Moot Witness

So, I'm off for at least a month. The Sabbatical and everything. The boy took a few days off also...he gets a ridiculous amount of vacation time, which he kinda needs with what he does. So yesterday, on a glorious May Monday when the rest of the world was at work, we went on our first canoe trip of the year. Guilt lapped at my mind as the choppy water lapped at our entry-level Great Canadian. It just feels wrong to be enjoying life, the world, the day..when everyone I know is involved in the daily BS. Silly. I have earned this time, I keep telling myself. This time, these moments, will stick with me in memory for a long, long time. It's an investment. Anyhow. We had almost complete solitude for 3 hours, save for one lone kayaker and an old guy fishing. And then there were the birds. Swarms of swallows did mosquito-eating aerobatics over the river and marsh, sometimes swooping close overhead. Macho red-winged blackbirds trumpeted about their territory from dead branches. There w...

After a few years of having given up on new music and spending most of my listenings on the early/mid 20th century and my same old/same old (though beloved), more modern favorites, I finally have come to discover a couple bands that have that heart-effecting quality...the way it felt to find a great band as a younger, hipper person. You know...that hungry, over and over, repeating nothing else for days sort of scenario....like a starving person who hasn't seen food in forever. I was beginning to assume that phenomenon was over for me....that I was old, had heard everything, maybe just didn't have the ability to "get" it anymore. That I was having some sort of strange, artistic frigidity that left only the call of spring peepers or the riffing of catbirds to cause my heart to flutter. I even thought maybe my soul has simply been dying. Maybe not. Maybe I just hadn't looked hard enough. The Builders and the Butchers are one of them.

One of the greatest quotes ever: "I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other." ~ Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein." A rather minor quarrel this evening which made my head throb also made me long to hear this line spoken in a choked-up voice by DeNiro as The Monster in the 1994 film version. So much dumb shit on youtube and no one has ever put that up? What a shame. Makes me want to go back and read the novel, anyway. I actually never have, sadly. And now I am realizing that most likely the cinematic archetypes have partly obscured the true greatness of the story itself. Though most who know me would call me laid-back and even-keeled, I myself am shocked sometimes at the extremes of flower-smelling Ferdinand the Bull and vicious, Pamplonian stampede I feel in one day so...

What I love most about begonias. This is the underside of an angel wing begonia, afternoon sunlight behind. Only a rex does it better. This looks almost cardiac, no?

Six weeks off. It sounds like a fantasy come true. Already I am feeling guilt at my lack of industriousness and I am only 4 hours into it. Been working full time in the veterinary world since I was 17....what's that? 18+ years now? The only times I have EVER had more than a week off at a time were times when an out-of-state move left me searching for a new job. And that's not "time off." That's simply stressful. It all slaps me in the face now...the years of excuses. "If only I had some time off, I would..." Learn some new songs....actually study bass technique...start walking everyday...4 million house/garden/music/art projects....ad nauseum. When I take the "work as obstacle" out of the equation, it's actually frightening. These comfortable sandbags we set up in our minds, hm? This is a mind-clearing time, though. Finally moving past the dark place that years of euthanasia and hoarding scenes and necropsies had put me in. Then, the past s...