The Urban Pantheist

People keep asking how the chickens are. They're doing well--we moved the coop away from the pine trees in case the blizzard knocked branches down (it didn't). They are still giving us the occasional egg, and we are feeding them lots of extra grapes and cracked corn to keep them fat and happy.

Today I'm taking a personal day because my coworker got to work before 5 this morning and texted me saying she had it under control. We just have the mystery animals to take care of, and the zoo was going to send us home early any way. It's been snowing since before I woke up and is supposed to keep going all day, piling up to a foot or so. This winter--hell just this past 2 weeks--has been enough to make us shop for a new place to live again. We aren't serious about it, but we are very tired of snow.

The dogs have cabin fever. We let them out to run in the tunnels we dug in the snow, they eliminate, get cold and want to come back in. Then they whine and bark to be let back out. I think they want us to fix the situation. I wish we could.

Anyway, happy midwinter! Anyone who puts a groundhog above ground today should be prosecuted for animal cruelty. Only 46 days 'til spring.

Alexis breaks up the crack (a cookie/candy) and bags it.


The snowy drive home from the annual holiday party in Salem. Horrifying, and I was just the passenger.

Years ago I read a book (I think it was called Song of the Forest, but I'm in too much of a hurry to google it) written by a French ethnomusicologist who went to live with the Baka pygmies somewhere in central Africa. The descriptions of daily life were what interested me, and his eventual acceptance by the locals and his interactions with them. Sometimes he would tell them stories about where he was from, and they would listen incredulously to these hard to believe yarns. One of the tall tales he told was that sometimes, where he lived in France, it got so cold that people had to wear clothes on their hands. Can you imagine? They thought he was a liar.

Anyway, this is the first morning of the year that I wished I was wearing clothes on my hands. The widget on my screen says 44 degrees F. (It's still technically summer until this weekend.)

I'll probably spend my lunch break today researching places to live in the tropics.

Thinking about why I didn't ride my bike today (instead opting for the ever-stalling Green Line, therefore missing my connecting commuter train to work) I said to myself, "Cold is my least favorite element." But cold is not an element--it's the absence of the element Fire. It's the bitter, painful withholding of the sun's love. Cold is the void that is always there, but for nuclear efforts of our closest star.

The biggest miracle of the Earth is the generally constant temperature above the freezing point of water (and consistently below the boiling point). However, great swaths of the planet--the top and bottom, as defined by the sun--spend much if not all of the year below freezing.

Plants there, when they rarely occur, are adapted to have short growing seasons. Animals--mostly birds and mammals--developed thick insulating coverings above and below the skin. Humans, deprived of plants, adapted to eat the raw frozen flesh of animals, and likewise wear the skins of animals. To expose their own furless and featherless skins is to freeze and die. Modern people, wrapped in artificial skins eat preserved food from packages and cans, or food transported thousands of miles from warmer places.

Humans, like all primates, are tropical animals. Our buildings are in large part attempts to create climatic comfort--tiny subtropical zones, always 'sunny,' always just below 70 degrees f. Tropical insects: cockroaches, houseflies, grain moths, etc. (and their predators: house centipedes and myriad spider species) have joined humans in our enclosed oases.

Doubtless, some people reading "like all primates," above, have thought of Japan's snow monkeys. Silly macaques! How did they get there? Their tropical memories lure them to the hot springs. What did they eat before their fans and documentarists provided them with rice and sweet potatoes?