A small bird (something like a sparrow I think) discovered that some of the seeds in the bird feeder outside my window are still edible. Shortly thereafter, a cedar waxwing of roughly the same size as the sparrow(?) bullied its way in to take over the buffet. When the waxwing slipped away to swallow its seeds, the other bird sneaked back in to get more food, but left when the bully returned. The waxwing seemed to have no compunction about pushing its competitor off the feeder’s perch, even though there was room for both of them. After watching this back-and-forth for a while, I put out a call for a mediator. A few moments later, an albatross and a bald eagle offered their assistance. I judged both of them unsuitable, figuring their considerably larger size would intimidate the two smaller birds. The larger birds, offended by my decision, left in a frenzy of feathers. Almost immediately, though, an African lion and a gazelle took their places. Despite their sizes, I decided to give them a chance to work out the conflict between the birds. I left for just a few minutes, returning to find the gazelle lapping up blood from the mangled corpse of the lion. How could I have known the gazelle was a rare carnivorous antelope? Apparently, the fatal dust-up between the mammals frightened the birds away; I haven’t seen them since. Hmm. I might find enjoyment in writing children’s books, based on hallucinogenic interpretations of disruptions of the natural order.
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Feed the young barely enough that they will grow into weak, feeble adults. Adults who are better-equipped to understand the use of starvation as a political tool. A tool employed as an instrument of power and control only slightly less jarring than whips and chains. What better way to introduce people to unrestrained cruelty than to expose the population to the barbarism of deliberate famine—using children as pawns in an eternal battle in which conquest at all costs is the sole ambition? Compassion has no place in this crusade. Animosity is the only acceptable emotion in this clash and greed is the principal motive. No one can watch this struggle as an impartial observer; neutrality is tantamount to complicity with the aggressor.
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She sewed sequins to her skirt to start the celebration.
He finally finished the festival on Friday, when fertilizer fueled the fire’s flames.
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When sunlight finds its way through dense masses of branches high in the trees and illuminates a small cluster of pine needles, the color of the spot highlighted by the sun’s rays seems to be lime green. But broadening one’s focus to encompass a wider view, those chartreuse leaves appear gold. Like everything else in the universe, color is contextual…when viewed through my eyes, at any rate.
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In 1971, Leonard Cohen released an album (Songs of Love and Hate) that included a tune entitled Diamonds in the Mine. Among the lyrics for that song were these:
Ah, there is no comfort in the covens of the witch
Some very clever doctor went and sterilized the bitch
Later, near the end of the decade, Cohen sang a live version of the song with some additional lyrics:
I told you all about it in the days of Vietnam
when your poets marched for Uncle Ho
And your sons for Uncle Sam
But which side you’re gonna take now,
which song you’re gonna sing?
With the mega stench of corpses that is blowin’ in the wind
Now, so many years later, I am finding references that suggest Cohen was both anti-war and anti-abortion. That discovery does not damage my appreciation of his music nor his poetry. But it causes me to consider that logic and emotions can comfortably conflict with one another in the same brain. I wonder whether I would have stepped in to save his life if I knew for certain Hitler would have discovered and shared with the world a cure for cancer…if he had lived just one more year?
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Every so often, I absent-mindedly let my morning Ensure get warm before I drink it. When that happens, I am startled when I finally take a sip and discover it feels like warm chocolate milk and has a slightly metallic-chemical taste.
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Once again, fragments of time have disappeared, leaving me to wonder who and where I was while it happened. Three hours have simply vanished since I woke, leaving a stretch of vacant emptiness on the morose face of the digital clock. The crows outside have noticed, too, alerting me to the fact that bright blue dye was sprayed all over the grey sky during the absence of my awareness of time. Snow drifts, some of them several hundred feet deep, could have covered Central Arkansas while I watched time erase all evidence of the bloodshed involving African wildlife and domestic songbirds. But snow was not in the forecast, so people are crawling out of their storm shelters and into their canoes, anxious to check their trotlines to see whether the Mona Lisa and her elves left any Halloween eggs or gefilte fish meatballs. Over the years, I have assigned categories to many of my posts here, but no longer. If I were to do that, still, I might classify this one as Absurdist Fantasy. That might reduce the likelihood that I could be committed to a psychological ward for observation. Depending on your perspective, that could be an appealing outcome.
