Rooster and Strawberries

[avram]

Yesterday I went up to Lisa and mnemex’s place in Sunnyside for Lisa’s RPG, CthulhuPunk+20. On the way out, I stopped off at the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market and picked up some fresh strawberries...

Memory: It’s shortly after we moved in together, Chris and I, probably that first summer in 1993. I’d just discovered the Plaza market, and just bought my first carton of fresh strawberries. I brought them home; “Look, fresh strawberries!” I said, washing them off. “I don’t see why everyone makes such a big deal about fresh strawberries,” said Chris. I held one up to her mouth, she ate it. “Oh,” she said, the light dawning.

...though these weren’t all that great. Also a small carton of apple cider to drink on the trip up to Queens, to go with the two apples (gala) I’d pulled out of my fridge for breakfast. On the way around the southwestern curve of the Plaza, up towards Flatbush, I heard a clucking sound. Looking over to my right, I saw a rooster, right there in the Grand Army Plaza park in the middle of Brooklyn! I know there are places that raise live chickens (catering to the West Indian community, of which a big chunk is in Prospect Heights), and I suppose maybe an animal gets loose every so often. I wonder if New York will wind up with wild chickens to go with the falcons and coyotes and other unexpected flora.

I didn’t see any two-legged frog people; that’s just a doodle. The woodless water-soluble graphite pencils (Progresso) are fun to play with, even if the lacquer they’re covered with gets sticky in warm weather.

Lisa’s game incorporates elements from the works of HP Lovecraft, including not just his Cthulhu mythos, but also the Dreamlands, a magical land one can visit in one’s sleep. The clever thing about this, from an RPG standpoint, is that it gives unconscious characters something to do. Characters can also physically enter the Dreamlands, but high-tech devices usually don’t work, generally winding up transformed in some way by the journey. Cellphones come through as crystal balls, for example, a regular enough occurrence that the PCs have come to rely on certain characters having crystal balls. Matt’s character, Blake, has cybernetic eyes, and in this session Lisa suggested that these might come through as some sort of steampunk mechanisms, with little chugging smokestacks, a paper tape readout, and bells for alarms. That’s this last drawing.

Comments

rooster

[redbird]

Your bird was in the paper the other day. Nobody seems sure of how he got there, but they're prepared to argue about whether he stays. Because, well, cocks will crow. At cockcrow. Which is too early for many of us.

I like the way you made him sort of cute, but still with the big talons.

Re: rooster

[avram]

That’s the Michel Gagné influence. I just got a quick look at the bird, maybe two or three seconds, before he strutted off into the brush. I’m pretty sure he had an orange-red head, comb, neck, and chest, and black body and tail, but the drawing was done hours later, from dim memory.

Ah, I see by these photos that I missed the patch of red on his back.

According to this NY Times story from May, Animal Control is planning to catch him and ship him off to an animal sanctuary upstate.