Last
night I visited a friend here in the Canyon. Actually it was in one
of our side canyons. The canyon is named Wildcat Canyon and is of
some local historical interest. My friend is a talented beer brewer.
So I went over and sat at his bar which is built on the canyon wall
under a grove of blue agave which are quite large and protect his
bar from being trashed by small rocks dislodged from the canyon wall
by various wild critters walking along paths on the canyon wall.
It
was a nice spring night and the air was a little crisp and the beer
wonderful. We sat and we talked about stuff. He's a geologist and we
talked about yesterday's 8.3 quake off the eastern coast of Russia
not far from the Aleutian Islands. Remember Sarah Palin talking
about how she was qualified foreign policy-wise to be president because she could see Russia from her front porch in Alaska or some nonsense
like that? It is interesting that quake which the USGS calls a
'severe' quake has yet to be even mentioned by the US media. I guess
it wasn't important enough for our media to comment on or report to
us. After all it happened in the land of our Mortalist Enemy (ca
1948-1982) so it couldn't possibly be of interest to us. Even though
our leaders and their leaders were committed to the mutual
destruction of our peoples. I would like to thank the Media for
deciding for us what would be of interest to us as a people.
Anyhow
one thing led to another and soon we were treating our various ills
with a little bit of a small innocent plant banned in the early
decades of the last century by Congress at the behest of the then
newly legalized liquor industry. Somethings in our system never
change and Congress apparently still only acts at the behest of moneyed
interests who open their checkbooks to members of congress, much to
the chagrin of those of us who really wish for a Congress more open
to actually working for the benefit of those who with our hard-earned
money pay their basic compensation and pay for their Cadillac medical
plans and their overly generous retirement benefits. These are the
same guys who have voted no fewer than 37 times to repeal what they
derisively call Obamacare in order to deny non members of Congress
decent medical care at affordable prices. As to who pays for
Congress' non-basic compensation I will leave that to your own
imagination, but please don't be surprised when you discover the
answer to that.
Meanwhile
back at the ranch, or more correctly at the hillside bar in Wildcat
Canyon he and I (along with his wife who had by that time joined us)
began to notice something odd and unusual. On his bar my friend has a
small lamp made from a 'dead soldier' or more commonly called an
empty half gallon-sized bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey. The
lamp has a small conically shaped green lampshade on it. At the top
of the lampshade his wife noticed some small winged member of the
genus Bug. This poor fellow was repeatedly walking along the top of
the lampshade and making circle after circle heading lord only knows
where. Sometimes the bug would slip off the side of the top edge of
the shade but would quickly recover and head on to wherever it
thought it was headed. We watched him probably for an hour engage in
this up to then fruitless exercise. At one point my friend decided it
might be helpful to the bug's endeavor if it were to walk through a
cloud or two of exhaled smoke. So that was arranged. The bug made a
couple more trips through the clouds and slipped off a few more times
but always recovered and continued on its sisiphistic journey around
its small world. It continued to fall, recover and head on. Suddenly
it fell again and clung to the side of the shade. It clung there for
awhile and then apparently had some sort of epiphany and realized
that for the last hour or so it had been headed in the wrong
direction! So it climbed back up the rim of its world and began
walking in the opposite direction. We continued to observe its
progress until it got a bit too nippy to be outside and adjourned our
meeting. I have no idea if the bug made it to wherever it was going
with such determination. I hope it did. I hope we helped it a bit on
its journey. It was indeed a most interesting fun Friday evening
in the eastern Orange County mountains.
