TWO THINGS happened recently that I suspect are connected. Well, I only suspect that I suspect they’re connected; it’s entirely more plausible that I’m forcing some philosophical connection between the two in an attempt to Say Something.
One thing is waking up on Saturday to discover a scorpion on my bedroom floor, lounging (yes, lounging, charge me with errant anthropomorphism, but it really looked like lounging) in front of the space heater. The remarkable thing was that I was groggy, smeary-eyed, as yet glasses-less. I only successfully interpreted its menacing blur as a scorpion because of magical thinking: I’ve come to credit myself with having some tingly, superpower-lite sixth sense that has allowed me to pre-emptively spot them lurking openly in the house over the years. I describe the sixth sense as some activation of my entire epidermis as a sensory organ, alert, attuned to some higher, sharper level of attention. There is no fear in it. It is, in fact, perhaps strangely, pleasant.1
IT’S A SIMILAR feeling to what I felt when I recently visited The Office of Collecting and Design for the first time. It’s an interactive gallery with a fascinated focus on tiny objects — imagine a thousand Old World junk drawers from a thousand sepia-soaked, great-great-grand-relatives you never met, and it is only possible to know them by the residue of their obsessive collections of dice, figurines, postcards, shells, buttons. Your attention simultaneously dilates and zooms; it migrates to your skin as you experience the mass effect of the intricacy and tactility of these forgotten, rescued objects. It’s stimulating and meditative at the same time. It’s a lot of things at the same time.
Anyway, here are some cool things going on this week.
Through March 3: Discovery Children’s Museum hosts a variety of special programs dedicated to Black History Month, including many hands-on activities.
Mon Feb 6 @ The Sand Dollar Downtown: The Hickoids, a famously genre-defying cowpunk band that traces their roots to the early ’80s Austin punk scene that spawned greats such as Scratch Acid, The Offenders, and Butthole Surfers, perform with The Psyatics.
Starting Tue Feb 7 @ The East Las Vegas Library: In “Spirit of the Land,” students from Equipo Academy exhibit photographs using alternative photo processes that celebrate Nevada’s newest National Monument, Avi Kwa Ame.
Tue Feb 7 @ Beer Zombies in Boulder City: The Beer Zombies Zombie Market features craft brews and vendors, including Brew & Bougie, Salsa Balazo, Moon Farmz, Sunshanstudios, The Crafty Cat, Dough 2 Door, and more.
Wed Feb 8 @ UNLV: Jaquira Díaz reads from Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Hype: Ordinary Girls was listed as one of the Must-Read Books of 2019 by O: The Oprah Magazine, Time, Bustle, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, The Millions, The Week, Good Housekeeping, and others.
Wed Feb 8 @ Clark County Library: The UNLV Jazz Concert Series features performances by exceptional groups from the UNLV School of Music, Division of Jazz and Commercial Music shows off its chops in this Latin Jazz concert.
Thur Feb 9 @ UNLV Donna Beam Gallery: In “Pervasive Surveillance,” artist Cida de Aragon presents a site-specific wall installation, video works and large-format photography that critique the excessive surveillance we all increasingly endure in public space.
(Pictured: detail of work by Cida de Aragon from “Pervasive Surveillance”)
I’m willing to admit that part of that pleasure is the thrill of horrified fascination that scorpions hold, in all their delicate, intricate, highly specific grotesqueness.
One Response
A similar thing happened to me, and I will now aproach these scorpion encounters with the sixth sense you so wonderfully describe here.