I harbor a disturbing fear that my kin, the crab at the Anchorage museum, has passed. Yesterday, we went to the museum for the free day and to scope the wares of the Alaska Black Chamber of Commerce. I was so white I didn't even know such a thing existed and the atrium that is usually quiet jammed with noise and action and vendors and the solitary representative from the Anchorage police department, the lone white woman manning a table at the expo. The place was too busy for me and I sought out the crab in its (hers, his, theirs?) enclosure to find it voided save the anemones and the kelp and the rocks. I became distraught and began to curse loudly at grief and general bullshittery such as to prompt my special lady to remind me where I was. I sat and watched the tank for a moment. Later I would discover via the internet that king crabs can live in captivity or without human predation for up to 20 years. (This may figure later in the narrative, who knows.)
The museum experience grandly astounded, as it does. And it made one reflective and moody, quiet and stupidly reserved. Water spilled onto a drum. Globes turned in a darkened nook. Mapmakers and sorcerers conversed about known and unknown territories. The top floor of the museum is always a treat and this day's exhibit, part of a lending from an Italian artist, was the figurative cherry on top - a cube of screens that one steps into to view images and hear lies. The docents made us wear paper booties, like surgeons, and the screens showed us images of all kinds, from the world over, and a gentle, almost robotic voice recited a litany of lies the world has heard from any manner of "trusted sources". (My favorites were "Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11" and "Prostitution is illegal in every country in the world." Say what that does about my memory and who the meat brain is.) 
After the museum, Ulybear's grandparents had gifted him a theater performance, his first, to see the dance, percussion, spectacle exhibition that is STOMP. It was the first time congregated with many folk in quite a while and as we all sat and breathed and coughed, the show came up and what followed was a true epic, a ritual, a sacrimony, an offering, truly human. I wept, my favorite parts being the symbolic combat, the high prayer for deliverance preceded by thunderous drums, the warriors' triumphant return. Man, it's getting me right now, even in memory, yet I remain confused by my fellow show-goers' inappropriate, to me, responses. They kept clapping and hooting like mad apes presented with higher ordered intelligences, somehow instinctually afraid of what, what portent they were beholding. The performers bled white while these imbeciles cheered. I am tormented by things and places, yet the desire to keep experiencing these events persist. Later, A drove us home.
After dinner at Klondikes, I stayed downtown and watched the scene. I have not been out, later than about 6 PM, on a Saturday, in some time. I described the experience later, to A, as it being like the late night bar scene, but for middle aged people, one of which I am. There was no desire to party, however, to cut loose, to "live in the moment" as it were. I read some poetry and tried to write about the experience referenced in the cave above. Failed. Wrote about the inane instead. Ditching the scene, I walked home in the dark, trailing my book filled purse like a schoolboy. Later, I would search for record of a similar act I watched in the same venue as STOMP years prior yet could not find evidence of it being penned and spammed on the tubes. (I know I've written it, probably even here, but it was a field trip for G when he was a kinder.) The search brought me into a time capsule that burned with the acknowledgement that I've never been as kind as I should have been.
I hope the goddamn crab made it a full twenty. They were (are?) my friend.
