A Plague of Butterflies

*Image courtesy of the New York Times, "In Texas, Conditions Lead to a Rabble of Butterflies" Thursday, July 27, 2006.

I've always thought of butterflies as the hearts with which God dots his i's-- sweet little affectations of the insect world that offset things like the dung beetle and giant bat-eating centipedes. Of course, I've also never witnessed a butterfly migration.

The fetchingly named American Snout is migrating through our town right now. At first there was just a light sprinkling of them, maybe ten in the space of a city block, but now they're coming quite literally by the thousands, in thick, low-rolling clouds.

There's something distinctly unsettling about walking around outside with what feels like a million dead leaves whirling chaotically around you at waist height, in silence, and with no breeze. Driving is even worse-- my windshield is covered in shimmery butterfly gore, and the grill of my radiator is a ghastly congestion of cooked and impaled butterfly bodies. In parking lots around town I've watched grackles wait for the grills of pick-ups to cool so they could perch on the front license plate and peck out a hearty butterfly meal.

Intellectually, I know this is a natural process-- there has been a population explosion of the American Snout down in Latin America somewhere, and now galaxies of them are headed north, as they do every year. There will be a culling of the herd, perhaps half or more, lost to 18-wheelers and predatory birds. But having never before been in the thick of any kind of significant, natural migration, (living in cities tends to preclude that) I feel kind of startled and unnerved finally witnessing one. It's like watching God on a drunken spending spree-- surely he can't afford this kind of promiscuous profusion.

Put another way, it's easy to imagine blinding excess on the part of human populations (we invented the glitzy civilian Hummer and triple E breast implants, after all), but unsettling to see it in nature, even if the numbers do eventually even out.

Oh, World...

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman



  

"Dear Hezbollah,

SUCK IT!

XXOO,

Dani




There are so many things going so wrong right now that it's hard to know where to even begin reacting to them. But here's a start: Israeli girls in pigtails writing little hate notes on live shells bound for Lebanon, where the civilian death toll, according to the Jerusalem Post, just topped out at 229.

I stared at this picture today for about ten minutes while my brain refused to spool up the rpm's to form a complete thought. When it finally did, the thoughts came in interior head-screams:

What needs to be written on a lethal explosive that the bomb can't say by itself? Do these kids even get what they're doing? What the hell kind of parent lets their child DRAW ON LIVE AMMUNITION?

And then I started thinking about an even creepier aspect of the picture: preteen girls. There is nothing more rancorous and vindictive than a preteen girl, and allowing them to write the kinds of things they write on bathroom walls and in complicated little folded up notes ON BOMBS, to people they've never met, who WILL BE KILLED BY THEM, should be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

I'm a nauseous kaleidescope of disappointment, profound anxiety, and fear. But mostly I just want to grab that little girl by her soft, curly pigtails and shake her...

Science and Shamanism

This morning I watched two crop dusters strafe the highway as they wove yawning figure eights around telephone wires and dusted the fields on either side of me. If I'd had a young, impressionable kid in the car with me, I would have told her that that's where fog comes from-- giant hoppers of chemicals in planes-- and on clear days, it means that the pilots are hung over.

I'm continually floored by how busy farmers are. My impression of farming as a whole was mostly formed by annual treks across West Texas, where cotton and corn seemed to sprout up in rows as orderly as corduroy with no visible trace of a human for miles around. I figured you planted and waited and prayed. If God was home, you got a good crop; if you got his machine, you were financially ruined.

Now that I drive by the same 60 miles of fields every day, I see how much you can do to nudge fate along, and how much of that takes place in the fragile hours of the early morning. Men in white pick-ups (the white pick-up has an unofficial offialness to it-- my grandfather once commented that there was no limit to where you could go in a white pick-up) bump along the margins of fields with all kinds of measuring instruments, prying up random plants, taking jars of soil, sifting powders along the rows like modern day shamans.

I have my own early morning rituals, and one of the best, most soul-clearing things in the world is an early morning run. The high school track is made from shavings of recycled tires and makes up for its boring elliptical shape by being mercifully even and easy on my knees. Across one field is the brand new Lowe's, and when the wind is right, you can hear the same sullen, sleepy-voiced girl making announcements over the loudspeaker.

My brother was always the athlete in the family, and for years I was focussed on other things, things that kept me mostly indoors and mostly inside my own head. In fact, if our bodies developed proportionally to our interests, I would probably just be a giant head that scuttled around on giant hands. I figured that being an athlete was something you were born into-- either you are or you aren't, and I wasn't, but I was OK with that. Lately though, I've been trying to reconnect with my body and learn how it works and if, maybe, it could be capable of something mildly athletic.

Part of this motivation comes from the fact that my metabolism is changing, and lying on my stomach reading a book doesn't seem to burn as many calories as it used to. But another part of it is the belated discovery of how delicious it feels to thoroughly exhaust my muscles and marinate my brain in a slurry of endorphins. It's incredible. It's like natural crack.

Unfortunately, there's also a whole world's worth of obvious things that I don't understand about exercise, having never engaged in it competitively or regularly or with any kind of guidance. For instance, why does the exact same workout feel like delicious crack one day and painful, boring horror the next? Regarding my retardedness with food, there's a whole mountain of questions-- how much of what kinds of things can I eat that will give me enough energy to run?

There's also an element of shamanism that goes into athleticism. What do you say in your head while you run? How do you manage your fatigue, and the despair and elation of either not hitting the mark or hitting it? How do you develop patience with your limitations yet still keep pushing yourself?

I'm beginning to realize that there's a lot that goes in to taking care of a body when you want it to perform, and I've decided to use a white pick-up approach to learning about it. I'll ask the dumb questions, I'll experiment and measure results, and hopefully, through some combination of science and shamanism, I'll get it right.

The little bit that we can talk about

The house smells like freshly baked bread right now, which should not be a problem, but it is. Something in the vicinity of my stomach is whining and squeaking in three different octaves, reminding me that I haven't eaten anything today that's stayed down. The problem is that I'm arguing with the squeak-- in a minute, after I run, after I write this email, maybe after some ice water. Sometimes I win, sometimes it does.

A problem like this is so common, so tired, so done to death that it's easy, out of pride and the deep embarrassment of being common oneself, to ignore it. I've done this successfully for a long time.

Therapy is the slow and meticulous uncovering of the blatantly obvious to someone who, for whatever reason, has lost sight of it. As such, I can't see how it would be anything but excrutiatingly boring to the therapist, and yet, this is what I intend to do-- pay someone for the privilege of boring them to death with my thoroughly common hang-ups about food. These hang-ups are getting in the way of other things I want to do.

I don't intend for my writing to take a sharp detour to follow the goings-on of the professional couch, but I also read recently that writing is, or should be, "honest, straightforward, non-bullshit communication that presupposes two things: intellectual honesty, but equally important, emotional honesty." I'm committed to addressing some shit in my world right now, but I'm also committed to growing as a writer. I can't do one thing without doing the other, and both demand honesty.

So here goes...