A fly was buzzing around my head off and on all day yesterday. Since the weather has changed from summer to fall I've seen a lot of these little guys looking for new places to live. The housing crisis must be a problem for them similar to the problem being face by those of us with only two legs, but I'm not about to open my doors for them to move in. There are contaminants enough being brought in by grandkids. I just don't need any more things to worry about. I would swat at this fly with my hand when it landed within arms reach and was only giving it exercise and a chance to mock me. It wasn't going to be a good relationship and we needed to end it soon.
I like Ed Abbey's take on living things. In “Desert Solitaire” he said, "I'm a humanist. I'd rather kill a man than a snake." I don't know if I feel that strongly about it, but I do like the sentiment. This fly was straining the relationship I have with the natural world/human world interface. We were not making progress toward a de-escalation in hostilities, but moving toward a serious confrontation. I would come to the table with plans and proposals, my needs and expectations and wait to review the materials offered by the fly. Nothing came. He was stonewalling me and expanding his territory and thumbing his proboscis at me by landing on food and utensils. All of them places clearly outlined in my negotiation documents that were being ignored. There was a confrontation brewing, but I was attempting to find ways to avoid violence if I could. I opened the door so he could go to the screen and use that as eventual access to the outside world where another place of refuge might be found. He ignored my offer and landed in the fruit dish and wandered from apple to banana and back, mocking me once again. This was getting personal.
It's always amazed me that we can drive hundreds and thousands of miles and never crash into another car. Think about it for just a moment if you please. Each of us locked inside our own steel, plastic and glass machine barreling down our 10 foot wide section of highway at high speed, with all of these internal and external distractions and we do it safely. The rules of the road prevail. Even when we find those jerks who make their own rules and fail to signal or drive within 15 or 20 miles per hour of the recommended speed, our understanding of the rules work to keep us safe. It happens at times that two vehicles attempt to violate physics and occupy the same space at the same time. Usually its a small space and the result is a 'fender-bender'. Occasionally it's a large space they try to share and the results are serious, even deadly. The amazing thing is it doesn't happen all that often considering how many cars there are on the streets at any one time. Add to this the fact that each of those drivers is locked inside their own brain-case and some of them are mis-wired, malfunctioning, unfocused or closely focused on anything other than the operation of the vehicle, and it whole thing becomes nearly a miracle. 'Faith and Begorrah', we're all potential saints. I find it even more daunting that the average vehicle has thousands of parts, most of which are critical to safe travel and were manufactured by disgruntled workers after a bad fight with their spouse or kids. They don't know me and couldn't care less if I'm safe as I drive to the store for my weekly supply of bacon. If I die in a horrible accident because the framus came loose and flew into the discombobulator that they failed to secure, I'm just another statistic that will never be part of their life. All for my desire to eat a little bacon.
We constantly are making decisions as we do our daily time travel, bringing the other three dimensions into the equation as well as an awareness of all these other stable and moving objects out there. It shouldn't be as safe as it turns out to be. Time is ours to use and timing our turns, stops and accelerations is critical to our successful completion of each and every day. We grasp the operational nature of it, but not the math and science behind it. If we had to do that as well, we would probably die in our chairs, unable to successfully put food in our mouth or get out of the way of a runaway vacuum cleaner. The fly mocked me and refused to negotiate. He was convinced that his skill in flight, multi-faceted eyes and quick reaction times would be enough to homestead here in my house. I escalated the battle and with the extended reach of my light green plastic flyswatter on the wire handle, proved that he needed to improve his timing. Or at least he needed to learn the rules of the road. My road.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
this is a story that may go somewhere, someday
The problem he was facing made his head hurt somewhere between his left eye and the base of his skull. It wasn’t just complicated and frustrating, it was getting cats to square dance. He didn’t say it couldn’t be done but he wasn’t about to channel his inner politician and promise it would happen. This effort would require money, patience, a prostitute with a heart of gold, an attorney with poor judgment and a good cook. He had a few bucks in his wallet, a library card, coffee buzz and an old jeep he had just beat up with an aluminum baseball bat. It wasn’t looking good.
That morning he had taken a reheated cup of coffee from his kitchen to drink while the Jeep warmed. Late fall frost had turned the Cherokee windows gray in the pre-dawn light. The warm cup had melted a circle on the roof of the car in the time it took to fish the keys from the pocket of his worn jeans and unlock the “beast from the City of Soul-Sucking Darkness”. Beast had been his favorite vehicle ever, dependable, strong and with a kickass stereo that was the only place left that he could play his collection of cassette tapes.
The combination of cold moist air and no winds had allowed the frost to grow crystal patterns that as they flowed and grew appeared to be the size of dinner plate dahlias on the windows of Beast. The engine moaned three times as he turned the ignition and then caught, first rough and then smoothing to a smoker’s purr. He turned the defroster on just as the November sun was changing the elemental base of the frost from diamond and steel to topaz and gold. He turned toward the window and watched as the flat crystals of frost softened. Channels began to open and flow across the window as solar fusion and internal combustion conspired to vaporize this microns thick icepack. The world outside was revealed as frost slid downward on lubrication made of its own mass recently converted from solid to liquid.
It was going to be an unseasonable, warm day with clean air and plenty of promise for enjoyment. Except for having to meet with a former co-worker for lunch, the day would be his. As he started to back out of the drive he felt a bump and heard a crunch that made his teeth hurt.
That morning he had taken a reheated cup of coffee from his kitchen to drink while the Jeep warmed. Late fall frost had turned the Cherokee windows gray in the pre-dawn light. The warm cup had melted a circle on the roof of the car in the time it took to fish the keys from the pocket of his worn jeans and unlock the “beast from the City of Soul-Sucking Darkness”. Beast had been his favorite vehicle ever, dependable, strong and with a kickass stereo that was the only place left that he could play his collection of cassette tapes.
The combination of cold moist air and no winds had allowed the frost to grow crystal patterns that as they flowed and grew appeared to be the size of dinner plate dahlias on the windows of Beast. The engine moaned three times as he turned the ignition and then caught, first rough and then smoothing to a smoker’s purr. He turned the defroster on just as the November sun was changing the elemental base of the frost from diamond and steel to topaz and gold. He turned toward the window and watched as the flat crystals of frost softened. Channels began to open and flow across the window as solar fusion and internal combustion conspired to vaporize this microns thick icepack. The world outside was revealed as frost slid downward on lubrication made of its own mass recently converted from solid to liquid.
It was going to be an unseasonable, warm day with clean air and plenty of promise for enjoyment. Except for having to meet with a former co-worker for lunch, the day would be his. As he started to back out of the drive he felt a bump and heard a crunch that made his teeth hurt.
Time is a liquid
It used to be that if I had an appointment at 11:00 in the morning that I would incorporate it into my lunch schedule. I might get to work a little early and depending on the nature of the commitment, I'd grab something to eat on the way back to the office or just eat something at my desk. Not a big deal. Yesterday I was about to make up a pot of coffee to linger over with a visitor when I realized that I had 20 minutes to get to an 11:00 appointment. I was wearing my tee-shirt from last night, cotton gym shorts and I was barefoot. It used to be 11:00 came just around lunch but on that day it arrived shortly after breakfast. It's not always that way. In fact it's always different and I think I know why. Time is a liquid flowing in unique and incomprehensible ways.
It isn't a liquid we can consume like beer but we can drown in it. It can wash us away in a raging torrent or we may end up becalmed with no wind in our sails to move us along. There are steady currents and trends that, if we begin to understand them, may aid in our navigation. But it is complex beyond our ability to understand, constantly changing and occasionally surprising. The single major constant is movement, mostly in one direction. Sometimes we are aware of the drip, drip, drip of seconds falling out of a clock in a quiet room as we watch someone sleep. Other times we are pushed off our feet by a firehose full of days or weeks and we wonder if we will ever get a handle on what all has transpired. We can be surprised when we discover a whisp of time has stuck to us and we revisit a moment that has already flowed past or more strangely something that hasn't, but could be downstream, waiting.
Someone with a strong understanding of fluid dynamics may have a better idea of how it all works, or what to expect from time. Me? I only have a few clues and stories that may help understand some of it. I think of old sayings that work for both time and water and my favorite is 'you can't step into the same river twice'. Time works like that, doesn't it? Even in those days at work when it seems like the tasks we did the day before are on our desk once again or it looks like the wall we painted has to be painted once more, there are differences. When we start planning on continuity and stability, the pattern changes and we are drowning once again. I walked down a narrow desert canyon once where the stream was flowing clear and slow, rarely deep enough to flood over the tops of my boots. I drifted into a walking meditation, Zen in the canyon. Multi-colored sandstone walls twisted around me, keeping my hiking companions out of sight and the sound of their passage away from my ears. A soft down-canyon breeze pushed the quietly applauding willows around and stirred up the scent of organic mud, flint and a sweetness of distant blooms. My pack was comfortable. my stride was regular and just as I was about to accend to the next level of consciousness, I stepped off a rock into a knee-deep pool disguised by sediment stirred by an eddy in the stream. Twisting and falling, trying to keep my camera dry and not break my bones, I ended up on my ass, cool water washing away my dignity as well as that cosmic train of thought. Laughing waters for sure.
Time and water came together at that moment but I wasn't ready to understand. Something about keeping my sleeping bag dry and being able to survive in the wilderness started nagging at my mind. The water didn't do anything different than it normally would, I just didn't see it. Now that I think I understand more about it, I'd probably still end up on my ass. I can't increase my ability to both think cosmic thoughts and walk in a stream. During that disorienting fall a flood of time washed over and around me, filling my world with enough time to think of how I was about to land, the importance of keeping the camera dry, if I was going to need to get someone's attention if I was damaged, who the hell put that hole in the river and why was the sky such a wonderful shade of dark blue against the yellow canyon wall at this time of day. No one else felt that same flood of time. It wasn't confined by the canyon walls like the stream and could have been moving in any of several directions. Regardless of the direction, straight up from the core of the Earth, downward, sideways or hopscotching along like a rook, it changed my capacity for experience and moved along.
It would be wonderful to be able to control it, dam it up, channel time along nice confined routes that benefit our world but it is a primal thing that can't be contained or controlled. Hell, just don't tell me it's other than normal to not see the knee-deep pools until we are drying our butt on the warm rocks as time and the stream chuckle.
It isn't a liquid we can consume like beer but we can drown in it. It can wash us away in a raging torrent or we may end up becalmed with no wind in our sails to move us along. There are steady currents and trends that, if we begin to understand them, may aid in our navigation. But it is complex beyond our ability to understand, constantly changing and occasionally surprising. The single major constant is movement, mostly in one direction. Sometimes we are aware of the drip, drip, drip of seconds falling out of a clock in a quiet room as we watch someone sleep. Other times we are pushed off our feet by a firehose full of days or weeks and we wonder if we will ever get a handle on what all has transpired. We can be surprised when we discover a whisp of time has stuck to us and we revisit a moment that has already flowed past or more strangely something that hasn't, but could be downstream, waiting.
Someone with a strong understanding of fluid dynamics may have a better idea of how it all works, or what to expect from time. Me? I only have a few clues and stories that may help understand some of it. I think of old sayings that work for both time and water and my favorite is 'you can't step into the same river twice'. Time works like that, doesn't it? Even in those days at work when it seems like the tasks we did the day before are on our desk once again or it looks like the wall we painted has to be painted once more, there are differences. When we start planning on continuity and stability, the pattern changes and we are drowning once again. I walked down a narrow desert canyon once where the stream was flowing clear and slow, rarely deep enough to flood over the tops of my boots. I drifted into a walking meditation, Zen in the canyon. Multi-colored sandstone walls twisted around me, keeping my hiking companions out of sight and the sound of their passage away from my ears. A soft down-canyon breeze pushed the quietly applauding willows around and stirred up the scent of organic mud, flint and a sweetness of distant blooms. My pack was comfortable. my stride was regular and just as I was about to accend to the next level of consciousness, I stepped off a rock into a knee-deep pool disguised by sediment stirred by an eddy in the stream. Twisting and falling, trying to keep my camera dry and not break my bones, I ended up on my ass, cool water washing away my dignity as well as that cosmic train of thought. Laughing waters for sure.
Time and water came together at that moment but I wasn't ready to understand. Something about keeping my sleeping bag dry and being able to survive in the wilderness started nagging at my mind. The water didn't do anything different than it normally would, I just didn't see it. Now that I think I understand more about it, I'd probably still end up on my ass. I can't increase my ability to both think cosmic thoughts and walk in a stream. During that disorienting fall a flood of time washed over and around me, filling my world with enough time to think of how I was about to land, the importance of keeping the camera dry, if I was going to need to get someone's attention if I was damaged, who the hell put that hole in the river and why was the sky such a wonderful shade of dark blue against the yellow canyon wall at this time of day. No one else felt that same flood of time. It wasn't confined by the canyon walls like the stream and could have been moving in any of several directions. Regardless of the direction, straight up from the core of the Earth, downward, sideways or hopscotching along like a rook, it changed my capacity for experience and moved along.
It would be wonderful to be able to control it, dam it up, channel time along nice confined routes that benefit our world but it is a primal thing that can't be contained or controlled. Hell, just don't tell me it's other than normal to not see the knee-deep pools until we are drying our butt on the warm rocks as time and the stream chuckle.
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