There are two kinds of people: those who want an explanation…

Sensory overload is not the issue — stimuli stimulate us constantly.

The issue centers on filtering.

You don’t appreciate your humble beginnings until you’ve had a perspective that tells you who, what, or where you might have been.

Normality is a numbing sensation that blocks the extremes.

For instance, the feel of the plastic keys under my fingers is normal.  I do not know what I miss, such as carving letters in the rough bark of a tree, hammering titles into hard blocks of granite, or writing my name with quill on smooth vellum.

Thus my position — the sum total of my experiences that place this set of states of energy in this spot, spinning around a planet’s core and rotating around the local star — is normal.

I do not know what it’s like to drift far from the pull of gravity.

I pop the joints in my backbone, expecting vertebrae and cartilage to respond as they always have before, relieving the pain of misalignment from working in the overgrown front yard.

Now there’s a hackathon worth sweating over!  But it can wait (as it always does).

While my wife was out of town on travel, I stepped into the woods behind our house, making sure no one in the neighbourhood was casually looking (those who were spying I left to their imaginations and binoculars), grabbed the lip of what, to the casual onlooker would be a large, extremely heavy, impossible to lift boulder, and lifted.

Counterweight hinges are a godsend, let me tell you.

Hidden in the caves that snake through the hills of north Alabama are designated passageways.

Down here, time is measured in…well, we don’t measure time, we measure stalagmites and stalactites.

Our library is composed of crystal formations and cave crickets.

Human construction overhead destroys old libraries, wiping prehistory of our planet from the slate of time and replacing it with notes from the Anthropocene.

The universe is like that, energy moving in bunches, crowding in and taking over a virtual spot held for billions of years by grouped energy states that transform or move on.

[Actually, spots — three-dimensional fixed positions — do not exist but we’ll save that subject for another adventure.]

Moving as regular as clockwork.

Normal.

A few days ago I sat in the library and observed guano.  Honestly, I’d much rather watch an iguana or an igloo but I needed to complete research I’d assigned myself when I was the Reluctant Leader of the Committee planning for his retirement.

There was a bat that ate a bug (or was it an insect?  I dunno.), a bug that once lived in a rug, all snug (of course), with a slug.  Ugh!

I wanted to know if the bug (or insect) had nibbled on the edge of a bog.  A big bog.  Smaller than a bag.  But I’m not one to beg.

So I sat and watched.

Waited until dusk.

No place to busk.

Or bask.

So I waited.

One by one and then a few dozen at once, the bats flew out of the cave, leaving their droppings for my scientific analysis.

Luckily, the bog’s bugs (or insects) have a signature chemical composition that, in the right light, not a bright light (or a Lite Brite), gives away their place in the food chain.

I was looking for the missing link (but not the Missing Link (or Richard Linklater (but maybe later Art Linklater)) that would guide me to a gas that permeates the bog sublayer accidentally stepped on by a boy carrying a buoy (not David Bowie (or a Bowie knife)).

Patience is a virtue.  She’s also a patient at the Virtuous Mother Virgin Ob-Gyn Clinic sponsored by Clinique.

So after I waited, I waded through the guano, holding up the right light until I saw the bog gas’ signature signature.

The puzzle was completed, the last piece put into place.

I had solved the riddle of the case of the cuckoo in the couscous cause.

There are two kinds of people.  Which one are you?