Everything Is Satisfactual
Ah, spring. It is here, at long, long last. I always get that little tingle up my spine when the first signs of spring come: the new leaves growing, the flower buds opening, and the quality of movies sharply rising from the interminable, fallow winter of January-February wind-blasted desolation.

There are two movies that I would very much like to see coming out today (Spike Lee's Inside Man and Thank You For Smoking) but there is an outside chance I might get to see one of those between now and the start of the REAL movie season roughly five weeks from now (Mission Impossible III comes out May 5... start making other plans now!), so just to be safe, for national security reasons, I cannot include them in Movies I Have No Intention of Seeing entries. I learned my lessons from the domestic uprisings following the Mr. and Mrs. Smith debacle. I've learned: with great power comes great responsibility.

Instead of going to movies, I encourage all of you to drop whatever it is you're doing right now: your work, your knitting, your child(ren) and run directly outside. Normally this kind of a) joy and b) movement is anathema to bloggers as a social subset and to me in particular. The question I ask myself every day: do I weigh 450 lbs. because I refuse to move or do I refuse to move because I weigh 450 lbs.? Chicken and egg. We'll never know for sure.

But this week, as I said in the opening paragraph, is the beginning of Spring. Sure, maybe it's still 30 degrees and snowing (I'm looking at you, Detroit!) but go on, get out there! Spring is as Spring does. The vernal equinox has come and gone. The weather isn't going to get the message until you get out there and show it who's boss. Tank tops, flip flops, sunscreen, hot pants; common everyday Springtime attire. You get out there and you prove to all of us that you don't take no shit from no snow-drift. We are human beings, the pinnacle of God's/Darwin's Creation/Evolution (choose as you feel is applicable). We don't adapt to the weather. The weather adapts to us.

Of course, I live in Southern California, so Spring here starts around... mid-November. We had a weird winter-like spasm a week or two ago, but Mother Nature seems to have worked that all out of her system and has gone back to her customary spot on the beach in Newport, lolling around in a bathing suit far too skimpy and revealing for a woman of her age and considerable girth, messily and loudly making out with spindle-thin Bermuda-short-ed Father Time. It's a disgusting image, but at least she leaves us alone.

The weather clock might move imperceptibly from season to season out here, but the biological clock of all the local fauna is definitely set to go off all at the right orbito-rotational moment. I know it's Spring because I can hear all the goddamn frogs croaking and the goddamn birds chirping from their goddamn nests in my goddamn chimney. It's a goddamn magical goddamn song of life.

As the animals awake and birth their offspring, I don't get to see much of my dog. This is her busy time of the year. She sets aside her normal routine of sleeping, testing various things left laying on the floor for edibility, sleeping, barking at nothing and trying to see just how far up her own rectum she can shove her nose for a heavy schedule of running headfirst into our sliding-glass backdoor in an attempt to chase and pounce on all the animals newly-awakened from their long winter slumber.

The sad thing is that when she doesn't hit the glass door at full steam and actually makes it outside, God help her if she actually catches the thing she's chasing. Thousands of years of effective domestication combined with the deep personal stupidity of my dog in particular means that her hunting skills, while active enough to initiate, are mostly there for show. Like all things vestigial, her hunting instincts are fairly useless in the end; they do about as much for her as my tail does for me.

The animals are awake and the baby animals are all being born. If Spring makes me think of anything, it's the idea of a bunch of wild animals balling each other mad in a wild sub-human frenzy of feathers and fur. Think of Bambi as presented by Larry Flynt. I know it sounds perverse or weird, but I used to think of that ALL the time, not just in Spring. The medication seems to be working.

Speaking of inappropriate procreation, I think in the interest of fairness, I should point out that my kids were born in the Spring. All three of them: Fennel, Portfolio and even little Inigo-Montoya were all Springtime babies. I don't know what that says about their mother and myself. Maybe we're tapped in to the resonant, propulsive rhythms of nature and therefore emulate not only the wellspring of basic animal life around us but the legacy of our ancestors who had their children in the early months of the dissipating frost in order to ensure long, robust survival in preparation for the ever-looming promise of returning Winter. Or maybe we just liked to do it in the Fall.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 6.1



Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:06 AM