Weather report

Rain hurried down
Then all was sunny
Now a gentle breeze
Reminds me

"Brokeback Mountain"

To understand what Ennis Del Mar feels for Jack Twist, you need to smell the blood on their shirts. It's not only the blood of cowboys thrown by spooked horses, of husbands protecting their wives from disrespectful scum (and themselves from the implication that they are not manly enough to silence lowlifes), of sheep ripped apart by prowling wolves, it's also the blood of every queer man and women killed by thugs unleashed by Bible-thumping TV and radio evangelists. It's the blood that passes turbulently from father to son, that marks a father's daughter as chattel exchanged for a promise to submit, to give in to the father and yield to him the knife that slices through the animal's dead body. To understand Ennis you need to see that a certain way of squaring the shoulders and a reliance on very few words could make the difference between being hung dead on a barbed wire fence and surviving until cancer gets you. To understand Ennis you need to see why he lifts his hand against his wife. The blood on their shirts is the blood they shed so that they would be taken for men, not queers. And the same blood marked the unspoken oath that both swore as they began their retreat from Brokeback Mountain.

Dream

I would like to wake tomorrow and find that America is home to a large indigenous population of echidnas.

Walken on air

Three and a half minutes of pure joy. http://www.astralwerks.com/fbs/woc/

Where the cow goes

Her blood: plywood adhesives, fertilizer, fire extinguisher foam, dyes

Her fat: plastics, tires, crayons, cosmetics, lubricants, soaps, detergents, cough syrup, ink, shaving ream, fabric softeners, synthetic rubber, jet engine lubricants, textiles, corrosion inhibitors, metal-machining lubricants

Her bones: for refining sugar and making ceramics, cleaning and polishing compounds

Her collagen: yogurt, matches, bank notes, cardboard glue, paper

Nature

That which is not man's creation is natural. An elephant on the rampage is natural. A mudslide is natural. Countless extinctions are natural.

Man did not invent rape: it is natural. Same-sex sex is common among many species: it is natural. Violence and aggression are natural.

Man's aggression is natural, unless it is an aggression aimed at plants and animals and soil and water and air, in which case it is anti-natural.

Cats are curious; curiosity is natural.

The "Cesar" Trilogy

The appeal of the three movies based on Marcel Pagnol's popular plays is their local flavor, the marvelous physical acting of Raimu, Fernand Charpin, Paul Dullac and Alida Rouffe, and the irresistible story of love and war between the generations in 1930s Marseilles. "Marius," "Fanny" and "Cesar" are the most delightful movies ever made.

Alice Waters named her restaurants after two of the characters from the movies.

The Philosopher of Life

Along the beach you watch for crabs,
Sideways thoughts that give you hope
In a desert zone licked by not yet
Saltless water, thick enough to tread on.

I am studying you studying her:
Your wife, by lamplight,
Tired of her home.

They comfort you, the homely crabs,
Catching the stick you extend,
Their sidelong society your balm.