can you fit your leg in your mouth?

Sometimes I’ll turn around and my dog will have almost his entire leg shoved in his mouth. This gives me great pleasure. His entire body is just one big toy to him. Don’t even get him started on that pesky tail.

It’s hot here and I remember now how I tend to lose my faculties in this type of heat.

Dream journal entry from last fall:

“I took a nap in the afternoon. I dreamed a fly flew in my mouth and I woke up choking on it. I fell asleep again and was dreaming about eating sesame sticks out of a bag when I realized there were flies in the bag and I may have eaten some. I woke up and there weren’t any flies around. It’s November.”

I vaguely remember that flies in dreams have a certain meaning but I’m afraid to look it up because I think it might be bad. I rarely try to analyze my dreams, although I’m not averse to the idea. I just haven’t explored it much.

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by sean on June 10, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in dreams, farley, flies, summer

Posted by sean on June 10, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/10/can-you-fit-your-leg-in-your-mouth/

our small furry friends in dreams and waking life

I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a rabbit tonight. I’m so sick of automobiles. Death traps they are. I’m not well-suited to them.

Today I read through sections of my dream journal for the first time in perhaps forever. Here’s an entry from May 2010:

“I could understand what squirrels were saying. Apparently they have jobs like us and were discussing a colleague. It was actually quite boring.”

My process for dream journaling involves retrieving the notebook from my bedside table as soon as I awake. I try to approximate automatic writing as near as possible. The result is extraordinary; when I look back at entries I often have no recollection of writing them. Frequently there are editorial comments on the dream that I’ve entered during the recording process. A lot of these are simply question marks indicating my confusion about the presence of a particular person, theme, or action in a dream.

I often have horrific dreams, many of them set in post-apocalyptic settings (usually due to some form of environmental collapse). In an entry from April 2010 I complained about not remembering my dreams lately. The next morning yielded this entry:

“Well, I got what I asked for. Gruesome dream during part of which I was standing at the bottom of this chute. People at the top were throwing down these plastic bags, some of which contained blood and other fluid, and others that contained chopped up body parts. Sometimes the bags would break open. Disgusting.”

Dreams such as these leave me shaken. But dreams also bring welcome visitors from my past, such as my dearly departed cats. Waking from these dreams leaves me warm inside.

Lately many of my dreams have been set in my hometown, a place I haven’t seen in almost 20 years. It’s made me curious to visit.

A common thread in my dream journal is the periodic desperate comment that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Dream-life is so important to me, and when I lose that connection to it waking life appears dimmer than usual. I also feel that dream-life and waking life interact. Sometimes the two are so bizarrely different, but as I keep track I see a seamless passing of themes, of characters, of settings between the two worlds. There is a path between them that I know is worth traversing.

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by sean on June 10, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in dreams, squirrels

Posted by sean on June 10, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/10/our-small-furry-friends-in-dreams-and-waking-life/

revoke my car privileges and drop me in a field somewhere, please

Rarely do I feel compelled to deconstruct my entire day in the space of a blog post, but today was um…special, shall we say? It started out normal enough. Armed with an unexpected day off, I crossed county lines with field glasses in hand to search for field birds. I had good intel on locations for breeding birds, and made haste for them. With windows rolled down, I heard the telltale robotic jingle-jangle of a Bobolink and navigated over to the shoulder. Out of the car in a flash, I first thought I’d been fooled by a nearby mockingbird attempting to hog the spotlight as usual, but then the bobolink himself flew overhead, tinkling and jingling to his heart’s content. He flew across the road and landed in a field, affording me adequate looks to get the day started off on the best foot. Nemesis bird comes home to roost! I moved on. I drove the country roads for about an hour and a half and found the birds to be generally cooperative. I saw and heard all my target birds for this trip. Meadowlarks were plentiful and I got a couple of stellar looks at them. Horned Larks were not as plentiful but I did spot a couple from a distance, and heard them elsewhere. I found a singing male Dickcissel perched on the exact section of power line where I found one last year…could it have been the same bird? In addition to these birds, I was also treated to great looks at several American Kestrels.

As I began to wind down my time, I returned once again to the site of the initial bobolink sighting to see if I could cop another look. As I navigated the car onto the opposite shoulder this time, the right front end suddenly sunk into a hidden ditch. When I got out of the car, I saw that the back left wheel was about 3 feet off the ground! As I assessed the seriousness of the situation, a man in a box truck drove up and offered assistance. We tried moving the car with him sitting in the hatch for balance (he was sorta stocky), but that didn’t work so he offered to seek out a farmer down the road with a chain, or failing that to call the sheriff’s office. While waiting around, I watched a bobolink groom himself while perched on a power line. Unfortunately my concern about the car impeded my joy at witnessing this scene. About 20 minutes later I was about to give up on Box Truck Man and call a tow truck when simultaneously the sheriff showed up and two country dudes in a big pick-up passed by and offered to pull me out. Within minutes they’d hooked a chain to the frame and pulled the car out. Country folks rule! I thanked them all profusely and decided to head back to the city after so much excitement.

I needed to pick Em El up and shuttle her downtown for a meeting but I had some extra time so I stopped to check on the birds at another favorite location. There I found expected Prairie Warbler and Hooded Warbler, although couldn’t get a visual on the latter. Many singing Field Sparrows, a perched Turkey Vulture (usually they’re circling endlessly overhead at this spot), a singing White-eyed Vireo, and other usual suspects rounded out the mix.

Once downtown I killed more time (die, time, die!) by finishing Darkness Visible and continuing with Paris Spleen, drinking espresso, and getting yelled at by a probably schizophrenic man. Somehow I think Baudelaire would’ve appreciated the scene. Unbeknownst to me, while all of this fun was taking place Em El’s car was being towed because I failed to read the red highlighted part of the parking meter that said No Parking Between 4-6 PM Mon-Fri. Yes, this is common knowledge to those who frequently drive and park in the city. However, I’m like a deer in the headlights when I get downtown behind the wheel of a car (really bad simile in this context, I know). I don’t know the rules, man! I’m a cyclist, for god’s sake. I haven’t owned a car since 1997 or something (if you’re curious, it was a Plymouth Valiant that sat in my driveway for a few years after I used it to move to Virginia [it looked like this, except crappier because it only cost $400]). Anyway, I guess the cycling gods were raining down holy fire and brimstone on me today for driving too much lately. Maybe I deserved it, but damn, those cycling gods are harsh. Of course, no thanks to The City of Baltimore, either, always taking and never giving!

As we waited in line to pay the obscene $272 required to get the car back, I attempted to lighten the mood by telling Em El that at least we can chalk this up as another quintessential Baltimore experience (along with other special things, such as becoming the victim of a crime and receiving wildly inaccurate water bills). After all, you haven’t really lived in Baltimore until you’ve waited 45 minutes in the tiny concrete bunker under the interstate overpass with all the other suckers preyed upon that day by the blood-sucking savages commonly known as tow-truck drivers.

As if all this wasn’t enough, immediately after Farley ate his dinner tonight he barfed it all up in various places around the house along with all the water he’d drank in the previous 30 minutes. By that time, I was about ready to hurl myself off the deck in search of sweet unconsciouness.

To sum up, my joy tonight is all tangled with misery and weariness.

3 Comments

by sean on June 7, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birding, birds, bobolink, books, car culture, city life, dickcissel, eastern meadowlark, existence, farley, horned lark, life, rants, reading, warblers

Posted by sean on June 7, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/07/revoke-my-car-privileges-and-drop-me-in-a-field-somewhere-please/

d = rt

Rain-washed city at night I welcome you. Empty streets and silent skies fall into step. Green grow the shadow trees. Beneath your leaves, I untether my fears, not even knowing if it’s safe. It might not matter.

Morning yawns open, its breath dry and breezy, this heat island cooled for now. Scudded clouds on blue, white shreds of a humid shroud shrugged off. Suspend seeking sustenance to gaze on bareness before you. I always see(k) it.

Distance equals rate times time plagues time travelers and distance runners. How far outside the circle I stand. Is it distance or time that matters. I can never get that straight. Distance being relative, for some meaning time. I hate math.

Twist the word wrapper at the ends of meaning like hard candy in cellophane. Suck it down to syrup, feel the rush. Spit back at the spitting sky, for its taunts fall on us with no reason. Stretch your hand out, fail to pass it through the clouds. These best things remain out of reach. What we have are objects on the ground. What we have feels arbitrary. I don’t want it.

Thoughts control, alter our actions. I sung that once. In youth we state the obvious. Of course they control; of course they alter actions. What did I know. I was a crippled distance runner. I was a failed time traveler. I was standing in the rain, spitting, waiting for the morning, candy melting on my tongue. One day dawn broke.

And now there is this. An equation to tinker with, variables to solder: a space behind me to fashion into organs of my own truth.

2 Comments

by sean on June 4, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in breathing rights, parts of the whole, time

Posted by sean on June 4, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/04/d-rt/

spotlight on bobolinks!

Male Bobolink in breeding plumage, Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge, Volusia County, Florida.

Image Courtesy of Andrea Westmoreland, licensed under Creative Commons

Somewhere in a field just north and west of here a bobolink sings. If I quiet my mind enough I can almost hear it, even though I’ve so far only heard recordings. Sometimes called rice bird, butter bird, skunk blackbird, or meadow-wink, the male bobolink sings a jubilant song that has frequently been likened to the robotic voice of R2D2 in the Star Wars films. Unique in many ways, the bobolink is one of only a few species that goes through a complete molt of its feathers twice each year. The male bobolink in its breeding plumage is a most striking bird! Yet through molting for the winter it comes to resemble the much drabber female.

Twice each year, bobolinks undertake one of the longest migrations of any songbird. They winter in central South America and spend their breeding season in the northern United States and parts of southern Canada. Originally a prairie-dwelling species of the Midwestern U.S., bobolinks adapted to breeding on agricultural land and were thus able to expand their summer range. Once killed by the thousands by rice farmers in the southeast U.S., these birds are now considered to be beneficial to American farmers due to their primarily insect-based diet during the breeding season. However, loss of farmland and changes in agricultural practices over the years have led to a steep decline in bobolink nesting habitat. Meanwhile, on their wintering grounds, a shift toward rice production has made the bobolink an enemy of South American farmers. Regrettably they are not protected there by law as they have been in the United States since the Migratory Bird Act of 1918. In the past bobolinks were also served as food in restaurants, and continue to be a delicacy in Jamaica, where they earned their “butter bird” nickname, a reference to the heavy fat content of the birds when they arrive there on stopovers during their long migration.

The bobolink has long been a nemesis bird of mine, along with a few other field-dwelling species. As one who rarely travels far to watch birds, I am restricted to what habitat is nearby. Unfortunately, appropriate field habitat is not plentiful in my usual birding grounds. Searching for field birds also typically involves a lot of driving around and pulling off on narrow road shoulders in an effort to catch glimpses of species that seem to thrive on playing hide-and-seek in the shelter of their grassy living quarters. This is not my preferred method of birding. That said, there have been recent reports of bobolinks northwest of here, and I may set out this weekend once again to find this elusive and intriguing bird.

1 Comment

by sean on May 31, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birding, bobolink, migration, nature

Posted by sean on May 31, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/31/spotlight-on-bobolinks/

mr. nature, or what did you expect from the day after a holiday weekend

Ravenous at my desk (even after technically eating two “lunches,” such as they were), I broke down and visited the vending machine in the lunch room. I was surprised and pleased to find the trail mix pictured above, a rare healthy (and vegan) alternative aside from the usual stale pretzels found in this particular machine. I have to admit I was also drawn to the name “Mr. Nature” and the retro packaging. The real pleasure, though, came when I turned the package over and read the first sentence of the descriptive copy on the back:

“Since time began everybody used nuts as a source of food.”

Entranced, I read this sentence over and over as I walked back to my office. How had such a sentence made it onto a package of trail mix? Who penned such inexplicable prose? Lost in thought, I reached the entrance to my hallway and looked up to see my boss approach with a pained expression on her face.

“Can I bum twenty cents?” she asked, continuing to look as if it were a matter of life or death.

I opened my hand, which just happened to be full of change from the vending machine.

“Take the quarter,” I said magnanimously.

Back at my desk, I continued reading the trail mix package and found that Mr. Nature has a website.

Intrigued, I typed in the URL. The first text that appeared was a message assuring me that Mr. Nature’s peanuts were not involved in the “recent salmonella recall.” Well, that’s reassuring, I thought as I munched on my trail mix, although I’m pretty sure, unless I somehow missed another nationwide salmonella scare, that the “recent salmonella recall” in question occurred several years ago. Are people still afraid to eat peanuts, or has the Mr. Nature website simply not been updated in three years? It was an interesting question in and of itself, but I set it aside in favor of more research about my new friend Mr. Nature. However, the website turned out to be a bust in this department. There was no history of the company or personal information about who founded it (Mr. Nature himself perhaps?). It merely held product details and stat sheets for distributors and vending companies.

Cursory web searches revealed not much subjective data outside of a few product reviews, some positive and some complaining of “stale nuts.” With regard to this latter complaint, I have to admit that the almonds in my particular bag were also not at their freshest. There was also a distinct lack of the promised walnuts. But the peanuts, raisins, and sunflower seeds were plentiful and within my own expected threshold of freshness for a 60-cent bag of trail mix. More importantly, the mix quelled my hunger, at least temporarily, and hopefully for long enough to fuel my four-mile bike ride home this evening. As for the identity of Mr. Nature, and the source of the sweeping packaging copy, these mysteries must remain unsolved for now, and possibly even until time ends, at which point we will no longer need to use nuts as a source of food.

*Trail mix photo borrowed with the best intentions from the Mr. Nature website

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by sean on May 29, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in food, mr nature, trail mix

Posted by sean on May 29, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/29/mr-nature-or-what-did-you-expect-from-the-day-after-a-holiday-weekend/

flying the flag over fort futility

I’m at a low point in my job. I have no motivation for it. But it’s not that I’ve lost my passion for librarianship. It’s not that. I still fervently subscribe to Sandy Berman’s adage that “I can’t have information I know would be of use to someone and not share it.” This philosophy, I believe, is the golden kernel rotating inside every librarian. However, my present job affords me little opportunity to exercise this reflex of mine. I spend more time outside of work fulfilling this mission: finding bits and pieces of information, cataloging and sorting them in my mind, and sending them off with a flourish to friends, relatives, and colleagues. But at work I am too far removed from this process. I primarily sit at my desk and wait for the day to end. I answer emails. I review and fulfill (or deny) photo requests. I catalog photos and documents. I select journal articles to include in a database. I attend meetings. I wander around outside at lunch and wonder what the hell I am doing with my life.

I have long known that I am a dreamer. At this point in my life I’m comfortable with this role, but it often interferes with practical matters. I could certainly leave my job and go find some other job. I could do that. However, I know that I would soon also tire of it, because this is a now tattered pattern that I’ve traced my finger along for my entire working life. What this present job has going for it is a four-day week, valuable benefits, decent pay, proximity to home, low stress, and not much in the way of responsibility. Collectively, these aspects would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in another job. So I bide my time, suffering my disconnection from how I spend it, eight hours each day, four days per week.

Leaving my own personal melodrama behind, though, and returning to librarianship, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about access to knowledge lately. This is chiefly because I volunteered to write up a blog post for APLIC about Brewster Kahle’s presentation at the conference I attended in San Francisco. While Brewster is a librarian, among other roles, some of his views are unusual within librarianship. For example, I’d venture to guess that the traditional model of librarian-as-intercessor still carries significant weight among many librarians. And yet Brewster is sending a wrecking ball through this ideal with his efforts to put all knowledge within grasp of anyone with access to an Internet connection. These days such access is becoming easier and more convenient to obtain than access to an actual physical library. The question is, then, does access constitute nine-tenths of the battle when it comes to knowledge attainment?

If so, does this mean librarians will become obsolete? My guess is no, but we are certainly becoming more specialized. And I think our role as intercessor has largely fallen by the wayside, despite our possible reluctance to admit it. At this point, the knowledge is out there (if anything, now in such high quantities as to warrant special skills in navigating it) and much of it is freely available. Now, rather than brokering information, I see librarians as more important in authenticating information, and taking it one step further, in showing others how to authenticate it. And by that, I mean showing them how to determine the trustworthiness of information. Because there is plenty of just plain shoddy information out there.

4 Comments

by sean on May 23, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in brewster kahle, information, librarianship, melodramatic tripe, work

Posted by sean on May 23, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/23/flying-the-flag-over-fort-futility/

“an absence of noise”

*I just realized that I never published this…originally written about a week ago*

One of my favorite shows on public radio is On Being (formerly Speaking of Faith). This past Sunday’s episode was another ringer. I think some readers here might find it of interest, so I thought I’d share.

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by sean on May 22, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in on being, public radio, quiet

Posted by sean on May 22, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/22/an-absence-of-noise/

wetlands

The evening sun dips below the reeds at Fort McHenry’s mitigated wetlands. Volunteer naturalists lead bird walks here during migration. I usually try to attend a few each year, especially since the wetlands are normally closed to the public. It’s such a unique ecosystem in this otherwise paved-over urban landscape. The osprey nesting platform was not in use; the ospreys seem to prefer the tops of light poles, power line towers, and ship cranes. There were plenty of tree swallows nesting in the swallow boxes, though. A few of their heads were poking out of the holes. We didn’t see anything unusual on our walk, but it was still a nice way to end the day.

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by sean on May 17, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birding, birds, fort mchenry, wetlands

Posted by sean on May 17, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/17/wetlands/

yellow light beckoning

These brushes with low-level fame grow dimmer as the years tear the flesh from our bones. In my mind’s eye I still see it all before me. How this was done. How it could’ve gone. Sneaking out of bed at the wrong time. Not primed in our prime. The time it takes to falter. The dreams you’ve lost to waking. Sleep-walking through daytime hours, thrashing through evening dreamtime.

These thrushes with flute-like voices grow stronger as my time on this earth strips youth off this sapling. Near-sighted I stumble but still know how it ends. How it must follow. Staying up late when it feels right. Fueled for the long haul. Steady walking to the light, the fields, the tall pines. The dreams I fall into every night. Breathing in, breathing out. Waiting for my reward.

7 Comments

by sean on May 10, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in breathing rights, dreams, in-between, life, nature, parts of the whole, peace

Posted by sean on May 10, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/10/yellow-light-beckoning/