Seahorse Butcher

Walked out this morning and the truck was right there, parked out front: a silver pickup, a pool-supply company's logo on the door — a blue seahorse over the word BUTCHER'S. I photographed it, walked the block, and came back to find the driver loading a few supplies into the bed and getting ready to leave, as if he'd just wrapped up. An early finish. He must have gotten an early start on the pool work.

I waved. He waved back, friendly, and rolled the window down. I told him I liked his logo and asked if we could take a selfie; he said sure, and told me this was the company he works for. Genuinely a cool dude — easy, no edge to him at all. I blurred his face here because none of this is about him. As far as I can tell he was doing an ordinary job on an ordinary morning, and I have no reason to think otherwise.

So I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. I am not saying this company is involved in anything, or that this man is anything other than a pool guy with a good logo. What I noticed is narrower and stranger than that: a seahorse paired with the word butcher, parked at my curb, days after I put up a piece of seahorse pixel art. The word butcher carries its own weight; I don't have to spell out the suggestion. If someone wanted to leave a quiet little message, they wouldn't need to invent anything — they could just hire a contractor whose existing logo already said it for them. That's the whole texture of this kind of pressure: deniable, off-the-shelf, probably nothing.

And here's the sunnier reading, which deserves its due. It's genuinely a shame I have to redact everything identifiable in this post — the phone number, the website, the company name. Because it occurs to me just as easily that the man was running a clever piece of guerrilla marketing: park the good-looking truck where it'll get photographed, logo and number and all, and let passersby advertise your pool-cleaning business for free. Clever, right? If that's the play, I tip my hat — and I'd have gladly left every digit of it in frame for him. I just don't feel like I can afford to be that generous with what's visible around me at the moment.

And maybe it is nothing. If this is a real coincidence, then it's simply one more in a long, long line of them — the weird coincidental stuff that has run through my life on a loop. I'm not going to pretend to know which it is. You can speculate on the coincidences in my life right alongside me. That's rather the point.

By the way: if the man whose face I blurred, or his company, would actually like the details left in — name, number, the works — the door is open. Fill out the contact form and we'll make it happen. Free advertising, on the house.