Why Heads are Round

'Why’re heads round?' Well I tell y’. An' believe you me, son, I done some thinkin’ on this one, too. Lots of it. Havin’ plenny o’ time for consumption, not to mention digestion, o’ suchlike deliberations.

I figger it’s like this. Now you’s probly too young to remember, but when I was jus’ a pup that’s when all this newfangled video stuff it first started takin’ holt o’ folks’s minds—back when folks use’ta sit’n talk ‘n not hav’ta be starin’ at some damn TV screen or cell phone or—….yeah, or sittin’ there a’whistlin’ or hummin’ little bits’n pieces o’ music which no one else cain’t hear. Yeah, like that.

Anyway, like I’s sayin’, first game I recall was one called Pong. Don’t know why they didn’t just call it Ping Pong, for that’s what it was, ‘ssentially, anyways, just ‘lectronical instead’a…….well, you know what I mean…….’stead’a….well…..’stead’a real-world-like.

So, like I’s saying, this here Pong, two folks play it jus’ like the real-world Ping Pong, only you play with this here little joysticky thingumabob, look’n like a little gear shifter knob thing, which controls your….well, controls your un-real-world Ping Pong paddle. Now, if a fella’ got some time in on that Pong game he could do all sorts o’ tricks, like putting spin on it an’ other such tricks an’ what all else I don’t even recall, bein’ about 35 years ago now since I goofed with one o’ them Pong contraptions.

Anyways, one thing ‘bout that Pong game was it had a few idiot-syncro…things, so to speak. And one o’ them idiot-syncrothings was that if you could get that Ping Pong ball goin’ straight back’n forth between the paddles, well, y’could just leave it be an’ go get yourself a koolaid or a beer or have a cigarette or smoke doob— ….yeah, a joint. Or hell, a fella could go ‘n watch hisself a movie ‘n fly back ‘n forth to Jupiter!

Don’t matter when he come back, that little Pong ball’ll be still a’boppin’ back’n forth, bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk, here to eternity, 'r so I guess. Leastwise ‘ntil the ‘lectricity goes off.

So, anyways, ‘f’I’can ever get back to what I was gettin’ at: I figger that’s why our heads are round, instead of square. Y’see if they was square, an a fella started thinkin’ ‘bout somethin’, say somethin’ philosophicalwise, an that there fella he runs up against some condrum or some such mental difficulty, well that thought, if his head was square, mind you, boxlike, so to speak, well, that thought it’d just begin to bounce back’n forth against the inside ‘o that fella’s percranial an’ it’d just keep goin’ bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk, n’ that fella, less’n somebody or somethin’ come along to jog him outta that there stuck position, well, I figger he’d probably jus’ stand there ‘n drool ‘n wither away ‘n die, ‘ventually, anywise. Course a lion ‘r a tiger ‘r a bear ‘r somesuch other hungry critter’d more’n likely come along an’ see that fella standin’ there a'bonkin'n a’droolin’ and that there hungry critter'd just have themselve an easy dinner. An o'course that would’n do. Leastways not for homeo-sapients family, on the whole, least not accordin’ to that there Darwin fella anyways.

So, theerywise, in order to keep that from happenin’, I figger: heads is round!

Well, truth be told, strictly speakin' o'course, fact is, they ain’t even round. They’s only sorta round. Oblong, if you will. An’ when you take inta ‘count all the little bumps’n flat spots'n unregularities on a fella's---or fellette's---head, as the case may be, well, then I 'spect there ain’t much of chance o’ that philocondrum problem ever gettin’ the chance to opportune itself stuck in one o’ them idiot-syncro things ‘n goin’ on forever’n ever: bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-like.

Anyways, that’s why heads is round. Or so I reckon. Likely as not, anyways, ‘n I ain’t never heard noth’n which might prove me wrong.

Course I seen a few folks who do just seem to stand there ‘n drool, so to speak. But I ‘spect their troubles’s less about unendin’ thoughts as it is about lack of thoughts......‘f‘ya know what I mean.
“Course, that’s a whole nuther thing, on which I done spent no small amount ‘o time myself a’bonkin back’n forth on. So to speak.

't's gettin' late though, 'n that theery’ll have to wait for more awakeful ears.

Night.

DOCTORS: PURE UNADULTERATED LUNACY!

After 10 years of back problems, I've come to two inescapable conclusions:

#1) Doctors, being entirely all too human, will likely as not set a patient to a path which, sooner rather than later, leads the still-suffering patient back to the doctor's magazine rack. Sometimes direct; somes circuitously; sometimes, even, to another doctor's* magazine rack. (*A biologist might call this "symbiotic behaviour between competing organisms").

It's an entirely understandable, indeed, almost forgivable behaviour developed over the millenia. Imagine, if you will, in the proto days of the healing arts, a village healer who actually healed. The end result? A healthy village, of course. But, alas, an unemployed healer. Better, in a Darwinian sense, for the alleged healer at least, to only partially heal. Or, better yet, simply provide some temporary relief. Or, best yet, a temporary relief which, alas, brings about new ailments for the ailer. BINGO! New ailments whose ill-conceived treatments invariably provide yet more ailments whose discomforts and prognosis is often far worse than the original. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum (and all too often, ad nauseum). Not to mention one very happy village healer, with a brand spankin' new set of Pings in the trunk of his jet black AMG.

Inescapable conclusion #2) When faced with musculoskeletal ailments, especially the type which evidently accompany the natural aging process, the best course of action is generally to attempt to figure out where the discomfort is actually generated (no small feat, especially for the doctor, who can't actually feel the discomfort, virtually never listens to your answers to the questions he asks you, and pretty much just guesses at the problem and the solutions to the guessed-at problem anyway, regardless of all the zillions of dollars worth of technology at hand). After a few years of discomfort you will eventually understand whatever mechanical malfunction is taking place inside your epidermis. Better yet, your problem will more than likely be well along on its way to taking care of itself....as 90% of these types of problems seem to do. By themselves.

In the meantime? Movement. Lots of it. In every way possible. And as much as possible; without, of course, inflaming the offending muscle, bone, joint, vertebrae, facet, etc, etc. And restrict your intake of calories to roughly match your output of calories, or you'll get fat(ter). You will, most likely, with patient consistency, figure out (usually unconsciously, at first), if not the actual medical diagnosis, at least a newly modified way of functioning; often at a level which is nearly as good as what you had before. Possibly even better! (Or, in the case of your garden-variety couch potato, often a much higher level of functioning will be achieved, since said couch potato suddenly realizes just how wonderful and precious his newfound mobility really is.)

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. DO NOT RELY ON THIS DISINFORMATION. IT IS FICTIONAL, CRAZY, STUPID, UNPROFESSIONAL, LUDICROUS, ILL-ADVISED, PURE UNADULTERATED LUNACY!

Foreign Policy: damned-if-you-do.....

The older I get, the more it becomes obvious that foreign policy is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't sort of affair. The question is less do-we-or-don't-we; more of a just-how-far-do-we-go sort of thing.



(admittedly farfetched) Example: Russia begins a slow but steady strongarm march across northern europe, never actually firing on anyone, but using their considerable political power to suck back up its old satellite states as it goes.



Do we (the USofA) turn our guns on Putin (or whichever former KGB agent is now running things) or do we heed Jefferson's warnings to steer clear of "foreign" entanglements? If we turn a blind eye as they vacuum up their old neighbors, then we risk letting them gain so much power and momentum that they may just decide the USofA has lost its resolve to be the world's top cop. Then who know's where they'll stop? Germany? France?



What's to stop them from laying seige to Canada? The US military and the threat of nuclear war, of course. But, by that time, after the majority of the world's industrialized nations are behind the new iron curtain, the US's geopolitical situation is not so unassailable any longer.



How such a scenario turns out is better left to a historical novelist with a keen eye for the future. But, to the discerning eye, what seems obvious is this: doing nothing, i.e. nonintervention, would appear to be little more than slow suicide, geopolitically speaking.



So, rather than doing nothing, we intervene when Russia starts on their southwestward march. We send envoys first. Then we send some troops. Then we lob a few missiles, careful to land just short of any target which might earn that infamous Russian animosity (or retaliation), but just close enough to let the Russians know what they're marching into.



At this point, one of two things happens: a) the Russians do an about face and go back home; or b) the Russians lob a missile back at us---maybe not so careful to avoid hitting, say, Anchorage. Now, of course, it's too late for any flag-waving "patriotic" American to reconsider. Congress howls for blood. The commander in chief says "let the dogs out," and all hell breaks loose.



Of course, these are two very simplistic scenarios, but history is littered with inextricably complicated issues whose origins are ridiculously simple, even if intractable. Water. Minerals. Skin color. Language. Religion. Maybe even some old slight from a couple thousand years ago. Bloody wars have been, and are still being, fought over such simple things. And there appears to be no end to warmaking in sight. Especially not when you have very powerful people making very big stacks of hundred dollar bills faster than they can count 'em as long as there is even a remote possibility of war on the horizon.

This I believe

This I believed

...to be the irrefutable Truth. The singularity of truths. The one Truth. The one true thing, on which hangs precariously the eternal survival of all manspiritkind.

And that Truth is this: outside of Jehovah, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, aka The Trinity, there is no hope. No hope of a heaven. No hope of an escape from a hell. No hope of peace of mind. No hope of joy.

No-hope-of-joy.

No joyful hope that one might someday overflow with a blissful sense of well-being as he gazes into the eyes of his happy children; who are in turn staring into the eyes of their happy children; who are in their grandfather’s arms.

None. Whatsoever.

Nor is there hope that one might look into the eyes of his mate and lover and feel that sense of oneness which binds two people’s souls together, if not forever, at least for this bit of earth-bound eternity they do have together. No hope that one might stare into a sunrise and feel the warmth on her face; without, at best, a nagging sense of guilt which poisons each moment of the unbeliever’s life.

Cut to present:

I drug this concept along with me, not unlike a rotting corpse, since before time immemorial; its condemning murmur resonating its way to my miniature ears, already perked as I floated peacefully in my mother’s warm, loving amniotic utopia. As I grew, I willingly refused the keys which would unlock the shackles that bound this concept to my ankle (bound to my ankle because, though out of fear I willingly submitted to dragging it around, I was never able to actually shoulder the burden.) And on the rare occasion when my mind would ask Why?... I nervously shushed it and hoped Jehovah wasn’t paying attention.

But then, relatively suddenly, I had two boys who would soon be asking me questions; and I was forced to ruminate on what turned out to be an increasingly difficult concept: the idea that, without a Deity to answer to, there is no compelling reason for a person to live one's life in a moral, ethical, fair, compassionate manner. This, of course, led me directly to the next problem: there are many moral, ethical, fair, compassionate people in every culture in every corner of the world (presumably.) And since relatively few of these far-flung peoples are Christians, might it be possible that it’s not the Deity, but the belief in the Deity? In fact, not even the belief in the deity itself, but the belief in the consequences of pissing off the deity, which provokes the goodness and suppresses the less-charitable animal instincts of our human nature.

Yes! There it was. Plain as day. Though we don’t share the deities, we do share the belief; and when all is said and done, it’s the belief, the faith (to borrow their term), which grabs us all by the shoulders and turns us toward the front of the class and says Stand up straight….or else. The Boogie-man syndrome. "Don't you even think about getting out of that bed, young man, or else..."

It’s a dubious idea, undeniably, that if you took any random million babies from, say, Iran, or Myanmar, or Laos (if there are a million Laotians), and you plunked those babies down in comfy little American cribs in a comfy little Judeo-Christian town in, say, Mississippi, that anything more than a minute fraction of those million babies would grow up to be anything but Judeo-Christian type folks.

This I believe.........(but it's still open to revision ;o))

GRRRRR!

How laughably inept is the priest or pastor or imam or, even more pathetic, the religious apologist or federal attorney or anyone else who claims that some other religion, some “cult,” or following or group...is bogus.
Who’s religion was not at some point a cult? Who’s following wasn’t, in its infancy, sneered at by whatever entrenched religion happened to be prevalent at the time?
Herein lies the inherent antisocial collective neurosis of religion: The one true God has spoken, and he says that our religion is the only religion which he accepts; all others are false religions and must, in the end, be eradicated.

It's a global world! (overheard at the banquet)

“It’s a global world,” says the starched lady in front of us, “and we’ve got to do our part.”
“Excuse me?" says the old man sitting two seats over. "What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘We’ve got to do our part.’”
“No, no, the thing before that,” he points at the sky and spins his finger around. “That ‘Global’ thing.”
“It’s a global world?”
He turns his head slightly sideways, squints, grunts. "Thought that’s what you said.”
The three of them sit there and look sidelong at one another for an uncomfortable long time until the lady sitting between smiles at starchy, lays a familiar hand on the old guy's shoulder and grins at him with her eyes and says, “I’ll explain it to him later, Mrs.-- oop, sorry, Mizz Bow-aired?"
“Buard! Chairperson Buard, thank you.”
“Buh-wahrd?”
"Bwuh! Bward!"
The old guy leans over to his buddy and says, "Rhymes with lard."

Fireside

The wrinkled old chief sits crosslegged, glowing reddish orange from the heap of mesquite coals. He says: “You landed in small boats and you looked around and gasped and wept and said Praise be to your Great Spirit. You told us that this, truly, is your Jehovah’s own Promised Land, which he has given to you. You said ‘He has brought us here to multiply and make this beautiful land our own and sing His praises, amen.’

“We told you: 'The land, she does not belong to us, nor to you. Go. Or stay. As you wish, but in peace. We will be brothers. Like your King David and his friend Jonathon in your holy book.'

We pronounced holy oaths and exchanged meat and skins and corn for whiskey and beads and smallpox. And then you, our new brothers, began marching to the west. You marched 3000 miles. The old man holds out one long hardened arm and pointed toward the sunset, his other fingers hang loosely. “You came through the impenetrable forests, across those eternal plains, clawing your way inch by inch across the merciless mountains. You buried your emaciated dead along the trails as you picked your way through our sacred deserts.

“And when you finally dipped your weary and broken feet in the western sea, the one you call Pacific, you said: ‘Ah, it is good and it is beautiful and desirable, we must put up fences or these savages will take our land and murder our wives and children and steal our horses and cattle.’ And once you had fenced off all that was livable, you said: ‘Now we must have an army, for these savages are great in number and they will surely come and murder and rape and pillage and take from us what Jehovah has promised us.’

desert mountains

Many years and decades later…

he sits atop a sand colored, house-sized pile of rocks which is itself perched, rather regally, he’ll think, atop a scrub pine- and bouler-strewn promontory situated three-quarters up the side of an 11,000 foot mountain. His relative insignificance, driven home and made perceptibly real by the mass upon mass upon which he perches, feels curiously comforting as the sun melts into the boiling heat waves of a horizon a hundred miles west. In his mind, superimposed upon this blue and yellow and rose canvas, he sees his own life inching forward at a glacial pace as though a course on a tattered map—a course which he alone will chart, which he alone will track, to its end. Wherever that may be, he’ll wonder again and again.

A course which, though tandem at times—paralleling the lives of his nuclear circle—is nonetheless a solo journey. As all courses are, he’ll muse. I am my course. I am what I am. A ray? A line? A plane? All these? None of these? A single line on the page, wandering to and fro, back’n forth, yet always moving from beginning to end. Or vice versa, he’ll guess more or less correctly.

The sun’s equator dipping below the horizon, he feels a whisper of a cool breeze on his neck and feels the goose bumps on his bare arms as he watches his life’s map become desiccate and crumble like ancient oak leaves suddenly heaved skyward by the churning gusts of a stormfront.

He’ll look up and stare, as on that bluing canvas the first stars began to materialize overhead, and watch the renewing winds vaporize and carry off into the void the sum total of his life’s journey; and the chart with it; and he becomes one again with the Om. With the Cosmos.

He wonders silently as the arctic pole of the solar disk sinks reluctantly into a sea which is somewhere off beyond the vantage of his eagle’s nest, yet whose salty smell will ever be there at the ready when called upon.

He wonders how different, really, are we: from the computers which we create…in our own image. And, for that matter, how different: from the gods which created us…in their own image.

The rose fades to pink, the lavender to blue; the night bloomers somewhere down there in the creeping darkness of the oasis spread their velvety wings and soak up the universe of dark matter as it flows by like so many dust motes in a photonegative. Above, the blazing pinpoints (with each their own army of theoretical angels singing praises to their masters) flicker like Christmas lights viewed from the mountain top.

…in their own image, he thinks. And he watches as the answer fractalizes and spirals inward—toward some hopeful vanishing point out just beyond the memory of that bubbling horizon—spinning into the singularity into which all questions must eventually fall into in order to be answered.

IN THE BEGINNING

IN THE BEGINNING….

…there was Chance. Some pointyheaded types have beleadened Her with the unwieldy and somewhat uppity moniker of Statistical Probability, but She likes Chance. Fact is, She’s not all hellfired up about the whole capitalization thing. But we do have EuroEnglish conventions. So Chance it is.
Anyway, as we were saying, in the beginning there was Chance. And She was thinking one day: Hmmm, what are the odds….and then She thought that if She introduced another dimension (Let’s us you and me we call it Time, She said) and voila! Suddenly all the theoretical possibilities which exist rushed outward in polar opposite directions—diametrically opposed, of course, so as not to throw everything out of whack before it even gets rolling—from the spark of that thought, and the universe, as we currently attempt to understand it, banged (or burped) itself into being.
Ahhh! Interesting, She said. And then, approximately two/thirtyfivetrillionths of a second later, before she knew what hit her, the dark matter and the light matter began to separate. Right there beneath her metaphorical feet! And, not at all unlike that lusciously deadly Utah powder, it began to slide beneath her feet. (Think: soil liquefaction. Eh? mm-hmm) and next thing He knew She was no longer in control of this new thought experiment He created.
And, well, in a nutshell, both hell and highwater, and everything else came on like a Tucson flashflood.


Things had calmed down quite a bit before the boy Justus clambered off the filthy twin Cessna and was promptly set upon by at least seven species of invisible flying insects. Not that they were actually invisible; it was the grimy salty sweat already pouring into his eyeballs that gave the damn little hemophiliacs free run of the boy’s exposed epidermis.
“Ow! Shit!”
Whack! came the hand that feeds.
“Don’t let me hear you say that again, young man, or you’ll get your mouth washed out with soap.” Justus father: William Piease: 1930—2001: born New Farmington Valley, Nebraska: higher ed’d Holy Warrior College (2nd runner-up valedictorian, vice pres of New Crusaders Missionary Fund, second tenor New Crusaders Missionary Fund Choir).
1st paying job—Assistant Pastor, 4th St 1st Assembly of God, Henry’s Wells, Navajo Nation, SouthWest USofA; $650/mo; rectory included, no car, no insurance: married Wilma (short for Wilhelmina) Proletare: Justus comes along exactly 9 “lunar months” later (said Wilma, grinning, eyes averted).
Listen young man, she growled without ever so much as twitching her permasmile, Jesus didn’t so much as say ‘shoot!’ It’s about time for you to start acting more like Jesus. Isn’t that right, William dear.
Well, Wil, I’m not so sure we oughta be comparing the boy to Jes—
She spun and hissed, still without ever twitching her smile: I told you not to dis…en…fr….urgggh! Don’t contradict me! Ever!
It wasn’t her fault, really. It was her bad time. And, as if that nasty little femmedemon wasn’t enough to deal with, the three-day non-stop series of flights, buses, cabs and donkeys had been rough on her. Womanly woman she was. Her skirt was dirty and her hair had fallen somewhere back around Camaranaol. He told her to forget about it, that nobody down here gave a heck what she looked like. The nuclear lasers shot from her eyeballs at him told him that probably wasn’t the best of consolations he could’ve chosen.
Lest the dear reader (hopefully there’s been more than one) misunderstand: Jehovah and Chance ARE NOT the same deity. Heaven forbid….it. Forbade it, actually. A long long time ago. Well, actually, Moses forbade it. Approximately 3500 years ago. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Or, roughly translated and even roughlier butherphrased: thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

owl kgjn w[erj gpsod (ancient Bedouin)

2.
Why in the world would God send me to this Godforsaken place?
Not a great opening sentiment for a missionary, nor even a missionary’s wife, one might think. But it didn’t so much as phase her, this seeming incongruity. Her consciousness had evolved with the peculiar ability to erect a firewall, so to speak, between her spiritual life and that running commentary which, in most cases, informs our ideas, concepts and, in the end, most importantly, the decisions which we all make. Indeed! Even those decisions we make at the subconscious level—that psychospiritual aquifer flowing beneath the sometimes choppy, sometimes placid, surface of our wonderful thumb-smashing/cigar-smoking/orgasm-having/tax-paying day-to-day reality—are so informed.
Seriously. Listen to this one. One day, in an uncharacteristically lucid moment, as a sophomore at Holy Warrior, on a Friday evening, Willy (her nickname), buzzed on two Schlitz bulls after having ingested a small amount of cannabis for the first and last time, and being completely and naively unaware of her stonededness, she saw the sum total of her knowledge not as a neatly organized hierarchy of intelligently sorted data (how she normally thought of her mind: a filing cabinet for God). No, she sat there giggling and staring and sipping the foam off the warm backwash of her Schlitz and staring out at the desert sunset. She could see (so to speak) her mind as more of an ever-putrifying effluent sloshing back’n forth in her corroded cranium. Flowing flotsam of foaming folderol threatening to drown her consciousness: in social taboos; to crush it between the tentacles of her inextricably rooted religious dogma; to suffocate it beneath sitcom laugh tracks. In her mind, she could see and feel her life as though it was one big purplish cow pie squeezing up from between the toes of Satan. And she reflected on the fact that her life was one of –otherness.
Some other place, some other time, some other job, some other man, some other child, some other home, some otherbody’s bank account. Some other life. Yet, in that vulnerability which getting potted brings on, even the concept of heaven……(is there anything other than the concept of heaven?) …was almost gigglable.
Almost? you ask. Obviously you weren’t raised in the Assembly of God Church. You try growing up in that jungle of ghosts and goblins and ultimates…and...oh, what's the use.
It does get better, though. Hopefully….

A magical 15 minutes

Trying to beat the darkness to my car after an unexpectedly long walk this evening I spot an owl taking off from a telephone pole. He swoops down from the top, makes a long graceful inverted arc toward the next pole and then flares and pulls back sharply, gaining enough lift to take it (just barely) right through the 3rd and 4th wires; and, much to my happy surprise, right over the head of an identical owl setting calmly on the top cross bar of its own pole. I can hear the delayed exchange (approx one second, from that distance) from the seven- or eight-hundred yards between us.

First owl: "Hoo-hoo"
Second owl:"Hoo"

He (or maybe it was a she) sails on by, performs another long inverted arc, pulls up sharply, exactly as the previous demonstration, and then settles, perfectly effortlessly, on top of the cross-bar. They exchangs a couple more Hoos and then leap-frog one more set of poles, performing the exact same maneuvers, identically and with the same beautiful animal grace and relaxed precision.

They continue this game (?) or ritual or whatever it is---launch-dip-flare-dip-flare-land---one after another, almost like two surveyors exchanging places, as they leap-frog down the little valley toward me. One of them, the female I'm guessing (since I have no clue), settles like a helium filled pillow on the cross-bar of the pole directly over my head, looking down at me by rotating its head 180 degrees backwards and peering straight down.

I Hoooo, she Hoo-hoo's back, and we continue the friendly stare-down for about another 30 seconds---until He, the other one, swoops over. The Hoo / Hoo-hoo exchange is crisp and close and it sounds a bit like a verbal baton-handoff, or maybe a casual high-five, in owlese.

She stares back down at me for another minute-or-so. And she doesn't appear to be in any big hurry to take her turn when He Hoo...Hoooooo....Hoo-hoo's. She promptly leans forward, falls & flaps simultaneously and drops into the long inverted arc, just as before. But this time, when she arrives at the pole, rather than surf over the swell of the pole, she flares and settles down right on top of it, between the 2nd and 3rd wires, standing directly opposite and facing He-owl, maybe a wing's length apart. They stand there silent and still for a moment, and then set about their discussion, which sounds, if not heated, then at least a little more serious than the situation warrants.

He, telling her to stay away from the clumsy bald apes down there: "You can't trust them, I don't care how harmless they look...."
She, responding, "Oh, take a pill. What can it do all the way down there?"
He, with a bit of sage advice: "I've heard about them; they're evil, and they're bigger, and closer, than you think."

Of course, it sounds rather more like: Hoo / Hoo-hoo / Hoo-HOO-HooHooHoo-HOO / and so on and so forth. Something like that; it's always hard, not to mention a bit imprecise---this avian-english translation stuff.

The duskness is almost total in the east, and when I turn back toward the sunset I'm stunned by the sparse beauty. Out of the southwest comes a miles-long procession of glowing orange pteradactyls, some rather Monet-ish, some a bit more Cubish (angular, disjointed, malproportioned, you know), but all seeming to be organized fairly well behind the first pre-historic giant floating motionlessly above me (well, almost motionlessly; there was a slight breeze). I stand there, dumbstruck, and watch the rapid evolution of burning and thawing colors: the flaming orange melting into the ever-deepening blue, both seeming to melt into the other. The sun slips its big bald fiery head back onto its pillow for the night.

Wow, I think, doesn't get much better than this: leap-frogging, talking owls, and now this unbelievable sunset. No, I think, it really doesn't get any better than this. And then I turn to see if my new-found, albeit prudently cautious, friends are still conversing on telephone pole. But the next bit of snychronicity, the piece de resistance of this charmed evening, presents itself, takes my breath away, like a god rising out of a volcano.

Directly atop the row of peaks---San Jac, Marion, Gene---to the northeast, there appears to be an almost sparkling white caldera blasting white-hot plasma jets high into the dark blue eternity above it. It is so....so..... well, truth be told, my command of English is far too sketchy to attempt any sort of poetic justice to the power and terrible beauty of this....this thing.

Of course, all this aforementioned jaw-dropping, and aweing all transpire in a small fraction of one second; and I immediately recognize this phosphorescent inferno as our humble little co-journer, Gaia, the moon, hiding behind a very small orographic (mountain-generated) condensation cloud which is being blown, very energetically I might add, over the massive geologic feature of the three peaks. There is not a whisper of a cloud anywhere else in the eastern sky; and the small cloud (moving perhaps 50 or 60 knots, yet not actually going anywhere, thanks to the wonders of mountain atmospheric phenomena) is situated, relative to me anyway, and also relative to the moon, just perfectly, so that the moon, even though it's fully super-horizontal, so to speak, is completely obscured; yet its photons easily blast their way through the thin curtain of vapor, making it appear as though there might be some sort of arc-welding operation, of cosmic proportions, going on atop our three peaks.

I hear the owls Hoo-hooing way off in the distance, having leap-frogged another 700- or 800 yards closer to the moon and its mind-altering special effects show.

And all in the space of about 15 minutes.

But the really amazing thing about it is, it ocurrs to me as I walked home, that this is going on all around me, all the time, every day, every minute, every moment of every minute of every life.

Sun and stars, moons, and volcanoes; and dolphins, alligator lizards, and children; funny faces and elephant's butts in the piles of giant granite boulders, gophers putzing about beneath our feet; spiders zipping up their meal for the night, for tomorrow's breakfast; and lighting bugs, and sand crabs, and..........

Damn, it's all so good.