E-mail from someone who had found a camera filled with odd family photographs and videos. He sent 5 of the photos and said he mailed the camera itself to my Post Office Box, thinking I would appreciate the rest of its contents.
The e-mail ended with an invitation for me to stop by a fried chicken shack in Long Island City. “First beer’s on me, stop by this weekend, my whole family’s gonna be there!”
I have never met the person who sent this invitation but we know of each other through Internet-only connections made through the years — which is to say we glamourized each other and ourselves to unrealistic dimensions of vacuous celebrity.
I looked at one picture – a picture showing a picnic-like scene in a tree-lined park with people lolling about on beach towels and sipping beverages from plastic champagne flutes. What was odd about the picture was that everyone’s attentions were drawn toward an enormous pig made of what looked like thousands of balloons. The scale of the picture might have been deceiving but it looked like the pig was over 100 feet high and 50 or 60 feet across, standing on its hind legs with its head turned impossibly far to the right, its enormous smile attempting to entertain this seemingly unimpressed gathering of people.
