While the thoughts and processes of my species wash over and through my stopped-up vessels, the flutter of feathers catches my attention. No, not a game of badminton on the front lawn. The neighbourhood avian population flies from backyard to backyard for kernels, morsels, seeds, anything nutritious, energy pills on this cold winter day.
The roadways dry, sublimation a situation in situ, people pedal their peddle carts full of leather-wrapped, multipositional seating arrangements for bodies in transit to parts unknown.
Neoclassical on the Internet radio, last.fm, preceded by post-industrial and ambient industrial and avantgarde. En garde!
Frozen water squeezed out of the sky, like gnats, flowing this way and that in the space between frozen tree stalks.
Desert spice fragrance oil bubbling in the glass bowl above a heat lamp.
The heat pump converting gas to liquid and liquid to gas in order to push warm air through subterranean vents.
Most days, a normal person sits here, asking if "why" or "why not" weighs more, tipping the scales, off-balance, off-kilter, on-time, inside or out, contemplating the value of the value of value, brain waves the only toys one has to play with.
Flocks of birds, every one fluffed up, taking off out of the wooded ditch at once. Where do they get fresh water today?
Observations versus imagination. One has the choice. Depression and inaction are not synonymous. Some days are like this, arms and legs caught in the floating mobile of words, tangled in sentence structures, prepositional phrases, dangling modifiers, the space between two musical chords. Trapped but free. Willing and unwilling. Thrilled and bored.
No place to go. No place to need to get away from. No place to be. No being to find. Just watching the birds and the automobiles dance in the snow.
Dishes and clothes to wash. Holiday decorations to take down and put away. Domesticity showing in the roots sprouting from the space rocket engines on one's feet. Physics and chemistry and psychology books showing off their dust-covered dust covers. A child's school creation by a child who's no longer a child fluttering childishly from a string.
Dreaming of Moskva, Flemish bicycle trips, skydiving over Australia, Italian villas, an Ennis inn...
Playing out-of-sync, unharmonious tunes on a portable Yamaha keyboard that one has always played, once played on uprights and baby grands, no sheet music required, disunity the theme, disconnected, free, expressive, extemporaneous, no capital letters, no commas, no periods, no paragraph breaks. Now with over 400 voices and rhythms to choose from! [Aah...technology.]
The birds don't care. They're focused on what's important ==> food. water. shelter from the cold. A bird-sized brain doesn't know self-actualisation or self-fulfillment or meditative stances or musical scores written for piano and laptop computer.
But I do. Happiness is a journey, with stopovers for depression, boredom, sadness, sorrow and introspection along the way. One can have one without the other but why? Why not?
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