The Urban Pantheist

This is the archway entrance into the Old Burying Ground (also called the Old Center Cemetery or just the Old Cemetery depending what source you consult) off of Mountain Road in Suffield Connecticut, the town where I grew up from age 7 to 17.


It's right up the hill from where the high school I went to used to be, but I don't remember ever exploring it.

Alexis and I set off for New York City, the first time the two of us traveled there together. I was quite skeptical about traveling by car--traffic, parking, etc. We were on our way to buboniclou's wedding, where Alexis was going to be the photographer.
( Read on only if you want to hear me whine )

There's a lot of talk about eating cicadas on the internet these days--probably I'm encountering it through my own self-filtering. Brood II, in case your own self-filtering has insulated you from this knowledge, is one of the 17 year cicada events on the east coast. From North Carolina to southern Connecticut there will be millions upon millions of large red-eyed insects emerging from their prime number slumber to ascend trees and emit their decibel-shattering love call.

I've only ever experienced annual cicadas--green, "dog day" cicadas which are loud and briefly plentiful, but nothing like these periodical events. I'm eager to travel to the action, perhaps to New Haven, a city I've never visited but that everyone assumes I'm from when I say I grew up in Connecticut.

There seems to be a certain amount of anxiety about this cicada event, fear driven by...I don't know what exactly. The way that cicadas look? The fact that there will suddenly be thousands around, making encounters between humans and these insects more likely? A friend posted a photo of a display of insecticides from (presumably) a hardware store, prominently advertising the fact that the products would kill cicadas. This is the worst kind of fear-pandering, since killing these animals does exactly nothing to control the "problem" of 17 year cicadas. They are active for a short period during one summer, mate and lay eggs, and then disappear again for the length of time that it takes a human to become an adult. So it may appear that by spraying whatever poison around you have made them go away, but they will go away with or without your participation.

The entomophagy community is using the UN recommendations and the Brood II emergence as a synergistic opportunity to promote bug-eating. Supposedly a southern Connecticut sushi restaurant is preparing to (or joking about) make cicada sushi. I'll take the tempura, please--uncooked invertebrates are likely to harbor parasites. This NatGeo Article helpfully adds "[their] plant-based diet gives them a green, asparagus-like flavor."

Of course most Westerners are not among the 2 billion people of the world who already include insects as part of their diet. There's a taboo on this class of arthropod, a disgust borne purely from cultural bias. My favorite recent analysis comes from (of course) a comedian, Andy Zaltzman, on The Bugle Podcast:

"There's no way I'm prepared to eat insects. Mashed up connective tissue of pigs? Yeah, yeah, I'm happy with that. The livers of birds that basically amount to aerial vermin? Yeah! The hacked to pieces corpse of a mechanically slaughtered baby cow? Absolutely! Insects? Never! Unless they're basically insects that live in the sea, in which case, OH YEAH give me a bit of mayonnaise and let me rip its head off! And eat it whole, stomach included, in one go--I don't care if it's dead eyes are staring at me, and if it was waving at me from a bucket ten minutes ago--YUM."

Last weekend I went to visit my Dad in Suffield Connecticut. These lovely violets were growing below a downspout.

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On New Years Day I drove my dad back to Connecticut. Not to his house, because he can't live in it due to the smoke damage. I brought him to a hotel, where they were packing up the lobby's Xmas decorations. I couldn't drive back with that image in my head, so we went to the 99 and had a beer and a melancholy conversation.


Alexis and I both had Monday off, so got to spend the day together, playing with the dogs and such.


Back to work on Tuesday, looking out the office window at three.

I went and visited my dad this weekend. At one point, Charlie got up in his lap in the passenger seat.


I helped remove an air conditioner from a window. Once it was out I was surprised to find a bird's nest had been built in the little nook there. You can see how the back of the nest bears the imprint of the a/c's vent louvers.


Then we went to South Hadley to pick up a piece of furniture from craigslist. On the way we passed this house with all this interesting poultry. Guineafowl, both barred and white, up above, and turkeys below. Also a cat.

The news of the bust of a canary-fighting ring in my home state has me thinking:

Firstly, how did investigators come to suspect a fighting ring? They must have had an "in" into the world of songbird fighting for gambling purposes. I'd watch an episode of that reality show.

More compelling, since this is the first I've heard of the sport of canary fighting, I wonder how much the practice has driven canary breeding over the years. Chickens are tasty, but owe much of their worldwide distribution and current genetic stock to cockfighting. You don't keep bantams around just for those tiny eggs.

Likewise, some of the most popular pet dog breeds (I almost said "best," but you know my bias) owe their existence to the Michael Vicks of the past. Not just American pit bulls (and the many dogs that look like them), but many of the currently popular Japanese breeds, and even the cute yoda-faced Boston terrier, were developed in the pursuit of superior fighting dogs.

I bet those bettas (you know, Siamese fighting fish) lingering in brandy snifters and plastic cubes in pet stores everywhere owe much of their prevalence and genetic make up to the legacy of fish-fighters.

The happy thing meme has been helpful. It's a good exercise to think about what made you happy in a given day. Sometimes it's something obvious, usually not; often when I think of it, it makes me happy all over again. I haven't been keeping track of how many days I'm doing it or how many I'm supposed to do. I think I'll just keep on doing it until entropy takes over, like every other running project I've done in this journal.

For my happy thing for Friday, I'm going to have to go with the easy rapport I have with my coworker Courtney. I think the people you work with accounts for workplace happiness far more than the actual work you do, at least for me. ( Possible complaining hidden behind Lj cut )

For Saturday, my happy thing will have to be audacian's wedding. It was wonderful to be at a celebration of love. Alexis was the official photographer, I was her unofficial assistant. Mainly that meant staying out of the way most of the time, helping when possible (find which two batteries still have any charge left) and trying not to make a total ass of myself. ( Self criticism verges on complaint )

I'm looking forward to today's happy thing! It might be the party for Jim at Alex's house in Cambridge, or it could be the wise decision to stay home and not try to drive in a snowstorm three days in a row. I'll let you know.

Here my dad poses in front of the place of his first full-time teaching job. It's now an administration building, but at the time it held all the classes for the small town of Stafford.

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