collapsing new buildings

Right next to my bedroom is this massive construction site, one of the cavities populating the mouth of la Ciudad. every morning at about seven-thirty, hell descends on the cavern in the form of giant Caterpillar trucks pounding away in a highly industrious (and industrial) manner. It reminds me of that German band, Einstürzende Neubauten, "collapsing/destroying new buildings." This basically seems to be the case. Lining the hole is a flimsy fence made of aluminum siding, which doesn't really hide the doings from anyone, because sound o'ertakes vision every time, emanating like the irrepressible smell of movie popcorn. This, in fact, could be part of some hortatory polemic on the transcendent power of the sonic in some neo-Derridean dissertation in some iv(or)y tower in some Panera ghetto (okay, enough).

and immediately before the snarl and churn of diesel engines, the construction site becomes the landing strip for what would seem to me, judging from its sonic intensity, to be something like a tornado of birds of all sizes, shapes, and squawks. These birds have the noise-force of a locust plague, although a) I can't actually see them, because my window is of frosted platen glass that seems to be fixed in a low-visibility position, and b) even if I could see them, my experience about birds leads me to believe that they are actually smaller and more highly dispersed than their concentrated sound would suggest. Birds are those little amplifiers, masters of sly incivility, blasting loud chirps from a frequently unlocatable source. Their ability to make a commotion without revealing one's strategic location really makes me respect them, and I love the perfunctory way that they go about their chirping.

Anyhow, I would have it that the birds alight upon the site as one body, moving in like a gale-force wind and stripping the place of all its resources, then abruptly changing direction with that 'animal magnetism' that impresses with its panache and creates binoculared, blinkered awe in those elementally chaotic human spectators of nature televisual porn, as well as this particular anthropos, who notes with some degree of disdain our haphazard and often failed efforts at synchrony. which is not a bad thing, as i'm not advocating militarism, but. (Sidenote: I'm beginning to think that I should return to graduate school as an environmental biologist. This is not a joke. Recent solipsistic and insipid events in the humanities have led me to consider making the 'leap of faith' into the hard sciences. Kierkegaard might approve.)

Anyhow, lesson learned: sound supersedes vision. Right now I'm listening to this unthinkable mishmash of sounds spewing from the kindergarten below, the kids yelling gutturally and crying (and clearly ripping each other's hair out) and saying things like "Agua!" and "Allo" over and over. Mixed in with this are: the dull ambient sound of engines, which provides the basso continuo, the shrieks of yet more birds, humming air conditioning units that ring the airshaft onto which the kitchen faces, and the walkie-talkie bursts of the (private?) guards, in brown drab, who lean in bored fashion and crack jokes outside of various institutions like the lubavitch synagogue across the street. There's still more - this place is permeable, with no real windows. I would add: I'm not really sure what it feels like here; that is, I can't make banal comparisons like "This is the Naples of Japan" or "this is the Texas of Maine." I should still further say that in other places, like Japan, people do this kind of pointless comparison all the time. Panama is not really trying to be other than itself, it seems to me. Maybe as yet it doesn't have the time, or the tourist infrastructure, to do so.