Sunday Morning Off-Topic

This morning is it cool and gray out, after a night of furious thunderstorms; I kept losing the network as I worked here at the kitchen table during the storm. The kitty is crouched on the windowsill hoping to eat a bird, her ears are perked up, she sits motionless, wide-eyed, a natural predator reacting to something she sees, unable to quite account for the complicating fact that there is a sheet of glass between her and the sparrows that dance around our bird-feeders. She has a second reason for sitting there, too -- she can taunt the dog safely from that position. He's a little Cairn, he can see her on the sill but he's too small to reach her. She'll turn to face him and wave a paw at him, sometimes boxing him in the face. If he's really noisy about it, she'll leap off the sill and onto the back of the chair, where she'll find the most precarious way to balance, reaching through the slats of the open back of the chair so she can punch him if he gets near, but making it as complicated as she can, just for the challenge of it.

The dog chases the cats, but it is obvious to anyone that they own the place. He makes noise, he can provoke them to run at times, but ... they eat his food, they drink his water, when Mama makes sandwiches the cats go to the front row in case a piece of meat "accidentally" falls to the floor (she's too nice to them), while puppy waits sadly behind them.

It's an odd kind of hierarchy of predators. He loves making their lives miserable -- there are two cats -- and in their way they enjoy the game, too. Salem is the queen of the place, she walks past the dog slowly, sits where he can see, looking him calmly in the eye as he comes yapping, hopping like an idiot. Her favorite moment is when we bring him into the house on his leash. She always happens to be strolling casually just inside the door as we come in -- he lunges, yip-yipping, yanking on the leash, and he can't reach her. She has it timed perfectly, she moseys across the room toward the cat-door to the basement, which he can't fit through. It drives him crazy, she disappears just as we unsnap the leash and he is released to go eat the kitty-cat. Salem loves having somebody to despise, it seems to make her life complete.

We hang the bird-feeders where we can see them from the kitchen and dining room. This last week a squirrel got up there and knocked the whole sunflower-bell down, we don't usually mind if the squirrels have some, but that was not nice. We have nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, flickers, wrens, goldfinches, mourning doves on the ground where the seed falls, plus the usual ones, starlings, sparrows. Did you know that starlings can learn to talk? They are related to minahs. When I was a paperboy, a lady on my route had a minah that would say "Hello?" when I knocked on the door. I would stand out there a long time, expecting to collect my money when in fact there was nobody home, no human anyway. I recently read a news story from England where a parrot taught the other parrots at the pet shop to cuss. They said English things like "Bollocks" and "Bloody this-and-that." Wouldn't it be funny if there was a flock of foul-mouthed starlings?

I kind of don't like the starlings. They're big and they tend to chase the other birds away. We have a birdhouse over by the driveway, like an apartment, there are six units in it, and sparrows try to nest there but the starlings go in and do something, I don't know if they eat the sparrows' eggs or the chicks or what, but you can tell it's an ugly scene. The sparrows have chewed the openings to the apartment units so they're wider, and then last year they stuffed grass and paper into the openings so you can't get in on one side. I have no idea what they think they're doing, but they have some big idea there, and they work very hard at it -- yesterday I saw a sparrow perched on the wire with a piece of cloth in his mouth that was almost as big as him.

I doubt you would call a starling a "predator," really, I'm sure the kitten here (she's a couple of years old, still young) thinks of the starling as "prey." I suppose it's relative, to the sparrow the starling is bad news. This cat, Evie, is a good one -- by which I mean to say, she is a pain in the butt. She loves people and she also loves to break things, tear things up, she likes to sit on the toilet seat and splash the water all over the floor. Lampshades have no future with her in the house. Plants that hang down, macrame, forget it. Something sitting on a table, forget it. Something like a salt shaker is just waiting to be knocked over, she can't resist. She plays cat and mouse with the dog, where she's the cat. It doesn't speak that well for the dog, does it? He's sure he's chasing her, she's seeing if she can balance with each foot on a different surface, with her head upside down, reaching through the chair-slats to bat at him, it's a game for her but he's pretty sure he's going to be eating the cat in a few minutes, he's going to get her this time. But, you know, dogs are intelligent. Cats are too dumb to learn tricks, a dog can learn to do what you tell it to do. There is a moral to that story.

Well, that's my house this quiet Sunday morning. WPFW just played part of a speech by Barbara Jordan in 1974, now they're playing a gospel song, they're singing "This ground is holy ground." The DJ is explaining now, these singers are church elders from different ethnic backgrounds. Wow, they're from all over the world. I see, it was the Annual Prayer Vigil for the Earth, their web site is HERE. Pretty cool, I guess.

I'm up a little bit early this morning, I don't know why. "My" show comes on at nine, it's a few hours of guitar music mostly, and other stringed instruments. Most of the day they play good stuff, blues, old-school, jazz, on this station. I don't mind the top-forty format but it doesn't hold my attention very long. I'd rather be surprised.

This has been a great week for my seventeen-year-old. He's with his friend in Daytona Beach. The friend has an old Volkswagen bus that he's fixed up a little bit, and they drove it down there. They planned ahead, you know, got a case of ramen and a case of Krispy Kremes. Well, you have to eat, you know. They were going to go to Myrtle Beach, but the night before they were going to leave the third kid, a girl, got in some trouble with her parents and they wouldn't let her go -- you go from splitting expenses three ways to two ways and everybody gets hit pretty hard. So they threw out their plans and decided to go somewhere else. They went to Google Earth, closed their eyes and moved the cursor around, and it ended up on Port Orange, Florida. So that's where they are, it's right next to Daytona. He said "It could have been Kansas." Tell me, does that make you a little bit jealous? To be seventeen, cruising down the highway in a VW bus, going someplace you don't know? Man, I think I could handle that! He calls, sends cell-phone pictures, it sounds like an excellent time. They drove straight down there without stopping, but they decided to come back slower, along the coast, spending the night halfway.

When I was twenty or so I hitch-hiked all over the country. It's hard to explain, but let's say I ended up with three hundred dollars from a bail fund after a riot, never mind I'm not going to go into that but the charges of remaining at the scene were thrown out and there was nobody to give the bail money back to. We had three hundred bucks, stuck out our thumbs, went from Phoenix to Steamboat Springs, Boulder, Boston, New York City, Long Island, New Hampshire. I got a job in New Hampshire for a couple of months, working on the highways in Swanzey, got enough money to go around to Niagara and back to Arizona. Shortly after that I read Kerouac's On The Road and was completely unimpressed -- isn't everybody's life just like that?

You don't hitch-hike any more. Recently somebody asked me why that is. All I could think of was Charles Manson. Is there a reason you can't stick out your thumb and accept a ride from a stranger? Is there a reason you can't stop and let somebody ride with you, to share a little conversation and help them out? Everybody's just afraid of everybody any more. When I was in high school, my girlfriend lived all the way across town, and I'd go out after school and stick out my thumb and I'd be there as fast as if I'd driven myself.

It sounds like the Day of Silence went well. You might have seen, one teacher who comments here said that 250 students at his school participated in it. Tomorrow the anti-gay groups want to do something, wear t-shirts that put down gay people of something. I don't expect it to be any big deal, I suppose we'll hear about it. You understand that I am comparing people like the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever to my dog, who thinks he's the big predator chasing the cats.