Sunday, November 16, 2003 :::
 
The Circle of Life: Autumn Reflections

Well, today is another lovely fall day in Washington, with a near perfect temperature that even a light misting did not ruin with humidity.

A few days ago, A Mind That Suits was walking downhill to the bus when he discovered that fallen leaves, properly soaked, become just as dangerous as ice. Negotiating up or down that hill when it is covered with ice is a brief exercise in terror, as a life altering tendon injury is only a misstep away. How the people who live there manage during our regular ice storms is beyond easy comprehension. That half block easily rivals the worst San Francisco has to offer.

Washington gets spectacular fall colors, the special joy of living north of the Carolinas. The trees on this street all turn bright yellow, and what concerned A Mind That Suits was not so much the possibility of a life altering tendon injury, though that was real enough. It was going through the day with a thick yellow paste of rotting vegetation on his backside. So he picked his way carefully and made it without incident, though on the return home he rode two more stops to the other side of the hill, where the ascent is much more gradual.

And once again he found himself on a block smothered in yellow. The smell of decay is actually not unpleasant, inextricably tied as it is with this glorious season. But it is decay nonetheless, and it apparently attracts some special breed of fly which had appeared in abundance to enjoy the feast, blissfully unaware that within a few hours the temperature was destined to come crashing back down and the trees whose leaves they had just ingested would begin to ingest them. And both the trees and the flies were blissfully unaware of A Mind That Suits, a representative of a species whose polluting tendencies seem not to bother them one bit. And should he have dropped dead on the spot, both the flies and trees would commence feasting upon him with glee.

A Mind That Suits was reminded of the philisophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who felt that civilisation was a great burden that hindered the creative possibilities of mankind. So much better, he felt, to copy the ways of nature, whose members dwell in cooperative harmony through the cycle of seasons.

What a crock.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:49 PM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.