Cicadas fly up off the ground into the trees, their iridescent wings little cathedral windows seeking refuge for mating.

Their lives what we call a series of stagecraft – pupils, largesse, and adultery, or something like that.

My youth spent studying botany and biology shrouded in decades of shredded adulthood.

A black-and-blue butterfly bakes in the sunlight.

Why do people want to find meaning in fulfilling prophecies of their predecessors?

Should a child’s unprotected ears be exposed to the unmuffled sounds of a lawnmower?

What value do you place in the future of your child’s life?

Do you judge your child’s future by referencing your childhood of the past?

Cicadas play bumper cars with the sunroom windows.

Their “singing” matches the rhythmic humming of my tinnitus.

I, like my ancestors and living relatives, am going deaf.

When space and time are bent, what is up?

Cicadas never stay in one stage long enough to need hearing aids.

They don’t need e-dating websites, temporary nests we call houses/flats/huts/tents, shopping malls or sports arenas.

Some days, I think our species has outlived its usefulness.

Some days, I’m thoroughly entertained by what my species calls progress.

“They want meaning or a purpose given by my royal edict?” she asked. “Let them eat cake! Unless citizens are true royalty, their only purpose is to serve me and my whims. No matter how ridiculous they look, my hats will find a ribald buyer with too much money. When reproduction is no longer their only goal, the people will fall for any ruse that’ll make me richer!”

When silence is no longer an option, what is up? Satire, of course.

To the enlightened childless hermit, it is the Only True Way.

The rest is trickery and tomfoolery disguising your simple need to perpetuate the species, an image I dimly see while going blind in thought as well as deaf.

Today, I serve myself, the only action I truly understand in perpetuating the false image of self.

The Invisible Hermit is just one more set of states of energy, after all.

Do flying cicadas eat before they sing, mate and die?

A spider, similar to last year’s sunroom occupant, walks crablike across the ceiling.

Erin catches a catnap while the skylight points sunshine at a chair.

Gnostic is not the same as Coptic.

Caustic.

Satire spreads on headlines like warm corn syrup.

Public opinion rolls downhill like a Purple Cow onion, not dissimilar to Vidaliate.

The WRGS logo sails on mechanised carts.

Doctored photos don’t pass the Hypocritical Oath.

Haven’t seen an Eastern scorpion in the house recently.

A magic marker speck of a spider hangs five or six feet from the ceiling – what happened to the other two or three feet?

When you’re 93 and eating anything leads directly to incontinence, why eat?

How much of your labour credit or investment income do you spend on perpetuating family/sub/cultural myths?

Which sub/urban legends are vital to your beliefs?

Middle-age ennui. Tired of small talk.

Which is more important to you: your children’s education, your children’s health or optimally operational public sanitary sewers? You only get to choose one.

How do you identify yourself?

I’m out of here!

Doing nothing is more vitally important to me than talking to myself via chiclet keys today.

As my life’s end draws closer, I review my life through thoughts organised into symbol sets that many of my tiny species’ members could comprehend.

But the storm that reorganises life on this part of the planet cannot speak a word.

I cannot tell you what I know because what I know has no words.

Untranslatable.

And that’s too bad (“that” being the Internet which cannot express life in real terms, only limited communications in the forms our species is familiar with (and various species partially understand in their unique ways)).

My sister and I sense/see/speak without words. I believe that Monica and I did, too. Very few people have I encountered who’ve communicated with me in like manner.

The moments in between are dry deserts of abject loneliness.

Do i object?

It is the only life this body has known.

Comfortable in the relative silence of an atmospheric disturbance, a natural phenomenon as regular as a lifetime partner’s sleeping/breathing patterns.

All I’ll ever know. Silented SETI listening stations, religion-based persecution/discrimination, intelligence/military leadership swaps and child slavery the forgotten wallpaper of the life I share with you.

The invisible hermit returns to his home unpowered by nuclear technology…humless.

May take a few days to watch my species continue digging an early grave for the current civilisation before I write here again…

If I could simply/easily tell you how …

But it makes so little difference to the galaxy that it hardly seems worth explaining what you already know in your wordless thoughts.

“This, too, shall pass.”