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May 15, 2003
"From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come."
--Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead)
I...have been indulging myself in rest, and fetishized solipsism. This is an extension of my thoughts of nearly a month ago. It is much more comfortable and--all around--more pleasant within the confines of my own skull. This flies in the networked face of what passes for human interaction in the Information Age, which is all about linking, increasing the complexity of the 'sphere, achieving some sort of tipping-point where all the pages and sites and 'blogs collapse into fabulous higher order and we've all evolved somehow. All very Aquarian Conspiracy, really, and right now the notion seems to me to be worth about the same as a used copy of that book. Fifty cents!
Which is not to say that I've settled upon the Big Knowing, or finalized my own personal take on How It Is, or told the outside world to sod off while I set about acquiring a good couch, some tapestries, a hookah and some poppy by-product to smoke.
But Lord, I've come to see that there is no substitute for a good and sensible Head, and in a massive fit of misanthropy I have concluded that there are far too many bad and insensible Heads out there, each one seeking out others to share in its nasty insensibility. Oh, I've got them spotted! Nasty, bad, wicked Heads, so attached to Knowing, all wrapped up in their Big Big Truth, but unaware that their furious clinging is akin to a drowning man's slipping grasp on a fragile rope, and that once loose of it they will plunge down into fathomless, lightless depths.
A little knowledge is a terrible thing. A lot of Knowledge is a neurotic redoubt erected against eternity.
It's taken me...oh, 31 years to realize this, and it puts me in the precarious position of claiming knowledge, or at the very least of having a belief worthy of acting upon, and this is exactly the same sort of thing that all of the other bad insensible wicked Heads are doing. That's a problem, and--contrary to what seems to be popular practice--the obsessive production of clever words strung together in some semblance of logical order will not resolve it. I would rather cut to the chase and leap about the room shouting I'm right! I'm right! I'm right! and baring my teeth at passers-by.
People tend to believe in the things that most reinforce a positive self-image. Thus, if the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Axis of Oil is the tripartite embodiment of all that is petroleum-based and evil, then the constant decrying of that Axis and all of its nefarious schemes makes one, by corollary, righteous. Similarly, if the Clinton/Clinton/Gore triumvirate of Lewdness, Feminism and Earthy-Crunchy-College-Boy Amoralism is the fount of all devilry, then by standing in opposition to it one becomes pure. It's a simple equation that becomes algorithmically more complex as one leaves the realm of politics and enters the houses of theology, ethics, and sexuality. The fundamental principle, however, remains the same. Rare indeed is the creature that chooses to deliberately cause itself pure injury or pain, and this is as true of the human creature and its thinking activities as it is of a rat in an electrified cage.
Of course, what we believe is good for us and what is actually good for us are not necessarily the same things. This is where we, as a species, part company with Mr. Rat. Our language abilities are uniquely suited to the task of psychologically resolving conflicts between "believe" and "actually." You may, for example, believe that opposing the continued attempts of Jews and Negroes to rule America and pollute the white race is a character-building enterprise, but whether that effort is actually good for you is, I think, open to question. There are similar issues surrounding modern sybaritic excess and flaccid "spiritual" indulgence, neither of which is thought to be harmful by the people who engage in it. It is via internal dialogue--that is, through language--that we convince ourselves of the rightness of our thinking and our actions.
People who only hang about with other like-minded people rarely have occasion to fully develop the sort of pithy justifications often required by those who would disagree with them. This is called orthodoxy, and it is on raging display in any group of humans you care to point out. Nevertheless, even in the absence of external heretical challenge, people still must create their own justifications for their behaviors and beliefs, if only to provide sufficient motivation for behaving and believing. This explains why a rat will eventually stop going into the corner of the cage with the electrified floor to get the tasty food pellet, while a human will--say--continue to visit bath houses every weekend and the STD clinic once a month. The rat can't convince itself that the tasty food pellet is worth the pain. The human can.
Similarly, there are idea-sets that are painful to maintain, because the ideas conflict with each other, the external environment, or with subconscious perception. This is what is meant by the term "cognitive dissonance." This dissonance is psychologically unpleasant, like an electrified cage floor. The assumption here is that the bundle of ideation which makes up a given person's thinking is capable of achieving a certain harmony, and tends towards order. Ideas that are in conflict induce various neuroses and complexes, which can be resolved by eliminating the dissonance.
There are many ways to reduce dissonance. One way is to seek out, as best you can, the "actuality" of a belief about yourself or the external environment, and to change your thinking if you discover that it's in conflict with that actuality. This works very well for some things, and not so well for others. Empirical beliefs about your environment, for example, are easily checked. Fluffier beliefs about your personality, or your metaphysical nature, are not so easily checked.
Another way to reduce unpleasant dissonance is via the mechanism of social padding, whereby the process of individually approaching "actuality" is replaced by a process of seeking consensus. This has the advantage of working well for nearly everything. Whether you're a Jew-hating cross-burning Aryan knight, a leather-wearing big-mustached fister of men, a sincere Christian, or a committed atheist, you can find a group of like-minded folks who will surround you with comfortable affirmation and lessen the impact of whatever disharmony your particular ideation-package might be causing. In our Information Age, this is becoming easier and easier. If you believe in cold fusion and UFOs, there are people who will assure you that you're right, in return for a little reassurance from you. If you believe that Bill Clinton personally shot Vince Foster in the eyeball, there's a newsgroup for you. Countless websites await those who believe that Dick Cheney will pocket eighty million dollars in cash from our recent Iraqi adventures. And so forth.
The Big Funny is that no matter which method you use to achieve cognitive consonance, there remains a fundamental epistemological uncertainty that can never be harmonized. Far beneath the petty assertions of human politics and religious constructs yawns the ceaseless chasm of death, the great unknowable into which the most well-constructed, impregnable fortresses of faith and logic will inevitably crumble.
Now: this is the part where I sail off into the flaky frontiers of personal, inexplicable experience. Once, in the midst of focused contemplation of what death might be like, while trying to imagine my own non-existence, I encountered an uncanny, thunderous absence. It was like a billion Gyuto monks in full-throated chant, and it was utterly silent. No drugs were involved, oddly enough. But while drifting in that strange state I "glimpsed" the overwhelming noise. Over the next few years I occasionally "sensed" it again, but never with any clarity...it was as though I was separated from all those monks by a thin, double-glazed window of soundproof glass. Sometimes it felt like an explosion, just about to occur.
Years later I encountered the passage from the Bardo Thodol quoted above. The Bardo Thodol dates from the 8th century, and purports to be a guide to the visions encountered during and just after death. It is intended to be read aloud to the dying. This supposedly calms the fears of the recently deceased, so that they will not be drawn into further bodily incarnation and can thus achieve enlightenment. The description of "the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding" is found in the second part of the book, the Chonyid Bardo, which is supposed to describe the states that a newly-disembodied awareness will encounter immediately after death. When I read those words, I remembered the silent thunder I had encountered. It seemed a peculiarly apt description.
Think of it this way: our five senses are attuned to the small space of this particular planet, this precise atmospheric mix, these certain wavelengths of light. But we don't see the ultraviolet petals that the honeybee sees, or hear songs as the blue whale hears them. Imagine, for a moment, that you could perceive all that there is to perceive. You would experience the cacophony of the entire electromagnetic spectrum far beyond the tiny sliver of infrared through ultraviolet light, encompassing radio emissions, X-rays and gamma radiation. You would hear the roar of molecular collisions, the shout of sunlight impacting the earth, the whisper of neutrinos passing through matter. If you could perceive all that there is to perceive, without the organic, limiting filters of flesh, what would it be like?
A thousand thunders, perhaps...the ceaseless, terrifying, overwhelming crush of all that is.
My experience is my own, and there are plenty of people I could seek out for a little social padding. But this doesn't seem like the sort of thing that needs to be fixed in place with the illusion of certainty. The Tibetan interpretation of my experience requires many things...the existence of souls, the wheel of reincarnation, and so on. But the experience itself...ah, now that is evocative. I attach these eighth-century words to it because they resonate, both with the experience itself and with my sense of it.
In my younger, psychedelic days I hung out with people who believed all sorts of things--that a guy named Harold could teach them how to approach God, that they were personally in real-time mental communication with alien beings from the Pleiades, that hyperventilating could send you back in time to resolve your birth traumas. All of these people were very focused on community. They had to be: how else to quiet the raging dissonance in their heads?
For my own part, I have come to realize a third way: eliminating dissonance by loosely holding onto personal experience, and not attributing to it a certainty that it does not possess. Did I really hear the thousand thunders of true Reality? Maybe, maybe not. But when I read the foamings of those who are Certain, of those who Know...I smile.
Not because I know more than they do...but because I'm beginning to realize that I know nothing of importance.
May 16, 2003
OK, I've just returned from Matrix: Reloaded. No spoilers, but I must say the following.
One. DJ Paul Okenfold sucks ass. Wait, who's he? you ask. You will know him by his mind-numbing, intrusively bad film score, which attempts to be analog retro and ends up spawning thoughts like: I'd really like to enjoy this massively chaotic freeway-chase/fight/big explosion scene but I can't because that FUCKING DRUM MACHINE IS DESTROYING MY BRAIN.
Two. Watch for the part in the multi-monitored climactic scene where the Wachowski brothers compare Bush to Hitler (Bush briefly shows up on the right side of the video wall, shortly after Adolph and his flag-carrying minions show up on the left side). Ooo. So daring. Ahh.
Look, spare me, OK, Andy? Larry! Pay attention! Stick to CGI fight scenes, cut down on the pseudophilosophical bullshit speeches made by characters with bad French accents, and realize that--as science fiction goes--this whole premise is tired, tired, tired. Sort of like Sheryl Crowe's music, or Tim Robbins' acting.
So basically, Wachowskis, all you've got going for you is your looks. And I've played Serious Sam (both encounters), so fifty CGI Agent Smiths pouring into a courtyard doesn't impress me. Don't think that putting a copy of Simulacra and Simulations in a movie makes you deep; it doesn't. As my freshman poetry teacher once told me, don't out-clever yourselves.
That is all.
May 19, 2003
I spent the weekend enjoying mindless slaughter and deploying vicious chemical weapons.
Am I Uday?
No.
I am a homeowner. And I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
Well, ant- and wasp-worlds. Oh, and I mercilessly thrashed dandelions and poison-ivy vines, as well.
Due to the presence of Bob the Cat and and a kitchen light that I left on for four years straight, my Queens apartment was essentially vermin free. Odd for the city, particularly for a building as old and a kitchen as ill-maintained as mine. But true, nevertheless. And it's not as though the pests weren't in the building: after the folks across the hall moved out, I snuck into the empty apartment to have a look. The bathroom floor moved when I turned on the light, so I high-tailed it out of there and laid an impenetrable barrier down across my threshold using Black Knight, the most devastating roach spray known to humanity (made in Kansas, chock full o' phenothrin, ask for it by name). And I remained secure and largely bug free.
I don't live in the city anymore, and the ecosystem of my home has become much more complex. The basement is the realm of freaky ur-spiders--brown recluses. They don't look like proper spiders at all; their legs are too long and their bodies improperly small and pinched-looking. They spew ill-formed grotty webs everywhere and this time of year many of them clutch small fuzzy white balls that are either the result of or the precursors to their toe-curling mating process, whatever that may be. I don't want to know. But they and their hideous offspring will be dealt with by my five-horsepower shop-vac. The basement is also home to soft millipedes--liquidated individually by pinpoint assassination; they're tricky, stealthy buggers--and the occasional errant wasp, which we'll get to more of in a moment.
The perimeter of the house is now under assault from ground-based sappers--carpenter ants--and aerial soldiers--wasps of various descriptions. The ants' sole purpose is to eat my goddamn house. Actually, it's the termites who want to eat the place; the ants just want to chew it up and spit it out so they can live in its beams and flooring. But we've got the termites licked. Fifteen subterranean bait stations full of yummy virgin pine, a veritable termite buffet, await those bastards. As soon as they snack the bait will be swapped for a high-tech low-toxicity poison that will prevent the colony members from molting. Presumably they will then explode. The system cost a lot of money, and I eagerly await the first evidence of termite feasting, so that we can demolish their cities, ravage their queens and make their grubs orphans before they pop and die.
But back to the ants: the previous owners, being drunken and overly fond of motorcycles, thought it would be a good idea to let the ants chew up a significant portion of the front porch, and then burrow into the bedroom floorboards. No more. Now the tiny savage monsters will get tasty splotches of strategically-placed honeydew spiked with fipronil, which they will carry back to their queen and share amongst themselves. Then they will keel over and twitch and die while I laugh and dance upon their broken bodies. Ants don't always forage for sweet stuff, though: their dietary requirements vary depending on the time of year. So I also have tasty protein granules. These, too, will be brought back to the colony, a prelude to more laughing and dancing. Those who think they can escape by travelling to the roof decking via the maple and the pine trees will also face miserable chitin-shattering death spasms, for I have a ladder. I will go where they go. I will think as they think. I will do as they do. Their tiny agonies will be as music to my ears. I will laugh on high, but will climb back down the ladder to dance in a safely victorious manner.
Peapod's eaves are open, and the lack of soffitting is an invitation to various airborne nasties who want to hang paper nurseries under the edges of the roof. For these wasps, I have overwhleming, high-pressure poison with which I gleefully saturate them from twenty-five feet away. They shall not prevail! This weekend a full dozen fell before my chemical wrath. Grim faced wasp-officers drove in black sedans to paper houses in the countryside, bearing the tragic news to patriotic wasp-mothers and wasp-fathers. Their progeny had made the ultimate sacrifice.
But I am merciless. I am highly motivated and well-equipped. Unwanted itch-making vines are mutilated by the Porter-Cable 10-amp Tiger saw as it tears through their thick and woody roots. Their oily leaves wither in the sun, and I revel in their slow, dehydrated anguish. For good measure I spray their ruined corpses with bottle-deployed defoliant from Bayer-Purcell Laboratories, the same non-staining, red-tinted death I bring to sinister dandelions...they may look bright and cheery, but they'll kill you soon as look at you. I triumph over their mangled, curling, dying stems.
They won't win. Any uprising will be put down without remorse. I will choke the lawn with their dead, though it makes my fingertips numb and blinds my cat.
For I am a homeowner. My house is a house of death unto the crawling, flying, stinging and inappropriately blooming things of the earth, and my house shall prevail.
May 21, 2003
Ever get the feeling that life is a vast arid wasteland populated only by small, leathery, water-hoarding lizards that live under hot rocks and are just waiting for night to fall so that they can pounce on you and suck all your precious bodily fluids out through their hollow, needle-sharp teeth?
No?
Oh, well never mind then.
In other news, it is raining and gray, and the view from the 42nd floor of the Multinational Corporate Monstrosity Building is of a few shorter, nearby buildings against a blank screen of oqaque gray nothingness. But I know that this is just because they're overhauling the Matrix image processors for my sector this morning, so they've got to cut down on my view distance until they're back up.
Meanwhile, I'm sucking down the Terrible Flavia (and no, my office isn't the same, but I liked it the way it was, you European purveyors of evil mechanized pseudojava), trying vainly to get a caffeine buzz on so that I can rustle up even the vaguest semblance of motivation. I got nothin'. I'm tapped out. Fagged and fashed, as it were. Bedways is rightways, but it's barely lunchtime and I've spent all morning slaving over a hot laminating machine and working the infernal paper guillotine.
I am, essentially, doing the same sorts of things that I was doing eight years ago, only now I make six times as much for doing them. That's a good thing, although I have not yet expressed the frugality gene supposedly inherited from my mother, so I'm not sitting on the piles of cash that I should be. That's not such a good thing, but I'm working on it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Confronted with the Amazing Expanding Waistline (courtesy of Paxil! Your fattening antidote to the Intolerable Futility of Modern Life! When you have the vague sense that your soul is dying, Paxil is there! Also available in grape and cherry flavor.), and the hairline heading ever-northwards (age, it seems, is a process of expansion and retreat), I feel the urge to do. To produce, to make, to create. This urge then runs headlong into the hard neuro-psychological wall of depression and falls unconscious to the ground. D'oh! Stupid personality.
All of which is a rather long, roundabout way of saying that I've really got nothing to say today, but that my fingers needed some limbering up, so I typed some stuff.
Have a nice day, buh-bye!
May 22, 2003
Wow! Deb--who's been reading this site pretty much since I've been writing it--has generated a graphic for Astonished Head's link on her site.
Now, that's just swell, in an geeky, 'nethead kind of way. Nobody's ever done that for A-Head before.
No mere text link for me from Deb, no sir! I've got a graphic. And an appropriate image, to boot. Too cool.
Go and visit and have a look at the paws on her newest, who is having his feet remade by Science.
Top Three Deviant Googlers Who Have Left This Site in Disappointment and Shame
(with appropriately-placed asterixes to prevent the further attraction of like-minded creatures)
1. "perverted daughter an*l frenzy"
2. "brown bunny gallo bl*wjob"
3. "T*m Brokaw shirtless"
You know who you are.
And, for future reference, this is strictly a Peter "Steaming Canuck" Jennings website.
May 27, 2003
I hate it here. This morning's ferry ride was a waterborne slouch towards a sunken pit of human folly, appropriately punctuated by a blast of stinking diesel smoke from the ferry's engines as we arrived at the Manhattan dock. Last night I had a desperate dream about needing to have some surgery re-done: there were unpleasant adhesions and so forth deep in my guts. I ran through the town, going up and down Main Street looking for the surgeon who had done the work. But the surgeon--who was Tony Shaloub, for some reason--had converted his practice into a cafe with dainty white wrought-iron tables set out on the sidewalk. He couldn't open me up again because his surgical theater now contained well-lit cases full of confections and various coffee shop-like pastries
I don't know how the situation resolved itself, but I woke up feeling like death awaited me in the city and I was stupidly doing everything in my power to go and meet it. First by car, then by train, then by boat I made my way towards it. On the water approaching the still oddly truncated skyline, the weight of monkey folly--all monkey folly, not just the folly of idiot mass murdering Koran-thumping apes in planes--settled on me. Every person I saw was another monkey on his or her way to do monkey business and, most likely, annoy me somehow in the process.
Then I got to my desk and had some coffee, and the feeling abated somewhat...but only somewhat. My attacks of misanthropy are getting worse.
Fortunately, I am not inclined to spend more than a few days at a time in my Unabomber-style shack. But this trend is disturbing. The last time I felt like this with any regularity I ended up naked under a blanket on the sofa, the house madman, fun for parties. Don't get too close; he might spit poetry on you.
May 29, 2003
 This place is haunted.
There are the obvious twin phantoms, of course, forming that vacuity in the truncated skyline that once topped out at at 1,100 feet or so. You can see them most clearly from the river approach. The three surviving cousins, topped by a pyramid, a dome, and a ziggurat, together form a visual arc that now sails off into the shallow sky instead of inclining steeply up the gray faces of the towers. The eye seeks resolution, and finds none.
Once off the dock and on the esplanade, a host of smaller spirits awaits. These are presences, rather than absences. Heavily armed police in squads of three, four and five. The too-new glass of the Wintergarden atrium. The four new American flags atop each corner of 4 World Financial Center. The new, dark red pedestrian walkway connecting the domed and pyramid-topped buildings. The old walkway over West Street, still bearing on its dull aluminum skin the innumerable pocks and scars of cascading debris, amputated and patched with plywood where it once angled to connect to Tower Two. The sidewalk beneath it holds the chipped impressions of tumbling steel.
 And over there, swathed in black windblown fabric, stands the hulking revenant of the abandoned Deutschebank building. Vast swaths of plywood are visible beneath its shroud, and on colder days it vents plumes of steam high above, almost as though it still burns. The street behind it has been completely excavated, fifty feet deep or more, as utility crews continue to rebuild downtown infrastructure. Here on the corner is the shell of "Ten House," housing FDNY Engine 10 and Ladder 10. It's being gutted for renovation. A heart and the word "YOU" remain on the half-open firehouse door, created with pieces of black tape.
It's full of ghosts down here...ghosts of presence, of absence, of memory. I usually avoid the worst of the lot, over by the Pit itself. Each morning I shun the old dull aluminum pedestrian walkway, crossing West Street at a traffic light a few blocks South. The old walkway offers wide-windowed views, suitable for visitors' photographs. It connects to a path on the other side that skirts the edge of the Pit and is walled by scribbled sentiments and tacked-up makeshift memorials.
However, the total effect is impossible to avoid. Every blocked-off street, every extra policeman, every missing tree in the park, every roughly-patched bit of pavement and every newly-installed barricade conspire to create the overwhelming sense, the inescapable, creeping sensation. Even if you've spent two years in a cave with stoppered ears and your hands over your eyes, you'd know: something happened here.
This, in turn, spurs on my imagination, and some days I spend my fifteen-minute walk from the water's edge to my office thinking of nothing but the interiors of aircraft, full of slowly tumbling bodies wreathed in flame, of pilots, dead and bled-out, of smoking moon canyons eight stories wide and three stories tall, 900 feet above the ground.
And I think: you fucking assholes.
For me, this place will always be haunted, and I'm among the least of those affected, having lost no one, sustained no injury, lacking the eternal moment of I'm going to die certainty experienced by my co-worker who watched a tower tumbling towards her. It's not even the souls of the dead, still hovering there, horrified in the sky, that affects me at my core. It's something worse, I think...having to do with the nature of the human animal, the endless, repeated idiocy of murder for spectacle, murder for cause, murder for personal righteousness' sake. It hangs over this place like a pall, a covering for the tomb: humans did this.
I find that knowledge incredible only because I am such a sheltered, first-world person, a doughy white man of privilege. I'm sure that inhabitants of Rwanda or Bosnia would have no trouble absorbing it. The fact that such depravity is unique here doesn't make it unique in the world. Over the course of human history it's not even unusual. But--selfish as I am these days--that knowledge doesn't help me. It doesn't shorten the eternity between one heartbeat and the next when--as often happens in a large building--there's a distant boom or bang, and I wait to see if it's just someone working on building machinery, or if the windows are going to explode inward, if the floor is going to heave up and then drop me out into the May sky, if this orderly space of cubicles and water coolers, office doors and computers, is going to turn into some unrecognizable maelstrom of fire, wreckage, and pieces of the dead.
I'm sure that at some point such moments will be memories, too. For quite awhile I avoided them altogether. Recently, though, they've increased...unexpectedly, I should add. Twenty months on, I've suddenly got more jitters and vivid imaginings than I did twelve, or even six months after the events. I'm sure there's some psychological explanation, and that I'm well within some normalized curve of trauma response.
Writing about it seems to banish it, to some extent. I feel better now, at the end of these paragraphs, than I did at their beginning. Yesterday, as I walked to the ferry dock at the end of the day, the squall that Pea had told me about on the phone two hours before finally reached New York. It took as long to travel from my house to Manhattan as I do. The wind kicked up, and the air took on the tang of incipient rain. I've got a peculiar affinity for windy days, so I opened my jacket a bit, and left my umbrella in my bag as the first big spatters hit me. I walked through the bluster, and felt great portions of fear and anxiety slough off me with each gust, with each burst of thunder rolling up and down the river.
I don't know why wind and storm work on my head that way, but they do, and I'm glad.
May 30, 2003
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this:
People tend to believe in the things that most reinforce a positive self-image. Thus, if the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Axis of Oil is the tripartite embodiment of all that is petroleum-based and evil, then the constant decrying of that Axis and all of its nefarious schemes makes one, by corollary, righteous. Similarly, if the Clinton/Clinton/Gore triumvirate of Lewdness, Feminism and Earthy-Crunchy-College-Boy Amoralism is the fount of all devilry, then by standing in opposition to it one becomes pure.
Today, I read this:
In short, the justification for bigoted comments directed at those with whom the educated Left disagrees politically is based on two foundations: 1) We're a lot smarter than they are; and 2) We're better people than they are. That logic leads to three inescapable conclusions: We're right. They're wrong. QED: All Republicans are assholes.
Label-wise, I'm politically vague. Nevertheless, Willy Stern is brilliant because he agrees with me and is, therefore, correct. Read the rest, if you would.
[Via Mr. Reynolds]
TANGENTIAL UPDATE: For a thought-provoking treatment of what "tolerance" means these days, check out Paul Griffiths' Proselytizing for Tolerance.
 And then, today: a pastorale, performed with lawnmower, compost pile, and pitchfork.
Or, as much of a pastorale as you can have with a car wash on the other side of your back fence.
Grass grows really fast, or at least our small patch of it does. More accurately, our patch of grass grows at a pace that easily outmatches my motivation to mow it. Whether that's objectively "really fast" or not I don't know, but I tend to doubt it. Nonetheless, following a strange restless night during which the power was out for two-and-half hours, prompting fears for a 'fridge chock full o' fresh foodage (mmm...cow-brisket...), I dragged myself off the bed, threw on the duck boots, and fired up the mower.
Mundane, I know, but a welcome contrast to every single aspect of the city. There: millions of people I don't know in close proximity. Here? Frank the Tractor Collector. There: a near-total absence of greenery, which immediately reminds me of small trees knocked over by buildings. Here? So much greenery I have to kill some of it and chop the rest of it down to size lest it overwhelm me and become living space for small creatures. There: Showers of soot, unexpected bird droppings, and dead newborn pigeons from ill-secured cornice nests. Here? Showers of vibrantly green maple seeds and squirrel nests.
It's true: Flick and Flack have two or three adolescent squirellettes, now, and despite having two fine high-rise apartments in the pine tree out front, they elected to pile a bunch of leaves into the hollow spaces of the porch roof and move in. Some broom-thumping and the expert use of a handheld super-soaker pistol convinced them to change neighborhoods. The next day, the lower of the two high-rise nests was all over the sidewalk. Wild rodent nesting material is its own ecology: fleas, small flies, squirmy unidentifiable grub-like things, and other sundry nest-guests abound, plastered with droppings and bits of fluffy fur insulation. Flick and Flack have been raiding the box pile in the deck out back, so the mess was also full of sodden cardboard, and bits of faded Christmas ribbon that they stole from the trash.
The message, I think, was clear: if you forcibly relocate us we will knock our other house down.
That's Squirrel for pbthpbth! I guess, and still vastly preferable to anything that might fall on your head in the city.
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