I woke up to the sound of crows, cawing madly, negotiating distribution of the daily scavenge. Some days I’m lucky and they have chosen another neighbourhood, and I get a more dulcet breed of bird that lifts the spirit and makes you feel, just for a while, that the world is a paradise. But the crows eventually return, although what they lack in voice they make up for with an odd combination of comical walk, intelligence, and the deep shimmering blackness of their wings. You can watch a crow and think on its industriousness, its bulk, and its sharpness; you just don’t want to hear it caw all morning.
My waking progresses to the point where I can open my eyes. There’s a hazy light filtering through the blinds and curtains. I only arouse my lethargic hulk because I crave caffeine in the mornings, and I want to get to my reading. I want to read what happened a million years ago, when we crawled out of the swamp, a desperate fearful creature that, however strangely, was destined to develop a superstructure atop the animal amygdala, a cerebral cortex that would have us flying through the universe and reflecting simultaneously on the unified and multiform moment, on the past, the present and the future, from the control panel of a fantastic fuselage.
I want what I want and I want freedom, and already this reading is taking me everywhere.
I decide to cook eggs and eat them on toast.
The pursuit of bliss knows no bounds; it is my joy and my downfall, but there’s nothing better than eggs. Presently I look up from my gluttony and fix my sated, avaricious eyes on the world. If you can eat eggs you are a snake, and a fox, and an eagle; stealing eggs and gorging on them is something we creatures all understand.
Julia Gillard is on the TV talking about a price on carbon. This in the face of extraordinary opposition, even to the very idea of global warming. Now this is an interesting point to come to, when we disturb the one solid, immutable thing we know, this surreal globe that spins and travels in the magnetic control of a hot star. Even when the earth spew's molten rock, or cannons us with hard water, it’s what we expect. We even know, because we’re so god damned smart, that it heats and cools every so geologically often. But we’ve never conjured the storms ourselves, never warmed up our beautiful world, or cooled it down. That’s the radical thing, the thing that fundamentalists can’t and won’t tolerate the possibility of.
But the hurricanes and tsunami's and floods haven't hit me personally, not yet.
It’s time to get out of here, to walk in the park, to look at the river, the multitudinous twinkly river, giver of life and floater of boats.
