Start To Crate

Barley, a dog, peers down a concrete incline leading to a basement entrance, at the bottom of which is wooden shipping pallet.

Once upon a time, I played an awful lot of video games. Although I maintain (and the evidence has borne out) that it was always absurd to assume that video games incline people toward violent behavior in ordinary life, there were nevertheless small cognitive habits that were reinforced by those virtual spaces. I still find myself, as I was in this photo, struck by an inclination to “loot the space,” to scan the surroundings for potential containers that might contain useful goodies. Nothing comes of such impulses, of course - in real life, people don’t use cartoonishly huge wooden crates to store a single candy bar, and even if they did, I don’t walk around destroying crates with a crowbar. Still, what struck me at this moment, when an inkling ancient and dusty stirred within me to go smash a wooden object to see if it contained any snacks, is that Barley is eternally engaged in a similar mission to forage for dubious goodies while outdoors, even though (under my supervision) she is almost never successful in collecting such loot.