Tom's Post: Being Cam 2

Gina,

Captured this image from BC-2 this morning. It looks like a close up on the previous BC-2, but more blurry. This is being.

Had to go. Lee (daughter) out until 3 a.m.

Tom

The Hole in the Floor and the Office

Dirk volunteered to patch up the hole in the office floor, but I’m not sure if he’s handy in that way. Since he works with computers he’s more the thinking-through-stuff type than the hammer type. He probably solders. He’s nailed a board over the hole and taped around its edges with gaffer’s tape, so we usually don’t trip. It isn't going to be your usual fix, because the old wooden floor is bowed, so it’ll be like flattening part of a trench. We’ve arranged the desks on either side of the sag, so if you put a pen on them it rolls in a nifty quarter circle before it stops.

Dirk asked me for the “history” of the floor so he could decide “how to fix it.” I think “decide” is synonymous with Googling or heading to Ace hardware. He knows that the hole showed up last week and that for the moment we’re going to take it on faith that it was made by Space the capuchin monkey. We all have problems with that explanation, not the least of which is that Space was found on the floor in a wicker basket, like Moses with very sharp teeth. None of us can fix in our minds the image of a monkey squatting there, trying to pull a dog bed through the floor.

This gets into the “character” of the office. I couldn’t have this office in a bleak business park or someplace that could be mistaken for a dentist’s office. That would be untrue to the nature of the Being & Nothingness Cam Project. We needed someplace gloomy and not-altogether-welcoming. So I rented a tiny wooden house, probably built in the ‘20’s, that had been empty a while. It was a home until it’s last occupied years and then it was an antiques consignment shop. It has no front yard and a tiny, sad, back yard in which Sia sits and smokes.

Whoever made upgrades for the antique shop had installed full length windows, which I covered with heavy, sticky plastic with a stained glass window design, telling the natural light to shove off. The hippie/churchy result was nicely disorienting and discouraging. So the living room is the office, the bedroom is the break room, and the no-appliance-or-water kitchen is a store room and there’s a half bathroom.

I think that the house is as old as Dirk and my ages combined and it has likely gotten much more accomplished than we have. I console myself by remembering that some people can shove a huge amount of stuff into the same space as others, sometimes by squishing it. I should ask one of the B&NC Team to find the philosopher who will best explain this.

Being & Nothingness Cam 2 (south)

Being & Nothingness Cam 1 (north)

Meanwhile, Back at the Cameras...

The uproar around here has diverted our attention from what we are supposed to be doing, which is, of course, operating/monitoring/interpreting the Being & Nothingness Cams. You’d think that with 3 B&NC Team members work could have carried on, even with a monkey hanging around.

The Being Cam image that Phaye posted Sunday is the first time that we’ve seen any tones besides black, white, and gray. Sia decided to whip out some of her philosophy weapons and said that based on John Locke’s principles of degrees of knowledge—knowledge, faith, and opinion—that all we could have now was opinion regarding any of the camera images. Tom pointed out that Sia’s opinion last week was that one of the Being cams was in the Marianas Trench.

Phaye—who I think is taking too much pain medication for her bite wound—said she thought it looked like either a monkey or a Twinkie that had been squished on asphalt. Sia said that since John Locke lived in the 17^th century he would have had no knowledge of Twinkies. Tom said that Jean Paul (B&N)Sartre had died in 1980, which left room for him having knowledge of Twinkies. Yeah, right. A French dude’s gonna have “knowledge of Twinkies.”

Once again, no conclusions or even decent theories about the images we’re seeing. We agreed that we like Nothingness more than Being, which I think you could have bet money we would not have said two months ago when we got this project started.

The Monkey and the Accountant

I’ve always said that for every monkey you loose you gain an accountant.

Space the capuchin monkey is gone. The Humane Society folks gave up their search and have issued what is the equivalent of an All Points Bulletin to law enforcement officials and to whoever else is supposed to keep an eye out for monkeys.

Phaye’s hand is okay. The doctor gave her antibiotics that I am going to be mother-like about making sure she takes and finishes. When Dirk came in he was horrified that Phaye hadn’t gotten to the emergency room right away when Space bit her. Dirk was bitten by his cat last year and the bite got infected and he was in severe pain for a week; he saw her experience as cat x 100. He looked at the hole in the floor (where Space presumably came in) and has volunteered to fix it. I have no idea how, since it’s a gnawed-out, ragged hole in the middle of the floor. It's not like there's something to glue back into place.

I went to see the accountant I had hired, Bethann, in her office to patch things up with her after Monday’s Who’s-More-Upset-Than-Who competition when she saw Space the monkey and yelled and he heard her yell and jumped across the room and broke the espresso machine. It’s not like I couldn’t find another accountant, but her office is above a self-serve car wash, and you have to admire that.

I have a bad feeling about the way I’m handling the grant money for the Being & Nothingness Cam Project—not in an illegal way, just in an incompetent way. I’m going to end up being flagged by my bank as a drug dealer or something.

Phaye, the Monkey, and the Accountant

Yesterday (Monday) was like herding monkeys. I brought in Bethann, our new accountant, to show her the office. Since I was looking at the office from a visitor’s point of view, the first thing I thought was, Wow, this place has a wicked nasty monkey poop smell.

Then we found Phaye in the break room, curled up asleep on a popped inflatable mattress, gauze all over the floor and Space the capuchin monkey quietly, methodically, grooming Phaye’s clothes for something to clean or eat. The gauze on the floor must have been Space’s work, since it led to a single twist around poor Phaye’s dried blood-covered hand.

Bethann shouted, Phaye jumped up, Space was startled and leapt onto the counter, and knocked the espresso machine onto the floor. The espresso machine. Whatever this place is, it is no place without strong coffee. The room, and monkey, were very still. The Bethann excused herself and left the office.

If I had heard of anyone else doing what I’ve been doing I would be furious, horrified, pitiless. Those dipwads had a dangerous, wild animal in their office for 3 days? What did they expect? I’m an idiot. I had Sia drive Phaye to the doctor’s while Tom called the Humane Society. He didn’t say I told you so. In my defense, one of the stipulations of the grant for the Being & Nothingness Cam Project is that we are supposed to, more or less, accept whatever happens. This includes monkeys showing up in wicker baskets.

Of course, by the time the Humane Society arrived we couldn't find Space the monkey--just broken stuff and primate poop. They’ve been looking for almost 24 hours. Currently some poor guy is creeping (for the second time) between the floor and the hard-packed dirt foundation under us hunting for a monkey.

Then there’s the thing of Phaye, without telling anyone, making the monkey-problems posting, as well as posting a Being Cam image capture that is a revelation. We’re looking over the latest images and…I don’t know. What I do know is that I can’t have a serious talk with Phaye when she’s sitting there semi-stoned on painkillers with a big old bandage on her hand.

This may be why people complain about Mondays. I used to hang around in my jammies until 10 AM, eating dry Cheerios out of the box and flipping through vast piles of New Yorker’s and National Geographic’s. Ignorance is bliss.