It's one of those rare evenings......pellucidly clear. Looking to the
east.....where the lake would be if you were close enough to see it.....the
air has a remarkably transparent quality......what people like to think
crystallized carbon should look like. If the houses across the street and
those for innumerable other blocks weren't in the way, you'd swear you could
see Michigan from here.
Look the other way, toward the neighbors garage, boat, and unruly bridal
veil, and another world suddenly appears. Turn around again. Keep the
evening sun to your back.......the chive blossoms make lilacs blush in envy.
In between, there is nothing......nothing so thick you could cut out chunks
of it and sell it to new-agers as a remedy for whatever the **** it is that
ails them. Turn again. Look toward the sun......not AT it.....but in the
general direction. Keep your hat brim low. The nothingness is alive. Fly
fishers look for hatches......but they only look sometimes.......sometimes
it's the wrong times......and places.
In the back yard. Don't know what they are. I don't care. I suspect the
fish wouldn't either. Whatever they are, there are a LOT of them. Looking
at them.....through a ruby glass.....I wonder that it is possible to breath
without feeling the chunks thumping in nasal passages. DAMN, there are a
lot of bugs flying around! And they're GOOD bugs......haven't been bitten
since last September.
As the sun sags ever lower toward the west.....toward a presumably desired
oblivion (it HAS been a long day!).....ever more invisible details spring to
sudden, if ephemeral, life. Spiders, those eternal (and, one must admit,
not entirely hopeless) optimists, have placed obscure traps.....visible only
now, and only briefly (EVER so briefly).....in places where even the
mindless hoards of insensate bugs realize they have no legitimate business.
They are out cavorting in what little remains of the warming
sunshine.....far away from the silken abattoirs in the shrubbery and the
poisonous fangs of their arachnid kin. A lot of spiders must starve to
death.
Joel called about an hour and a half ago. We're going to meet for breakfast
a week from tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m.....or thereabouts......in a place
so secret that there simply MUST be people on each and every continent who
don't know about it. Then we're going somewhere else to do something else.
I could tell you about it, but then I'd have to beat up your old man.
Don't tell George. I mean it!
Wolfgang
anyone else, of course, is welcome to join us.