Double Flee A

in which a thesis fails to form

J and I went out for our evening constitutional a little while ago and looked into the window of a greenhouse. (A business; we weren't snooping on someone's estate.)

As J and I weighed the merits of the various flora, I saw the condensation on the window and thought about summer and how much I missed lying on the beach and looking at the south pacific. Here it's 34 and dark, which is good; when it's dark you don't have to think about the clouds, and I'm pretty sure it's cloudy. Either way you can't see much of the stars with all the light in the city. After our chat, I'm pretty sure we'll end up with a houseplant with two-tone leaves.

Except for the panes of glass at greenhouses and conservatories, summer and winter are separated by time and distance. This cycle was what the greeks had in mind when they invented Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and the wife of Hades, who after being kidnapped, brainwashed, and then "bound" through the eating of a pomegranate seed, had to split her year between her husband, the lord of the dead, and her mother, who being married to Zeus, obviously had a sick beach house. I can see both getting old, but at least there's some variety. Heaven always scared me as much as anything else in church, I am frightened to imagine what the inside of my mind would look like if I thought the same thing all the time would be great FOREVER. I think I'd be better off as a ghost or something, if any of that was even real to begin with.

I also thought on my walk (I share with my grandfather that getting up and walking around makes me think better, or at least less poorly) about how we have had several young people in Minnesota and Wisconsin go inexplicably missing over the last two years, whose bodies have later been recovered from rivers. Most of them were known to have been drunk when seen for the last time. What I hear when listening to these stories (If for no other reason than to help me ignore their choppy, low-quality journalistic interpretations: live at five with Kent and Julie!) is the story of the seduction of water. There's obviously something calling to these people, and when they go to it, end of story.

How could it be a good idea to go swimming in the river drunk? Get drunk some night and go down to the river alone and if you make it back let me know. If people are tempted at all, though, it might be by some voice that can't be ignored, so coming back might be a good sign you never heard it. Maybe this is one of those things we all have to agree it is best not to know.

If there were such a thing as magic, we'd probably say it was something about unnatural processes taking precedence over natural ones, like the things that make living things die on purpose, whatever they are. People who hear voices are schizophrenic and sometimes they kill themselves. Before we knew it as a mental illness and had drugs and tax dollars to throw at the problem, it was probably seen as much more of a mixed thing when crazy people killed themselves.

This all had to do with something. Oh well, I'm going to watch Fargo.

posted by dale @ 9:05 PM