All Twitter These Days

At the right.

When you are thinking in aphorisms it's a better setting.

And Fixer is getting fixed.  Will stay quiet until I figure out how to escape the corners into which I paint myself.

Rain

For some reason the media emphasis has been on the heat - well, there is a reason, the heat is unprecedented - but what has really been so relentless is the lack of rain.  Cracks appear in the ground, whole trees die.

So when the rain came we went out and danced in it.  Now the tree frogs and cicadas are in full serenade.

Chemistry

Over 100F for many days, no rain, no relief in sight.  As to plant life, and we have lots of it, you get to the point where you risk boiling instead of watering. 

What I Mean By That Is

... Strays is going to be more and more like Twitter.  In fact I may migrate to Twitter.  Until I do, aphorisms.  You know, like "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."  (Boy, that one has always seemed like voodoo.  Wear this apple around your neck and mwambajamba no more doctors!)

But where I'm really going to try to apply myself is in Fixer.  Link on the right.  It's going to start trite and derivative.  So let's watch and see if I can find a voice.

Fore

There may be another way to propel this forward.

What impels the words is a desire to share ideas, plus a desire to write, plus a desire to exhibit.  As to the last - otherwise why put it out on the Internet, where it lasts forever, is completely corruptible, and is likely to bring back nothing good.

So you could close it down, call it a day.  Or you could carry on, but try to make it more regular, more urgent, less introspective, less idiosyncrantic, less boring.

Or (and there are lots of other or's out there), you can reframe things as fiction and narrative.

And you can drop the second person when you really mean the first.

Thwack.

Downstroke

Here in America we live and work mostly in daylight, and we dine, dance, and sleep after dark.  The Mediterraneans, with their siestas, know something about another way, maybe because of the heat. Those of us who work across multiple time zones, we navigate another way too.  So you unlink from regular, linear time a little, but at the same you are more wedded to the clock than ever in order to keep your bearing.

Backswing

When the temperature reaches 108F and it's going to be over 100F for the next five days, and there's been no rain for weeks, and humidity is in the teens... well, St. Louis, meet Palm Desert.  Which is pretty good weather for geezers with a/c, but it's hell on the hydrangeas.

Gets you thinking... what if it doesn't rain until September?  It means that all the water I bought, and will buy, over the last months and this summer will be for naught and we'll be losing trees, not just plants, and we'll be facing fires, not just the usual tornadoes and hailstorms.  It's so Biblical!

One sign that it could be the end of the world:  folks are giving away their tickets to the Cardinals games over the weekend...