Temperate Zone Rooftop Horticulturalism

Not, as some would hope, sclerophyllous woody vegetation habitat regeneration.

Earlier today, based on the crows circling around a hawk (dark wings, dark-banded tail and light-coloured chest), I assume the meal in the talons of a hawk would have grown into an adult crow.

Do you know the "lively red-haired man" behind the Oatmeal Creme Pie, O. D. McKee?  To him, I give thanks for Little Debbie snack cakes and a favorite after-lunch dessert of two soft oatmeal cookies sandwiched together with a fluffy creme feeling ("creme" being a word that can designate a special formula that is not exactly cream but a sweet concocted confection).  I've enjoyed the pies for 40 years.

While giving myself time to investigate the vegetation growing on the limestone hill behind my house, surveying the sedum, prickly pear and other potential rooftop crops for northern Alabama heat islands (and perhaps other areas of this temperate zone type), I saw the first flowers of late-blooming trout lilies and the first leaves of a large field of shooting stars, along with deer trails, freshly-broken snail shells, and a short-tailed lizard (perhaps a juvenile broad-headed skink).

Storms passed by last night.  Then, in clear skies, the reflection of Mars and the Moon directly overhead.

So now, while mourning the loss of a good man who died of cardiac arrest yesterday, grandfather of my niece and nephew, I think about his family's legacy and wonder what he did to teach his kids How to Be Brilliant.

Long before the last couple of generations of us arrived, our species helped usher in the dawn of a new epoch - in the past few thousand years we have demonstrated our ability to alter the landscape, exaggerating the effects of natural climate change.  Now, we have the smarts to ask ourselves, "Are we facing another silent spring?"

I met a young woman who asked me if I was more entertained by Holmes older brother or by the 8 femmes.  I asked her if a state is a state or a state and what state the state was in.  Based on her mood, she stated that recalling one's state troops from overseas missions is one state one state could state stately when pressed to recall what is the state of states on one's slate of state issues.

Exactimundo.

When pressed, a shirt starches.  Did I mean scorches or lurches?  Lunchboxes carry their own waist.  Wait, I meant weight.  Or did I mean waste?  Being mean with the mean of what one means.

That's not it, eye-thur.  Who's the author?  Who's authoritarian?  Can you be authoritarian and not a disciplinarian?

The cajones to legalise illegalities legally.  Does plastic-sealed paper money smell like money?  Where's your paperwork to paper the place with papier?  Or paper-mâché?  Or macheted spaghetti?

Noodling around again.

I cannot see the future.  I am a translator.  My power is not in me.  You are the only power I've got.  You are the future, are you not?  You are the tree rings ringing 'round the divining rod called a preshaven pencil.

We don't need the religion of global warming to make smart business decisions to reduce, reuse and recycle for higher profit margins.  You've proven that point pointedly.  We estimate our cultural industrial workplace effectiveness by the costliness of extracting metals from rock and from landfills.  When you know, you know junkpiles are money piles.

How do you pile your junk from one cycle of learning to the next determines your certitude.  Is it better to burn trash or turn it into goo?  Do you hook cows up to methane collectors?

What is manure?

Do you take away smugness if you tell the second party that the first party gets to enjoy its smugness in turn?  If we're just taking turns, where's the feeling of victory?  Ah, history.  Those who don't/can't read, don't understand, so why tell them?

Did I tell you about O. D. McKee, who drove to a salvage yard and retrieved a gear from an old washing machine to replace a hand crank at his factory, added a small motor, and "began the automation process which turned his small bakery into one of the nation's largest producers of snack cakes"? [all references to O.D. McKee taken from the back of a snack cake box purchased in 2010 - one way to think outside the box?]

Waste not, want to be knotted.

Ever watched a microwave radiation battle between two satellites orbitting Earth?  The silence of glowing things.  Space jams in space jams.

While your electronic clothes pass the electricity your body movement generates, what do you pass?  Do you pass gas?  Do you see yourself as a microwave oven?  Can you process all the waveforms passing through you?  Are you an electricity and magnetism guru, equating equations to waiting e-friends?

Are you a rooftop gardener, growing veggies and raising goats?  Do you share your chickens with the hawks, you being a ecosystem hawk yourself?  Can you extract water from the air?  Where do you store your collected carbon dioxide?  Do you sell carbon credits for batteries to store your wind generation?

If you were trapped all alone on a heat island, what would you want with you?

Sometimes you have to ask the same sets of sets of question sets to set your thought in a new subset you'd intersected more than once before.

I met a young woman who asked me a question, "What's it like to be alone?"  I told her it's not lonely if you're a lone wolf.  She's asked what it's like to be lonely.  I asked her if she was her own god.  She nodded.  I told her gods are never lonely - they have a universe of gods and servants to fill their thoughts.  She agreed.  We laughed, we gods.  Yegads!  Thankfully, we know we aren't important - two gods in the same place, one or both of them knowing a sense of importance ... you don't want that, do you?  This planet's too small.

The morning after a woodland walk I found a dead tick attached to my hip.  Damn bloodsuckers - don't they know better than to taste the power of the gods?

Time to taste time - this sluggish computer tastes funny.

Time to test the sky.  We don't own the world - we just pass the beach ball on to the next player in the next game set.  Are you ready?  Get set.  Go!