Four unrelated paragraphs

Dear diary,

I like the way that grass looks, just how it is: you don’t have to “doll up” grass to make me like it — you don’t have to put makeup on it, by which I mean spraypaint it greener, to win me over. I like the way that it sways in the field when it’s long and the wind blows thru it. You can cut it short, that’s fine: that doesn’t ruin it for me; but I prefer long grass. And I like when there’s a thick, dense amount of grass covering an area — I don’t like to see sparsely positioned wispy yellowing straw-like growths interspersed with cracked dry dirt upon the earth. I even prefer the actual jungle to that. Which is a strong statement, for me, because I normally hate the jungle — I can’t stand its inhabitants: all the insects and evil birds… the jungle’s too crowded; it’s like high-rises for wildlife.

I don’t know why so many humans enjoy blowing things up. Certain humans are thrilled when they discover a new element, previously unknown to mankind; because they can then combine it with other elements and make stuff explode. I don’t care about that. I think of explosions as the stupidest form of repetition imaginable. Cuz everything in this world is an echo of some previous occurrence; and an explosion is just an echo of the stupid Big Bang: the starting gun that began this nightmare. Rather than blowing things up, I favor connection, communication — that’s the opposite of mere repetition and easy echoing: communication is the anti-Bang, because it brings things together. Like when you sit so still on an island that a tiny fluorescent bird comes and perches on your arm. The bird thinks you’re just a statue! Then the trick is not to move, because, if you move, you might scare the creature away. Sometimes you have to sit still for a whole afternoon, before the little life leaves on its own. Then you can return to penciling sentences into the manuscript that you were writing.

Just imagine how many plot-twists in novels were determined by the visitation of local wildlife. It could be that Adam & Eve woulda never disobeyed God’s rule, if that little lizard hadn’t scampered over and stopped on her bare left foot, when Bathsheba was typing the story. Right between the two sentences, when she was trying to decide the next deed to have her characters perform, the lizard enters the sun-room (she’d left all the windows open, and there was no need for screens in those days, because there were no mosquitoes); thus Bathsheba lost a good hour-and-a-half of writing time. And once the creature dashed off, as quickly and as whimsically as it had arrived, the very next sentence that Bathsheba typed was “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” (But of course she wrote in ancient Hebrew — I’m just providing an English translation, on the fly, for the benefit of my readership, which is mostly American).

And cats will often knock things off your desk. Imagine that your desk contains the following items: an ink jar, a rack holding seven clear vials of colored elixirs (each one its own unique neon tone), and one pitcher of vodka. Now your cat — nicknamed Tyger, after William Blake’s poem — approaches the desk and leaps upon it in a single bound, and knocks over everything. We can only assume that Tyger does this intentionally, because he’s far too agile to have made a mistake — except he leaves the ink jar standing. So now all seven vials tip over and splash out in many colors, and the vodka spills and mixes with these liquids, and everything combines into a newfangled potion, which is rainbow-hued and very pleasant to taste and also desirable to make one wise. This liquid drips off the desktop and into the large glass cruse below. (This attractive cruse was prearranged by happenstance.) Now we enter the room and see what our Tyger has done, and we smile and laugh. Little Tyger glows bright, as is his want when he’s pleased with himself, and then he nimbly exits via the window, which we always leave open, as Bathsheba instructed us; for Tyger is free to come and go as he likes — he’s not a house-pet; he’s a welcome friend. He’s also one of the most respected citizens of our pleasure-dome.