nixsight

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We’re walking the dog. It’s one of those unreliably sunny days we seem to be having a lot of, this May. The sun is shining, but any thoughts of seasonal stability are blown away by the bluster of the wind, the rattling rush of it through the trees and long grass.

I look over at her… her attention is off in the middle distance somewhere, like it so often is, and she doesn’t look back. She’s so beautiful, and yet it’s hard not to worry when she is off away like this, pensive and restrained. I’ve been around. Nearly every conversation we have, I’ve had a version of with someone else before… every silly little system crash of mine I get a sharp pang of recognition, every crazy little quirk of hers, it’s unnervingly familiar. With however many billion people there are on the planet, and the combinations of them all buzzing around, all down the years, every iteration of every row and kiss and joke we share has been done somewhere before.

And at the same time, because she isn’t the same as all the others, and I am not the same as all the others, at the same time as being so painfully typical, it’s different. All at once, it’s different and the same.

A buzzing, swooping bug drifts crazily into view… I notice them more since getting the dog. Her only real stab at alertness and competence is the ability to catch a critter out of the air with no apparent warning or preamble, so these days I have to spot them first, and distract her. A swallowed wasp or bumblebee could spell an expensive trip to canine casualty. I choose caution.

This doesn’t carry the familiar yellow and black stripes of danger, though. In fact, it doesn’t look much like anything at all. It has the feel of a cricket, but I’ve never seen one in person, so I’m only guessing. It’s got bright red wings, round like a ladybird’s, flapping lazily like washing on a line. It’s body is stretched and spindly, legs dangling free, for all the world like a tiny man hanging from a tinier crimson parachute.

I’ve never seen a bug like it. She’s good with nature, so I draw her attention it’s way, but she doesn’t know what it is either.

We talk about the strange insect for a little while. I suggest that, maybe with their compressed lifespans and massive numbers, species of bugs might evolve and devolve and become extinct so quickly, and we’d never know about it. That if species of creature that have been around for thousands and millions of years are only now being discovered in the hardest to reach parts of the world, wouldn’t it be possible that these smallest of beasts might evade notice in the mundane places, where etymologists might never look….

Privately I become quite preoccupied with this thought. What if we so seldom see anything new that we just assume that we never will? Assume that we just don’t know enough about bugs? What if truly exceptional breeds of creature are born and die under our noses all the time, and we never think to notice? That if it was worth noticing, someone would have noticed it already…?

Iterations of the same type, so similar that they go unnurtured and uncelebrated, but different enough to die out?

Versions of the same sort of thought haunt me sometimes, maybe familiar enough that I don’t see the need to address them, but maybe I should.

My thoughts are interrupted when the dog notices the bug, and hounds it into the undergrowth, maybe to kill it off, maybe to get distracted by some other shiny, flittering thing. She clearly can’t tell a difference between this bug and any other.

We walk on.

I offer you: YOUTUBE EMBEDDING! BWAHAHAHA! After all this time, I finally found a plugin that seems to work. It’s from here, by the way: http://www.paulbain.co.uk/simple-youtube-plugin-for-wordpress-easytube  /, and it’s a thing of beauty. Although the “newer” version on the website doesn’t actually work in my install.

If you know why the subject line is relevant, you deserve extra points, which you may redeem when the internet is over for a passel of naff all. You lucky people!

Image by avolare at flickr.

When I was a child I spoke as a child; I understood as a child; I thought as a child; but when I became a man I got very confused. Everything went wrong.

I may well be the last person in the world to have read the website that this passage is taken from and that I have linked to (from the passage itself).

That seems to be a constant worry about getting excited about things on the internet and sharing them. But I have broad shoulders, and can carry the load of that worry. If it means that you, my few readers, find something that you love. Or are vaguely depressed by. Whichever.

I just walked past a sign that read “DEJA VU”. And then a few moments later, walked past it again.
Afterwards, across the street, a tiny blonde boy (must have been about five or six) called for my attention by name, and directed me to watch an old lady in big pink moonboots, who, once I was watching, did a kind of soft shoe shuffle across the road, gently splashing water up from scattered puddles, to the boy’s squealed delight.
It’s going to be one of those days.

Wow, how wonderful is technology? I am typing this in the dark, lying on the sofa, on my Treo phone…
Wordpress is awesome. But it isn’t designed for a Treo screen.
Head girl and I are in the capital for the wedding of a friend of mine… my aunt and uncle are very kindly putting us up for the nights bracketing the wedding tomorrow, and head girl is ably coping with the quite daunting scenario, especially for a good white English girl, of partial immersion into Greek family life.
Head girl’s karmic superiority showed it’s face at the beginning of the train journey here… I admonished her when she made an intolerant comment about the slight noisiness of two overly boisterous teenaged girls with one of their mums, sat nearby. So naturally, after I defended their exuberance, the two horrific little harpies got louder and louder, singing off key, fighting in the aisles, generally being little twats. Eyes rolled, but none of the other passengers said anything, and to be honest I think that was mainly because the mum was there, and like fools we didn’t want to show her up.
Still, I did get a couple of good lines out of it. one said “ooh, I love all of this kind of music” as a tinny house anthem came on, and I barely supressed the urge to say “Which kind? Shit?”.
The other was just after a play scuffle broke out, and the undeniaby more pretty one exclaimed “you can hit me as many times as you want, you’ll still be ugly!”

If, like my housemate and I, you are still really into Lost, Paul Levinson’s article, recently represented, is an interesting read, broken down into key topics and not too nerdy, for those of you who are scared of nerds: http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2007/01/lost-keys-to-whats-really-goi ng-on.html

It should go without saying that if you aren’t fully up to date, here be spoilers!
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Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Because thanks to my inability to turn off the tv while I’m on the pc next to it on Saturdays, I have me a head full of Grease and Joseph Technicolor Jacket Yo! songs…

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