& other ruminations. &, if not ‘nations’ then perhaps rumiterritories.

AMOEBA FARTS

Hey! Calling all amateur (professional, anybody?) entomologists. I took the pixure above, and below, recently. These larval or cocoonal struxures were under a wooden deck we were cleaning. DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT THE HECK THESE ARE? Is this what the first wave of the invasion of the body snatchers resides in, prior to emerging to take over the world? (Not that Betty and I would know, we’re already snatcht.)

I’m serious here (mostly). What the heck are these? They’re under a deck near our house, people. Who knows, there are probably hundreds more even closer.

Betty and I watched the last

Twilight

movie last night. When Bella awakens in her new life as a vampire, the movie does a good job in conveying her new and intense awareness. Seeing a spider, as if under a microscope, up on a ceiling beam working on its web. A squirrel eating nuts in the forest. Even the scent of blood from a climber’s scraped knee hundreds of yards away and up a cliff.

As Betty awoke this a.m. I inquired about her waking into a new and heightened awareness. Why, you could even hear an amoeba fart. It’s very very quiet, but has a quite distinctive sound.

“It seems that there is not a lot of attention being paid to amoebas in the media,” she opined.

“Yes,” I chimed. “One doesn’t hear nor read nor have occasion to think much about them at all.” Perhaps we’ll do our part to change that.

Betty participates in a couple of book clubs. One of these (or both?) decided to read Peter Heller’s Dog Star. Betty is rarely derogatory about what she reads, but this particular book she decided that the public and publishers and all the acclaim, and fame, was a case of THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES. Lousy book, she said. Pithy. Uses “fuck” too much – which we both agree should be relied upon sparingly. And then only for maximum effect.

And so, while out hiking in the forest above “The Monument” recently she came up with some introductory sentences to her new book. She tried to relate them to me. I suggested she do a parody of Heller’s Dog Star. Disconnected sentences, just tossed out, as if the author hoped the effect would be to ensnare a picture, concepts, feelings, which would guide the reader along in the story.

Life is but a series of random events. Suddenly, the Lebanese* fighter jets flew overhead. In the distance, smoke was still rising from an active volcano. I walked down the path. The effect that the problems we encounter in life has on us, personally, is determined by the importance we give to them. At last, some small measure of so-called “free will.”

I think her book is off to a good start. And I KNOW she’ll do better than that Heller feller.

Milli, the dirty cat.

Milli, closer, the dirty cat.

When one considers the spaces between the tines-of-the-FORKs not ridden, nor RODE upon.

Y … hicimos nuestro diversion o divertido nuevo y Viejo: chinga-de-chinga entre los sesentas.

Heh. (Heh).

Occasionally, far too rarely, I had been considering not being so judgemental. I penned a brief and cryptic note recently while driving, which, upon later reflexion, made little or no sense.

The whirled-why’d environmental prawbleghm #1. Okay. The ultimate goal, nay, not “goal” but inevitability for (wo)man-kind* is for the hide&seek game to end – only to begin all over again.
*Is there a … “manUnfriendly”? Man-mean? Yeah, THAT’s probably more applicable and descriptive.

Now that I think about it, really, try to minimize writing notes while driving. In addition to no texting …

Speaking of “real” authors, something from T Pynchon’s Against the Day:

She sang of longing so deep that humiliation, pain, and danger ceased to matter. He had left so much emotion behind that it took him all of eight bars to understand that this was his own voice, his life, his slight victory over time, returned to fair limbs and spring sunrises and a heart beating too fiercely for reflection driving him toward what he knew he needed, could not live without. (Without a time) as the song, too many of the songs, went – back in that day … what had happened? Where was desire, and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire? He regarded the dawn outside the street door, the cyclic fate of one more room-size Creation assembled from scratch through the dark hours one mean blow, petty extortion, faithless step at a time, a little world in which a city’s worth of lives witlessly, gleefully, in its entire force, had been invested, as it would be, night after night. It was the absence of all hesitation here that impressed him, setting aside the stimulants whose molecular products, occupying by now every brain-cell, discouraged careful analysis. It was a world entirely possible to withdraw from angelwise and soar high enough to see more, consider exits from, but nobody here in the smoke and breaking waves of desire wanted exit, the little world would certainly do, perhaps in the way that for some, as one of her songs suggested, children, though also small, though comparably doomed, are forever more than enough.