morning there is a hole in the floor near my desk and a medium-sized wicker dog basket in the “shady” corner of the communal office with a capuchin monkey in it, curled up sleeping. Phaye found it and at first she thought it was a strangely colored raccoon. When she saw that it was a monkey she was very worried since she was pretty sure that we didn’t have any monkey chow and the local independent pet store was unlikely to have any. At first she thought that it was dead, but it woke up and stared at her then went back to sleep, like a cat, which is not proper monkey behavior. It should have been screaming, bouncing off the walls, exploring everything, and shredding up all that it could see. And who knows what it would have been doing if it was frightened.

This is not good. The prairie dogs were at my house and didn’t smell bad. They’re vegetarians and poop out little hard pellets. The monkey will to be pooping let’s just say not-pellets all over the office. I hate for that to be such a top priority, but we’ve got a lot of computer equipment. When Dirk came in he went down to the Stop ‘n’ Rob to see if they had any fresh food, but of course they didn't. So Dirk got some dog food and Nacho Doritos. Once the monkey woke up—he was a male-- he was happy to eat both.

A monkey coming into the Probably Space Monkeys Being & Nothingness Cam Project headquarters. What are the odds? But there he is, a calm and relaxed monkey, not at all sick or weird, hanging around the office like your basic employee. Maybe he’s on Ativan. He played with and shredded all of our paper products and right now he’s in the break room playing with Tom’s Rubik’s Cube (Dirk says rubric cube). Tom thinks that we should call the Humane Society. Phaye said she’ll do some monkey diet research, and I said fine, so long as her only source isn’t Wikipedia. We haven’t let him have any coffee.

Sia said he must be a space monkey, so we’ve had to name him Space until we find out his real name. Phaye printed up flyers and is posting them everywhere. I’m not thrilled with the prospect of people coming to the office, since I’m not supposed to be running a business out of what is essentially a house, but how many people can have lost a monkey?