Lone Star Tick

Let’s leave testosterone and oestrogen out of this discussion, shall we?

There are ticks all over the yard.

They’s even a’crawlin’ across my new storage shed, afore I finished a’buildin’ the thing, too!

I’m a’gonna step away from fancy talk for a moment and get down to business.

Smellin’ the wind and tastin’ the rain earlier today, I was.

Nothin’ like a May flower rain shower to give this ol’ pilgrim a sense of what’s a’gonna happen next.

Seen a June bug crawlin’ on the driveway.

It’s another sign I reckon is a’tellin’ me what’s a’gonna happen next.

Thing is, I don’t rightly know if’n I otter tell you’ns.

A suburbanised country boy who’s a’fixin’ to tell you sump’n important to you but not to him.

Don’t feel right.

Don’t seem right.

Should I just keep muh big trap shut and let it happen anyway, you not really able to do much about it no hows?

It’s a modern feudal society, they tell me, but I don’t know what that means, do you?

I’m a Traveler, feedin’ off the land.  Watchin’ out for feller predators, I am.

There’s a sucker fish born every minute.

You want I should fix your roof or slap a coat of asphalt on your concrete driveway, gettin’ paid up front, of course?

I can charge it to your credit card so I ain’t the only one a’preyin’ on your financial predicaments.

I don’t barter none.  Cash or credit.

Meantime, there’s sump’n acrid on the wind, a cool breeze blowin’ in.

Ya know what that means, don’t ya?

Muh mindreader is here.  We’s a’gonna tell you’ns who’s been a’cheatin’ on whom.

A fancy set of wheels and shiny baubles on your fingers, wrists and neck are signs you been barterin’ for sump’n I reckon is worth tellin’ the world about, don’t you?

After all, there’s more in a pot of beans than water-soaked seeds!

Time to read some crawdad shells and see what this blackberry winter’s a’predictin’.

My skin’s a’crawlin’ – them tick bites’ a’itchin’ like nobody’s business.  Someone’s in trouble, that’s fer sure.

Watches Nuts and Bolts

Rain fell, as it always seems to do.

Rarely, without the assistance of wind or antigravity, does rain find a way to move upward out of dense humidity we call clouds to reach outer space.

This tale will tail the sordid details of telltale signs of rain.

“Raja!”

“Yes, Lee?”

“When did you first join the Order of Mathemati-e-radicals?”

“Funny you should ask. I was just about to eat my mid-afternoon snack. Here, let me show you.”

Raja put his right index on his nose, drew a straight line in the air down to his breastbone, moved his index finger to his left shoulder and drew a horizontal line across to his right shoulder and then picked up the bowl of freshly-cut fruit on the table.

“Yes, Raja. I know the sign of the Order. Did another member teach you the sign?”

“Not that I’m aware of. My friends at university invited me to attend a special meeting in a large building they called a church. Inside, they made the sign of the Order and informed me they also made the sign before they ate their meals.”

“So…”

“So I’ve been making the sign ever since.”

“And…”

“And one day a member of the Order quoted a long mathematical equation to me after I made the sign, which I could mentally picture as a completion of the formula.”

“You mean he…”

“She…”

“She told you THE formula?”

“Yes. And I could see its beauty immediately, the ultimate explanation of the explanation for everything!”

“She must have assumed you were a higher member of the Order. To share the ‘decoder ring’ in public like that…”

“Yes, well, we weren’t out in the public. Anyway, I quoted her a piece of an esoteric math model developed thousands of years ago, dug up by an archaeologist friend of mine. That got us talking and she inquired about which branch of the Order I belonged to.”

“‘Which branch?’ There are branches?”

“Groups which merely disagree about the purpose of some unsolvable problems, that’s all. Not formal suborders. She holds the belief that no equation is perfect, that a hidden variable, or many, wait to be revealed in even so simple a statement as 1one quals one.”

“She invited you to join the Order after that?”

“No, she assumed I was a member. I guess I’ve always been a member and didn’t know it.”

“What about the Ritual of Initiation?”

“Oh, I’ve taught it to new recruits so many times now I can’t remember.”

“Wow, Raja. To think you slipped into the Order that easily…how many others are like you?”

“Lee, I could say the same about you. How many members require a lot of ceremeny, pomp and circumstance when our only shared goal is the study of the purity of mathematics?”

Lee lifted a glass of water that was three parts per trillion impure. “To the Order!”

Raja raised his fork which speared a piece of what was mostly mango. “May we teach people that the only true religion, science, art, politics or sport is Applied Mathematics – to the Order!”

Best comment of the day

I bet Bin Laden regrets allowing his iPhone app to “use his current location”. — from Megan, under Yahoo comments.

Flush out the covey and watch the hunters take pot shots at the rest of the flock.

Anyone for guessing who the next official “Public Enemy No. 1” will be?  My inquiring mindful bookie wants to know.

Thanks to the anonymous neighbour and his son for checking to make sure my wife and I hadn’t succumbed to CO fumes pouring out of the generator that was running hours after we had power.

Time to read what my ants had built and see if this here future is all they say it’s gonna be – them wooly worms ain’t been as good a fortuneteller as my Crab Orchard neighbour promised me that night we finished off a jug of ol’ “mountain dew.”

Six-legged creatures are just as good, I reckon.

That’s all she wrote for this evenin’ – my bottle of muscadine wine has run its course through muh veins.

Night, y’all!

Egg Case on Hickory Leaf

The calendar tells me today is the first day of May, often celebrated in honour of those who labour for others.

Having mown lawns, cleaned toilets and performed similar labourious tasks, I qualify as a labourer, one who set aside desires of instant gratification to invest in the companies and ideas for which I and others laboured.

Now I relax on this day, a holy one to many, and meditate with thoughts turned into recognisable symbols.

I wait for an interesting topic to hold my mental gaze while floods, fire and famine ravage our species.

What else is new?

If I do not think or write about a topic – person, place, thing or idea – then it does exist with me in this moment.

A single-engine plane flies overhead, perhaps an enterprising person piloting.

Have you ever watched ants pass data through a distributed network-based processing unit represented as an organic biological set of states of energy?

An aquarium heater will warm a tub of water overnight.

Sometimes meditation morphs into a nap. Now is such a moment.

Thanks to Beth at Carson’s Grille; Richard C., Chris and Whitney at Lowe’s.

Time to dream, envision our species 1,000 years from now again, when we and our current form of civilisation will appear barbaric and unenlightened.

“Be yourself – everyone else is taken.”

What have predictable orbits, with six planets in one section of the visible sky, got to do with the life of a carpenter bee or a luna moth?

If nothing, then why do you think they have anything to do with your life?

Sanity check. One, two, three.

Your eyelids are getting heavy. You can taste sleep at the back of your throat. Your head is nodding.

Now, repeat after me, “If my body can’t sense it, it does not exist.”

A Late Comment

Without power for a few days, my wife missed the British big, fat royal family wedding extravaganza.

Watching a replay of the wedding ceremony on her iPad, we both joked about how the video made the wedding look like a cheap English soap opera, complete with bad lighting (in comparison to the overbright lighting of American soap operas), but no longer the bad teeth.

Just another case of reality TV blurring the line between sleazy actors pretending to be “real” people and real people looking like the sleazy actors they are, I guess.

Your True Colours Come Shining Through

A word of thanks to those who provide the backbone of civil society – safety/peace officers, firefighters, petrol/gas/power/water/sewer/phone/road/refuse utility workers, postal/delivery employees, hospital/first aid crews – and in emergencies, the many volunteers who go above and beyond their comfort zones to aid those in need.

Crises are part of everyday life and we respond the best way we can.

My wife and I saw that yesterday when we stopped at the local baseball stadium named after a former mayor, Joe Davis, where local restaurants had donated food being cooked free for the community, with donations taken up for a local charity; Gigi’s Cupcakes handed out free samples for a donation to the Red Cross; and many stores operated with a full complement of employees on-hand to provide them an income during tough economic conditions.

Speaking of which, in the George W. Bush and now the Obama presidential years, as millions of jobs have been added to the employment roster, are we in the U.S. truly seeing not only a loss of “good” jobs to low-wage countries/regions, but a dragging down of the living wage for the majority of Americans?

In other words, as an investor, if I want to maximise my profits, would it make sense for me to invest in a company employing workers who are offered no benefits other than an hourly wage?

I’m putting aside social responsibility at this point and looking solely at the benefits I derive from living with people around me who, for no one reason, are happy to find any job offered to them rather than create their own companies/legal business entities, or manage an investment portfolio that works for them.

While Obama and Trump and all the other political pundits jab each other jovially in hopes of getting the attention of potential voters in the 2012 U.S. legislative/executive election (as well as increase advertising revenue which hopefully translates into higher earnings for entertainers and the producers/agents they work for), I wonder about the truth.

What types of aircraft and from whom is India buying them?

While the rich get richer in an easy-to-make-money global economy, what value is rhetoric?

Is there such a thing as a safe investment?

If the U.S. government lives primarily off the backs of workers whose living wage is less than livable, what about those who live off the U.S. government – are we on an upward or downward spiral?

As long as other governments and NGOs rely on the U.S. as the world’s nonimperialistic police/military force, we’ll be okay?

And after it’s no longer okay, then what?

Questions, questions, questions…

My service to the community is small – while regularly paying taxes via sales, investments or income (except in cases like Amazon.com online purchases, it seems – a good reason to buy locally), and donating to charities I and/or my wife deem worthy, I recently gave platelets to the Red Cross via apheresis on Tuesday.  Is it time to give whole blood again or schedule another apheresis appointment?

This is the only moment I have in which to live.  How I choose to live it with you is in the guise of a regular guy – the Wandering Wonderer, the Invisible Hermit – doing my part to help us live together in relative peace and quiet…the loud 7250 watt generator in the driveway notwithstanding (thanks to City Lumber).

A final thanks to Lowe’s, Huntsville Stars baseball team organisation, Little Paul’s BBQ, Publix, Mapco and Walmart for their service during the regional power outage.

Our prayers, positive thoughts and meditation to those in need and those serving them during the emergency crisis in this part of the North American continent; also to those in wartorn regions of the world; and the woman I saw who stopped on the side of the road to help a turtle get to the other side with the chicken that didn’t know why it was there.