Double Duh!

So, last night, I tried to load a message onto the blog. But the blog wouldn't take. Once my message was keyed in, I selected "Publish Post" and the cursor started pinwheelin', accompanied by a blinking message that said 0% loaded. 0%. Pretty good odds that it won't appear in the blogosphere any time soon. Which raises two issues:

1. This is the first time that I've had any technical problem w/ Blogger, or blogging in general, so it caught me off guard. But it was slightly distressing that there was nothing that I could do to remedy the situation. Pinwheeling and 0% and the inability to troubleshoot or correct: the inept bloogger's trifecta of dysfunction. So the message is lost.

Which begs the second question....

2. What is the fate of that message I sent out into hyperspace? Is it traveling the universe aimlessly, like Odysseus, looking for his home? Will it land somewhhere, adhere to some other message, or starpollen, or will it circle the heavens in perpetuity? How would one ever know

So, little message, which I don't for the life of me remember just now, go. Go forth and represent me well.

!

Duh!

Is there anyone out there?

Where is the creator?

How will I have a voice if you do not fill me with breath, the spirit of life?

Why hast thou forsaken me?

Duh!

Drove down to Lake Geneva with our bikes after school and spent the evening riding around the lake. Very relaxing, perfect evening. Then ate a white pizza w/ mushrooms, Canadian bacon (well, smoky links), banana peppers, and onions). Also had a basket of Jamaican and lime ginger chicken wings. Dinner and tips for $42, ate outdoors on the veranda looking out on the lake and the sunset.

On the drive home, made 5 wrong turns and saw a midget in a Verlo mattress store. Full moon out, a corn moon, so the night sky was glowing. To the north, clouds flashing with lightning out over the lake.

Gophers and Such

As it turns out, the world is made of greasy grimy gopher guts...

Over the last two weeks, as I've been bike riding through the outer limits of Tosa, I have spotted untold numbers of teenage chipmunks, no bigger than 2.5 inches, not including their little Fuller Brush tails... They dart in and around the bushes near the curbs at lightning speed, darting even faster than their adult compatriots.

I saw one teen bastard dashing across the road with a nut half his size clenched in his miniscule jaws. It was as if he was a power lifter run amok, but he barely cleared the curb in his mightly leap to the freedom of the brushlands...

I have seen several crushed by cars, perfectly flattened, perfectly preserved, it seems...

I saw one who had coughed out his guts in a perfect raspberry...

Today I saw two little shits battling as they scurried around our deck and then one seemed to spin out and come to a sudden stop in the grass, lifeless. His foe eyed him from several angles, as if stung by remorse, and then left. The chipmunk lay lifeless for ten minutes, until I came down from the deck and approached him--no movement. I got to the point where I was only inches away before he sort of startled himself back into consciousness and ran away, dazed...

I saw two woodchucks today, one who galumphed madly across the grass to safety and then, inches away from the dense brush, suddenly slowed and then furtively, gingerly, delicately tiptoed into undercover...

The other woodchuck just sat dead in the weeds, oblivious to any other life form, disinterested in anything except his own splendor in the grass....

Idea for Poem

So last week I was attending a soccer game, it was an evening game, and it had been raining for several days, nothing heavy, but a constant sprinkling. The sky was overcast and gloomy, it was a thin drizzle, the world slick and slippery. So as the athletes took the center of the field and the national anthem was played, we all gazed at an empty flagpole. It was almost too much: everyone standing, some singing, some saluting, and we are all staring out across the field at an absence, a lack, an emptiness. It was a postmodern performance--we all imagined the flag there, and we all slavishly honored what we knew was not there.

The anthem was a recording of the school band, and it was a lackluster performance--the bass drum murderously off beat, as was the sousaphone, and so it seemed more like an early practice session of the middle school band. Comic and just bad enough to be awful.

The players on the home team seemed abjectly disinterested--stretching their legs, looking down at the grass, spitting, talking.

At the moment I thought of our troops in Iraq, how they are putting their lives on the line across the globe so that we do not need to sacrifice or suffer, and I thought of all of the blistering close-minded rhetoric that challenges the patriotism of those who question our country's mission in the middle east.

[On the first anniversary of Katrina President Bush was asked in a televised interview why he had not asked Americans to sacrifice as we fight in Iraq. He answered that Americans have suffered and sacrificed. They pay higher prices, they had their lives interrupted, the economy suffered, energy prices have soarde. That is a strange kind of sacrifice or suffering.]

i thought of the arrogance we all at that moment held collectively: the right, the privilege, to enjoy a soccer game, to compete and hope to win, in a game of relatively no importance and yet many of the people at this game deeply cared about its results, far more than they cared about what their country was doing in Iraq.

We seeem to be distracted. We seem to be duped into see something that is not there.

The excuse offered later in the game was that the flag was not flown during drizzly days.

So we must save the flag from fire and water? We must watch what we say and think because our questions and convictions suggest that we have gotten ourselves into trouble by naively entering the business if nation-building, by blinding ourselves from our desire to hope that other countries with complex histories will suddenlu drop their stories and somehow embrace democracy?