xtcian

cemetry gates

11/23/03

Unseasonably warm weather allowed us to go outside and do everything that will be impossible in a few short weeks: I took down the Japanese Beetle traps, unhooked the Mousquito Magnet, and yanked the Anti-Deer Fox Urine Dispenser around the garden. All of these things are designed to keep the Natural World™ out of our existence up here on the farm, and all of them had a success rate of, say, 77 percent.

The top section of the barn had become something of a killing floor; there were dead bats, a dead bird, dead mice, and most painfully, a beautiful dead kitty cat. My feeling is that all of them fed on each other, and all of them ended up losing. The culprit might be this gorgeous red fox that Chopin the Dog flushed out of the underbrush. I have rarely seen anything that beautiful, and any digital picture therewith would have been tremendously unsatisfying.

If you want to have a healthy, Buddhist-like understanding of your insignificance, spend the day outdoors; if you want an unhealthy, despondent understanding of your insignificance, spend the night online. I came across about 450 more blogs tonight, most of them quite funny, all of them interconnected in a symbiotic, glowing sort of way, and I began to feel a little shaky. It's obvious that some people's Blogs really are their Lives, there very little in one that is not shared in the other.

This afternoon, I was also momentarily thrown into a bit of dyspepsia whilst at the Johnson's Antique place in Millerton, where I found a cache of old novels sitting on one of the ancient bookshelves. Think Morrissey's lyric:

All those people, all those lives
Where are they now?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born and they lived and then they died.

And you think to yourself, do I really believe this mega-dose of exceptionalism I've feasted on since grade school? What makes me dare to try so much, when so many have gone before, and so many are doing the same? Look at the mastheads of magazines and newspapers, respected journals of serious (and not-so-serious) thought helmed by all these people, and they have jobs, steady jobs, and you do not.

It's all a high-wire act with no net, and the crowd murmurs humiliation, and you just have to keep walking, looking up, and realizing that there's no such thing as falling.