A beaver pond in the West Hills. In the larger version the reflection on the water is much more defined - crystal clear, in fact. That’s what makes this one interesting.

 

As Spring asserts itself my mind turns to first things, the essentials. What are they? Is there any thing in that inventory which is missing? Is there anything that I must amend? That means change. I think about that because change is so apparent in the spring. Each morning looks different, in a dramatic way, than the day before. Too soon the green mist that seems to gather round the branches of the bare trees is gone, and a deeper color that isn’t like a mist at all takes over. Spring is almost as melancholy as the Fall, when you look at it that way, because inevitably it must yield to its apocalypse, and even though the longed-for warm and verdant days of summer are still ahead, they too will come to an end.

 

In my song widget is Heaven, the Talking Heads. The lyric is “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens,” and it’s a lovely song because it’s about change, indirectly; it’s about the kiss that must end, the party that will eventually be over. Then there’s that small feeling of emptiness afterwards. How well I know that feeling. Spring is about anticipation, but you can’t freeze time so that the summer is always promised and never fulfilled. All things move towards their end because life moves towards its end, inexorably and inevitably. Actually, there’s a glimmer of theology in the song as one can glean from it the idea that we live in a world of ever-changing matter and look forward to a Hereafter which is eternal. Something which is eternal cannot by definition change.

 

It occurs to me a kiss would be lovely, even one that must end. In the winter my thinking is different than it is in the spring. In the winter, when I think of a kiss, I say to myself, “Well, I was kissed in 1997. That’s not so very long ago. How would my life be enriched by mere repetition?” But, in the spring I don’t think of it that way. I have to admit a kiss may be first among the missing essentials.

 

Oh bugger, but that involves trawling for someone who would be willing to kiss me, and that’s hard work! I’m lazy too. I may seem industrious – always working – but deep down in my heart I’m lazy. Deep down in my heart I am sitting in a chaise lounge wearing a yellow seersucker suit, sipping fresh lemonade in the summer sun, and saying things like “Sho-now,” as though I were written by Faulkner. Yikes – there’s an image.

 

Anyhoooo, Fibber and Molly return tonight. Fibber attempts to bake Molly a birthday cake. That should be fun. In the meantime, blossoms will open, and by the time I have posted the program they will have died. Life goes on, yes?

 

    

 

Speaking of Bloobs, - (I know we were not, but let's pretend we were) - my son has this to say: "You never get the shots you don't try." Ah, such wisdom from one so young!

Suspense! continues to offer stars of stage and screen in mystery stories written chiefly by John Dickson Carr. This installment originally aired on January 5 of 1943. I'm listening right along with you tonight. 

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) was an American mystery writer who spent so much of his career in England that he was thought by many to be English himself. Here he is, above. His crime stories are often very complex, with twisting plots that don't always work so well on radio as they require a fair amount of exposition. Radio audiences were required to listen carefully, so Suspense! was a very adult program.

One of the advertisements at the top of this page reads “Schools in Kissimmee,” which leads me to imagine this dialogue:

 Where are you from?

 

Kissimmee.

 

Well, that’s a lovely suggestion, but I hardly know you.

 

Whenever I see something I have written with quotation marks wrapped ‘round it like a color guard of tadpoles, I am taken aback. My inner voice – that is, the voice that reads to me within – suddenly begins to read the bit between the quotes in the voice of Ronald Coleman. I think, “My word, who’s the miserable little prick who wrote that?” You see, I don’t read what I’ve written once I’ve written it. I try not to feel what I felt after I’ve felt it either.

 

I’ve told this story before. A few years ago I was in a local launderette, and was there lost in whatever my thoughts may have been, minding my own business, when a woman’s voice began suddenly to fill the place with – me. She was reading to her husband from a book I had written, one of those tourist books that are left in trafficked places for tourists to find, one assumes out of desperation. Oh she would go on; I could hear my voice in hers. It was very odd: my words in another person’s throat.

 

No, I don’t suppose she could get pregnant that way. Settle down please, gentlemen.

 

I admit it takes some getting used to when I am quoted.

 

Making a simple bank transaction also takes some getting used to. The teller says, “Mr. Squabbler?” and my first reaction is to implement a strategy of plausible deniability. My fingertips tap nervously at the altar rail of such institutions as I wonder will I be found out this time, will I be denied the money, and will the authorities be called for?

 

My first-ever serious E-mail exchange occurred several years ago with an old friend who had recently reinitiated an acquaintance. His E-mailed responses to whatever I had written began with the words, “mr. squabbler @ yabbadabba.com wrote:” – blah blah – my words in tadpoles – ah – quotation marks. It was maddening. It was as though they were returning in a black chorus of disapproval, as vengeful ghosts, to accuse me of some terrible crime.

 

To write words is the same as speaking them – they are released. They are liberated. They are freed. Once the words have left my mouth, my pen, my fingertips here tap-tapping, they fly off like birds to – who knows where? They were never mine to keep. They were never really mine.

 

I’m not really a thinker; I don’t think deeply. I’m really just a medium who is relaying thoughts from another source. You might say this source is all that I read, and all that I have ever read of the great words of others. I say it is the Squabs whispering in my ear or the result of indigestion – it’s the same damn thing, really.

 

Well, I am thinking this morning about how to tell the difference between Right and Wrong. Oh what a quandary! No – not at all. You see, it’s written down rather plainly what is right and what is wrong, and what is written is applicable to every case, universally, unilaterally. (What a word!) This writing, which is called the Ten Commandments, is older than dirt – or very nearly. At least it is considerably older than I am, and in this age of instant communication and world wide access to the deep well of collected wisdom few can claim ignorance of its content.

 

So, we have this word – judgmental – which is usually applied with a negative connotation to folks who take that old document seriously. It is not good – so the training of our knee jerk reaction goes – to be judgmental, or to be considered judgmental in any case. One wonders why it should matter, but of course we are social creatures. (Well, most of us. I’m not really sure what the Squabbler is.) But in reality judgment isn’t usually necessary to determine what may be so easily grasped by simple observation.

 

To explain what I mean I will invoke the spirit of Sesame Street, the old government TV child educational program which most of us have seen. On that program there used to be featured a little song which went, “One of these things is not like the other/ One of these things is not the same.” Several objects, or perhaps geometrical shapes, were shown on the screen and the young viewing audience was encouraged to discern the difference between them. Here is a circle and here is a square – does it require judgment to tell the difference between a circle and a square? I say no, it doesn’t.

 

 

Let us say then that “Thou Shalt Not Steal” is a circle; stealing is a square. Is a person being judgmental when he observes that there is a difference between them? Of course not. And telling Right from Wrong is really just that simple.

 

Judgment is a little more complicated. It involves not merely discerning the difference between right and wrong, which as I’ve explained is as simple as telling the difference between a circle and a square, but passing a sentence or assigning a punishment, or Penance, upon the perpetrator of the wrong action. The purpose of judging is to amend a situation of wrongness so that it may become rightness. In the case of stealing, for instance, there are people whom society has elected or otherwise appointed in the role of judge. It is the judge who passes sentence, assigns punishment, thereby allowing the wrong to be amended.

 

When it comes to passing judgment on the state of a person’s soul, however, who amongst us can see what state another person’s soul is in? The answer to that question is Few, if any. I understand Padre Pio is said to have been given this great and rare gift of the Holy Spirit. That may be. Otherwise, being judgmental is really not a thing for which any of us are really qualified. Discerning? - Yes. Judgmental? – Out of my league somewhat, I admit.

 

 

Just as in the case of stealing there may be extenuating circumstances in any other cases of wrong doing which an actual judge – assuming he is a good judge – will be required by his office to take into account. These extenuating circumstances will ultimately affect the nature of the assigned punishment, Penance, or amends-making.

 

Why is this so? Well, because we all suffer from a predisposition to do the wrong thing at times. But we are not predisposed by fate, circumstance, genetics, or what-have-you to do the wrong thing at all times. In other words, not every wrong act is willful and premeditated, requiring therefore the strongest application of punishment. Judging involves making such a determination. It’s a tricky business. It requires some wisdom.

 

There is the outward appearance of Wrong – that would be the action, such as for instance stealing – that is one thing, and the commission of Wrong within the mind, whether it manifests outwardly or not – that is another thing. In cases where the Wrong is not outwardly manifest it is only God who judges. Moreover, it is ultimately God who judges every case – public or private – with a finality His human proxies cannot achieve. We are asked to take inventory of our thinking in order to discern the circles from the squares, thereby beginning the process by which we may amend the situation of wrongness within ourselves. And it all begins with a simple little song: “One of these things is not like the other/ One of these things is not the same.”

 

That’s not being judgmental. That’s just being observant.

It wasn’t the best day for pictures. This road runs straight along the top of the ridge line, connecting all the Hollows. Somewhere off the road to the left or to the right there is a place where the wind in the leaves says my name, I just know it.

 

This is the Indian Ghost Road. The legend has it that a young Native ran its length to inform the garrison stationed in the town where I reside, too late as it happens, of the massacre occurring in Rhubarb Valley in 1778. He is still sometimes seen running its length, so goes the tale. The residents of Rhubarb Valley either fled or were killed by a raiding party led by a British operative, some of the Indians of the region siding with the Royalist cause in the Revolution and others – like our young runner - backing the Colonial effort. Rhubarb Valley would not be repopulated until the turn of the century, memories of the slaughter of the women and children being so fresh in the

mind.

 

 

 

Another road winds its way up the hill into mystery. This creek has its source in the nameless ponds which dapple the landscape of the Hollow Hills. One comes upon them as unexpectedly as abandoned cemeteries and laid stone foundations of houses long ago reclaimed by the land. As you know, I don’t take pictures of inhabited dwellings without the permission of their owners, but the Hills are home to real people as well as to ghosts. There are many sights similar to the pictures in my last post which were taken somewhat south of here, but on the same property as those old ruins there is often an inhabited trailer home or Pioneer shanty house which prevents me out of politeness from taking a picture. On a better day I might knock on a few doors to gain permission.

 

My favorite view, looking up towards Hinder Hollow. A man may make a good home in such a place. It is free of werewolves and quite safe in general. The bears stick to the wooded areas.

 

More rain is expected today – in fact, it is dribbling now against my windows. I think I’ll wait for it to clear before I go out again.  

 

 

Somebody was here. I haven’t checked yet to see who it was or what he had to say. Well, each day is a new life. At night, when I close my eyes, the world ends. The Apocalypse happens. It happens just exactly as our Book says it does. It happens for many people. It happens for all those who close their eyes at around the same time I close mine, but who don’t wake up again to write blog posts. It will happen for me, just as surely as the world begins anew with each awakening. We live our lives as if life was real; we have to.

 

Now, if you’re standing out in an open field, and you’re surrounded by birds and trees and bathed in sunshine; if there is not a sign of humanity to be seen except for the simple fact that without humanity there would be nothing – nothing at all – and suddenly a train appears from nowhere, and you are standing on the tracks, do you decide that the approaching train isn’t real and just continue standing there until you are killed? No, of course not. You step off the track. There will be time to organize your thoughts so that the arrangement of matter makes sense to you. We make the unbelievable believable every day. We make sense of things. That’s creative intellect. That’s the way in which we are made in the image of God.

 

But only approaching the likeness. Achieving the likeness of God is the journey of life. Now, the journey of life itself occurs in time, and time doesn’t really exist. What really exists is change; time is how we make sense of it. We are in the image and likeness of God already, but in the context of the fourth dimension, time, we are always merely approaching it. Some say that it is destined we will achieve God’s likeness, no matter who we are, or what we do, or what we decide to do. But they’re wrong. What I was writing yesterday is correct: God respects us, allows us to make our own decisions.

 

People are gonna do what people are gonna do. That’s the whole deal right there.

 

The thing about time. Before there was space there was no time. Time was created in the exact same moment that space was created. What existed before space? God existed before space. What existed before God? There was no before God. There was no time before God because before God created space there was no time, and without time there is no before or after. St. Augustine explained all this. Why do people continue to wonder about things that are already known?

 

Now, Mrs. Uppington likes to poo in rather inaccessible places. She’s funny that way. Behind my house there is a very steep hill. The hill used to begin to descend into the river basin below much closer to the driveway so that where a person may have parked his car was right up against the precipice, but shortly before I moved here – that would make it seven years ago, plus – truckloads of excavated landfill were emptied over the bank. The result was the creation of a back yard where there had been only a very steep gradient falling into the river basin. During the first year I was living here the “new” ground was hydro-seeded. There’s grass on the back yard now, though it’s not exactly barefoot bliss to walk upon it.

 

I wear crocs, silly things. But there’s poo back there now, and at night who can tell exactly where it may be? Rubber footwear which can be hosed off is indicated.

 

I must be quite a sight when I’m back there letting Abigail take care of her business. There I stand, leash in hand. The other end of it is straining somewhere down the bank where I cannot easily follow. Anyone who is watching can see me, and see the leash in my hand, but not the dog he would correctly surmise was on the other end of it. Now, I write the word “dog,” and you form in your mind the image of a dog. But, what does your image look like? I’ll bet it looks almost nothing like Mrs. Uppington.

 

Unless, of course, you’ve seen the picture of her that I posted a while back.

 

Speaking of pictures, the one above I took yesterday. Elizabeth and I were on our way to a job site up in the Hollow Hills. I’ve posted this scene before, and the one below, which is across the road from the above pictured house remnant, but in the winter time. By comparison those pictures were quite bleak. I love this time of year. I love the way the birds wake me in the morning. I love the singing of the tree toads from the river late at night. The lilacs outside my bedroom window are just beginning to form their blossoms, now clenched tightly like purple fists.

 

People are looking for houses on my behalf. As you know, if you’re a regular visitor, I’m looking forward to moving away from this village where I have been living. There was a time for village living. That time is past. I now wish to return to my beloved hills, and there live out whatever remains. I am seven years past death. In however many more remain I will continue to chronicle the end of our civilization – as that appears to be what is happening – or, if I’m wrong, to rejoice in its renewal.