Farley channeled his dingo ancestors in a frenetic dig for water.
He jumped in the pool to clean off.
Decrepit truck with dog.
Corn! We picked some and ate it. ‘Twas good.
ignotum per ignotius
This has nothing to do with the following post.
Good evening, this is your onomatomaniacal captain speaking. While I ruminate over a possible second section of the previously published story, I’m returning this blog to its regularly scheduled program of automatic writing, arcane ramblings, and sudden bursts of intentional confusion. I feel excited and relieved about that, although I realize others might not. To those folks I will relate the following anecdote. I have always been curious about the wasp they call the cicada killer. Now, I like cicadas, so much so that I even have a tattoo of one on my arm (people usually think it’s a butterfly or a bee, but to hell with them). So I was shocked when I first learned that there was a wasp feeding on cicadas. To me, they seemed untouchable. I just figured they showed up, made a lot of noise, and then fell dead on the ground. I had no idea about this cicada killer and I wanted to know more. Well, today I finally saw a cicada killer. IT WAS FLYING WITH A CICADA THAT IT HAD JUST CAUGHT. This was at the country estate of my sister and her boyfriend. The cicada killer flew past me with its cargo and descended from the sky to the edge of the garden, where it promptly disappeared into a hole in the ground! I was flabbergasted. So if you’re feeling disappointed about the story not continuing right now, just be thankful you’re not a half-dead cicada being dragged underground by a wasp. And if you’re not disappointed, that’s good, too, because you must be reading this blog for the aforementioned rambling confusion and such, which is what we now have plenty of here.
More about cicada killers here. Side note: my favorite part of that link is the droll observation made in the photo’s caption that “Tall grass does not seem to keep them from locating the entrance.” Indeed it does not, as I saw with my very own peepers earlier today!
P.S. I may post a few more photos later from “Weekend at the Country Estate,” starring cicada killers, muddy dogs, giant gardens, and ancient abandoned vehicles.
Posted by sean on July 22, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/22/ignotum-per-ignotius/
hiding under my deck from the insect overlords
Channel 6 anchorman Kent Brockman mistakenly reports on a master race of giant space ants.
Welcome to the Kingdom of Ants. I don’t know what goes on here, but I like it. Actually I don’t care for ants. I particularly don’t like when they start that business of traveling in lines. Nor do I like them crawling incessantly around on my kitchen counter or invading the hummingbird feeders (even though there are no hummingbirds this year? where are they? hello?? I created an urban paradise for you and you never showed up?). But enough about that. I enjoy the idea of an Ant Kingdom. Do you remember the Simpsons episode where Homer gets sent into space? He bumps into an experimental ant farm, letting the ants loose into the space shuttle. Footage of the accident, depicting ants looming large in the camera lens, is picked up by Springfield’s Channel 6 News. Anchorman Kent Brockman subsequently reports that the shuttle has been taken over by a “master race of giant space ants.” Brockman goes on to state: “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.” On the wall behind him, Brockman has hung a homemade “Hail Ants” sign. Now that’s funny. My roommates and I hung an identical sign in our apartment many years ago. But in reality I’m pretty sure I would not enjoy living under insect overlords. They would likely make me march in lines, which I would hate.
Brockman shows off his obsequious nature.
Mondays are so absurd. Lately I’ve been away from work more than I’ve been at work, which makes being at work now seem all the more ridiculous. I’ve got this sticker at home in a box that says “Why do you work?” I hate that sticker. That’s why it stays in the box. It’s so cold at work and it’s so hot at home and this is a source of perpetual confusion for my body and my mind. This morning it was raining so I suited up in rain gear and then the sun came out as I rode to work sweating in my non-breathable rain gear, as was expected according to this fundamental rule of bike commuting. This evening I rode into the alley and the kid whose grandmother always screams at him was walking toward me, banging a long metal pole of some sort against the pavement. And it was like that scene in The Warriors where David Patrick Kelly clinks the beer bottles together, yelling “Waaaarrrrrriiiorsss, come out to pla-ay!” except substitute a little kid for David Patrick Kelly, a long metal pole for the beer bottles, and a cold blank look for “Waaaarrrrrriiiorsss, come out to pla-ay!” I got off my bike and I was sad.
But I digress. Here are two mostly unedited short pieces I scrawled in my notebook a few months back while riding south on the light rail. I’m not exactly sure where I was going with these at the time. I think I was pondering the 1950s and the beginning of the suburbanization of America. Maybe imagine these as entries in the American Handbook™ that we give to our insect overlords so they’ll understand us better. If we’re lucky maybe they won’t force us all into subterranean caverns and we can keep our decks and our pools and our acres of green green grass.
Deck: A deck is a popular structure attached to a house. When people tire of feeling closed in, they retire to the outdoors, without leaving behind the comfort and security of their home, the deck being an extension of the house and not a separate entity vulnerable to attack. Homeowners enjoy inviting over acquaintances to sit on their decks with them. Often this is accompanied by a meal cooked “en plein air” on a grill that sits proudly on the deck. The man, clad in a masculine-themed apron, always controls the grill. It is his domain. His wife brings him platters heaped with sanitized animal flesh, which he slathers with sauce before neatly placing on the foil-covered surface of the grill. After the meal, the deck people continue drinking themselves into oblivion before finally driving home and/or passing out in their bedrooms.
Pool: A pool is a status symbol popular among the wealthy. In-ground pools are the only ones that anyone cares about. If heated and covered by a screened room to keep out bugs, so much the better. Teenage girls enjoy laying out by the pool as their bratty brothers plot to splash them with water or inflict some other heinous act upon them. Rich mothers bring trays laden with glasses of cold lemonade to poolside. Their daughters sip daintily before applying more tanning oil. Their snotty sons then sneak up and snap the bikini tops of their pretty daughters. When the man of the house arrives home from a tough day at the office, he may, if of a certain disposition, change into his trunks and swim a few laps. But first he tousles his son’s hair in greeting and gazes briefly and uneasily at his daughter before finally kissing his wife on the cheek. He may then pop open an Amstel Light if feeling particularly spent.
Stay tuned for more entries!
Maybe. Depends on if the ants come, I guess.
Posted by sean on July 9, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/09/hiding-under-my-deck-from-the-insect-overlords/
ending days
How do you end a day? Does it depend upon the day? Likely. Today is ending with Bedhead and a beer after a long day of driving and visiting with my family. The visit was good; the drive was bad. That’s all I will say about that.
Are there rituals? I read until my eyes can’t stay open any longer. Right now I’m reading Solzhenitsyn’s “We Never Make Mistakes.” Could there be a better title for a book describing Stalinist Russia? Unlikely.
How to end the day. How to tie it to the next one, trailing a tail braided of only the best moments perhaps. Or is it better to let dreamland clean the slate and start anew in morning time.
These are questions beyond me, right now and maybe always.
Posted by sean on July 7, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/07/ending-days/
intentionally blank
Posted by sean on July 7, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/07/intentionally-blank/
subject to unmeasured confounders and biases*
Inside it’s freezing cold. Outside it’s blazing hot. I walk out there into the world and my arms remain cold to the touch for a time. After that passes, my hair follicles feel like they are burning in my scalp. My coworker is back visiting from Dhaka, where she reports it is hot, crowded, and smelly, so not much different from Baltimore in summer. I forgot my music today. I don’t even have headphones. This pains me. I also forgot my ID badge. I have no identity. I am no one. I am all of the things we don’t say. And that is a lot. If we even knew them, whatever would we do. A thing occurs and it causes effects and those effects affect you and you wish the thing never occurred even though you made it occur and you could have not made it occur. That was your choice. But you took a stand, for better or for worse. And now there’s just this sort of empty place. Anyway, I read a book and it was the Collected Stories of Carson McCullers and I wrote a long review of it over on Goodreads, but I want to mention it here because I loved it so. I read a lot of it in the cabin when I should probably have been talking to people but I wasn’t, because that is how I am and I know I won’t change and I don’t even want to change, so there. And this book included the novel The Member of the Wedding and it was sad and dark in the way many good books are and it placed me even more in awe of Carson McCullers than I had been before. Growing up is hard and life is not very kind to adolescents and then suddenly you are an adult and what the hell is that. I mean, it’s hard being an adult, too, but maybe not as hard as being a teenager because at least when you are an adult your youthful idealism has been wiped away instead of still in the process of being stomped on by the awakening realities of life and the human condition. I feel strange today, but not in the way I felt strange last week. Perhaps it is the heat, perhaps it is how today is my only day of work this week and it’s odd to me that tomorrow is Friday already. It seems like it should be Monday. And it just keeps getting hotter and hotter and I fear we all may explode like ants under a magnifying glass. But the tomatoes and jalapeños are ripening and new cucumbers are growing, so I guess a few more of them were fertilized after all. The heat is good for that, but not for my mental state. The radio tells me this heat may last well into August and if that is so, I very well may lose my mind. I will lock myself in my room like Kurtz and plot and read and scratch out words and maybe something good will come out of it. But first there is this and that of which I don’t feel like doing on account of my awfulness, and so I will sit here and brood over my jasmine tea for I am into brooding these days and perhaps the tea will warm me up.
Note: In the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, the third definition of brood reads as follows: a) To be deep in thought; meditate. b) To focus the attention on a subject persistently and moodily; worry. c) To be depressed.
I am thrilled that this definition of brood offers such a varied and expansive range of what I do so often. I can use this term broadly and no one will know if I am actually worrying, depressed, or just deeply in thought. Some words are so convenient.
*Title of post lifted from a random journal article I saw in a list of search results
Posted by sean on July 5, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/05/subject-to-unmeasured-confounders-and-biases/
escape to hot springs
Some friends purchased a cabin and 15 wooded acres in the North Carolina mountains so a visit was in order. On Saturday we hiked up Max Patch Mountain, a bald mountain in Pisgah National Forest that was cleared for pasture in the 1800s. The Appalachian Trail crosses the top, where lucky hikers are afforded dreamy views of the Great Smoky Mountains to the southwest. Off to the distant west rise the dark ridges of the Black Mountains.
The trail to paradise.
And then there is the reward…
The Great Smoky Mountains seen from the top of Max Patch Mountain in Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina.
Such beauty is all the more poignant when shared with old friends.
A/T on the A.T.
Farley was beside himself with joy for the entire trip.
Farley in his element, bounding through the tall grass on top of Max Patch Mountain.
There were also non-mammals enjoying the outdoors.
A Common Buckeye butterfly alights on one of the plentiful blackberry bushes growing along Max Patch Trail, Pisgah National Forest, Hot Springs, NC.
Back at the cabin, we cooled off in the creek.
I walked up the middle of the creek and found damselflies consorting with each other.
My walking stick used for navigating the creek.
For some reason this little sun-dappled tableau struck me. I don’t think it comes across in the photo, but it was the sort of scene into which you wish you could miniaturize yourself for the purpose of better enjoying it.
And here is where we retired for eating, sleeping (although some of us camped outside), and reading during the heat of the day.
Farley exhibits signs of extreme boredom outside the cabin.
Posted by sean on July 4, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/04/escape-to-hot-springs/
somewhere else
I have somewhat regrettably returned from the mountains. More photos to follow…
Posted by sean on July 3, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/03/somewhere-else/
distract / icon
A distracted worker bee buzzes from bloom to bloom. Brushed with pollen, it rubs its hairy legs, one against the other. Zigzagging through the hot still air, it follows ancient steps coded in its fuzzy abdomen. With twitching antennae, two worker bees greet each other and fly away. This insect life strips life to its core. There is only work to be done, in a distracted kind of way. But it’s okay. No highs and lows, only this pick-up and delivery.
Posted by sean on June 27, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/27/distracticon/
my thoughts dried up so i wrote this instead
When you isolate yourself, you have no one else to blame when things go awry. There is some small comfort in this. It is possible to go days without talking to anyone. This can be a magical combination of your own self-imposed silence and a general indifference on the part of others. Together we can make it work. The woman in the alley enjoys screaming hateful words at her grandson but she is sweet as pie when I say hello. This dichotomy hurts my brain. The alley is loud in the summer. The ladies across the way gun their motorcycles at all hours. The level of their inconsideration for people living together in a confined space staggers me. Small children yell and sing and talk like adults. I brood at the kitchen table. If it weren’t for the swatch of overgrown vegetation threatening to engulf my porch, I would have to see, as well as hear, the denizens of the alley and that I could not bear. Meanwhile, in the plus column, the city installed four solar-powered compacting trash cans on a main street in the neighborhood. I was overjoyed to throw my dog’s poop in them. Then they took one away. It was the most conveniently located one. Why. On another street near my house the city erected an expensive-looking fence in the median. A few weeks later they removed it. Why. Every day I see the thousands of dollars I pay in property taxes hemorrhage out onto the streets in the form of Kafkaesque activities such as this. It pains me. I could make much better use of those thousands of dollars than by funding the erecting and dismantling of fences. Segueing into the employment realm, it’s summertime at work which results in a curious laissez faire attitude toward attendance. I like it but it confuses me. I am always suspicious of it. Yet there is a natural relaxed cadence I cannot ignore, and so I allow it to carry me in its wake. When I feel agitated, I look at the little pictures in the dictionary and this soothes me. Last night I had a pleasant time in dreamland, but I forgot most of it upon waking. I don’t like that. I need to remember my dreams or waking life seems vacant. Do you ever wonder about the nature of friendships? They are curious things. Coming and going, rarely staying. Sometimes they wane; sometimes they wither. Sometimes they fail over the stupidest things. And you wonder if it could have been avoided, but in reality if it was a strong friendship it should have been able to withstand most of the nonsense we manage to self-generate. Which then begs the question of why the friendship existed in the first place. Convenience, perhaps. Boredom. Desperation for human contact [see: possibility of going for days without speaking to anyone, as outlined above]. I have had many friendships through the years, for all of these listed reasons and more. Not many have lasted, but the tiny few that have are worth more than gold. The question is then, do I now need more friends? What purpose would they serve? It gets harder to make friends as you get older. It’s horrible but I find myself more judgmental than I used to be of people when considering them as potential friends. I am also perhaps even more guarded now. Friendship requires time and effort, both valuable resources that I don’t expend lightly. How can you know if it’s worth it. Most of the time I am content to be by myself. I also have a dog now. The ultimate friend. Always dependable, always happy to see you. Can’t go to the bathroom without your help, which is a little weird. Doesn’t talk, which is both good and bad. Sometimes I wish he’d talk, just a little. See, even though I am content by myself, I have this annoying urge to reach out sometimes. It’s irrepressible. Sometimes everything can’t be found in books. Or nature. Most things, yes. But not all. This is the curse of human nature. We are not 100% autonomous. And I am so restless. This incessant unease shadows my every move. The panic. The urge to drop out. The crushing confinement of your own mind. We’re all so spread out. Held together by weakening links. I trip over my own shallow roots and fall face-down in a mucky bog. Roll around and let the clay harden on your skin. Let it cover all that you see as wrong. It feels so good.
Posted by sean on June 26, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/26/my-thoughts-dried-up-so-i-wrote-this-instead/
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