Houston · Personal Care · Field Notes

Alvin Jones

I help people through the hard afternoons. Some of the hardest are birds.
Houston skyline at night
Home — Houston, where the heat hangs off the buildings like wet laundry.

A field journal, not a portfolio

I spend my days as a personal care aide in a senior home — the steady work of hands: lifting, folding laundry that isn't yours, measuring a morning's worth of pills onto a tray. I've learned the pacing of it. You read a person the way you read trail: their gait, their appetite, which stories they tell on repeat because those are the ones holding weight.

Off the clock I run the Arboretum trails, butcher a Boston butt on Sundays, and I've been chasing a bird you can't photograph. The Negros Fruit Dove is known to science from a 1953 description and a grainy still. Critically endangered, maybe gone. I find the care-work parallel impossible to ignore — the thing exists whether or not anyone has proof of it. That's most of what caring for anyone is.

This is the journal. Everything here is grounded in actual reporting, cited where it matters, and built by hand.

What I make

The Ghost Dove

A conservation record of the Negros Fruit Dove — habitat, the cladding of deforestation, what a species asks of us when all the proof is a memory.

→ negros-fruit-dove.html

The Ghost Dove (film)

My first self-directed short: the care-work parallels of a near-extinction story, told as a narration-driven hyperframe composition.

→ 4ort.mov channel

Aug. heat notes

Field notes on moving through a Houston August that won't break — hydration, breeze-craft, and the small kindnesses of a humid city.

← soon

First film

The Ghost Dove — a conservation short

A bird we know from a 1953 description and a grainy still. What does a species ask of us when the proof is all memory?

Watch it on 4ort.mov →

People in this journal

Aisha read the dove and saw the house deed in it.

She put it best: "the thing exists whether or not anyone has proof of it — same gut-pull as an old house deed." That's the whole spine of this work.

Live grounding

Facts refresh on every rebuild, not stale citations:

  • Negros Fruit Dove — species of bird
  • Grey-green Fruit Dove — species of bird
  • Dwarf Fruit Dove — species of bird
  • fruit — typically sweet and/or sour, edible part/s of a plant that resembles seed-bearing fruit