*slip* BAM! Fell in love.

A friend at work asked me to take a photo of a certain highway sign for the blog she's setting up, so at lunch we drove around Northern Kentucky looking for a good place to take the photo, which turned out to be the passenger seat of her car as we drove under the overpass the sign she wanted the photo of was stuck to.

I'm half-drunk; please excuse my terrible sentence construction. I am also suffering from the sinus headache that 94.7% of Cincinnati is suffering right now due to the fact that it was 55 degrees and sunny today and tomorrow it is going to be cold and snowy.

Anyway when we got back from this little photo shoot, there behind the parking lot, under the railroad that runs along the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge, where all the busted glass and trash and bent beer cans from Bengals tailgating parties winds up, there is this thing.

This thing here. It is about twenty feet long and it is about five feet tall and it is covered in this mosaic. Of these fish. See these fish? Those little mosaic tiles and pieces of glass, some of those things are the size of my thumbnail. And this thing is twenty feet long.

See, and on top of this thing, this twenty foot by five foot by five foot piece of art, are these birds.
Like this here. I don't know what they're made of, but they're covered in mosaic pieces--of rock and seashell.

This is Cincinnati. The nearest beach is like a twelve-hour drive from here.

And this thing, this piece of glorious art, is in the dregs of downtown. The edge of downtown. Beyond this sculpture there are warehouses and wastelands. Above this sculpture is train tracks. Next to it is a big-ass parking lot for a football stadium.
There, you can see the train pilings behind it. Look at that eye! Isn't that the most amazing thing? There is this concrete seabird, with a seashell for an eye, sitting on top of a twenty-foot mosaic, in downtown Cincinnati.
Look at the detail on the underside of that wing!

What is possibly the strangest thing about this sculpture is that it sprang up seemingly overnight. One day it was not there, and then today, it was there.

The second strangest thing about this art is that it has no identifying information on it. I don't know where it came from. I don't know who did it. I don't know why they did it.

It is just here.

And the third strangest thing about this sculpture is its location. If you're going to make something like this, with such attention to detail and care and emotion in it, why in the holy hell put it at the ass-end of nowhere! Why! It's beautiful! It deserves to be seen!

Which is why it's on my blog, thingie, now.


I hope it doesn't go away as mysteriously as it has sprung up.