Spring Beauty

At this time of year, in my part of the world, a tiny wildflower pops up in places where the bulldozers of "progress" have not obliterated it.

It's called, most appropriately, Spring Beauty. Claytonia virginica.

Little blossom pops up at the end of a stem not more than a few inches high, fed by a tuber no bigger than a baby's thumb. Incidentally, you could eat the tuber -- boil it like a tiny potato. I've done it, just once. But to do so utterly destroys the plant and robs the world of that flower. Not to mention there are probably more calories in half an M&M.

By the time the warm weather arrives to stay, the flower has vanished for another year.

Nothing much for today. Made home-made hashbrowns for breakfast -- so good with ketchup and garlic pepper. That made me late leaving for work and put me once again to fuming about the stupidity of freeway speed limits.

Yes, I absolutely support the harshest of speed limits through populated areas like neighborhoods and such. But I have never understood the point of putting up a ridiculous limit on the Interstate -- typically free of bicyclists and children playing ball -- to which nobody under age 90 pays any heed, and assigning police officers to snag violators of said limit at random.

Tailgaters? Slam em. Drunks? Nail em. Drivers who talk on cell phones while changing their pants and trimming their toenails? Bust em good. People who max out their engine governor and attempt to become airborne at 100 or so? Fine em, sure.

But if I am in the far left lane of the freeway on a straight stretch on a sunshiney day and there is no congestion around me, and I want to go 75 or 80, LEAVE ME ALONE! In the words of the late Pres. Nixon, I am not a crook.

Weird clip art for the day

Has this girl suddenly become aware that her shoe is untied?

Or has she discovered a lost piece of string?

Is that actually an unfortunate earthworm beneath her sole?

If so, is she deliberately squishing it?

Another admission

As I was driving to work this morning, I thought about Kim.

It seemed possible that I had only imagined her, so long ago did I meet her.

But upon reaching a computer and the Internet, I found her to have been no mere figment of my fantasy.

There really was a Kim, a slender, sexy beauty, though she seems to have faded away over the years.

Kim was a cigarette. A stylish, feminine brand of cigarette. Like Misty, Capri, Satin, Virginia Slims and More. And for me, those names might as well be porn starlets.

You see, nearly a century ago, brilliant PR people for the cigarette companies realized they weren't reachng 50 percent of their possible customer base, i.e., women. And so began the campaign to put a cigarette in every woman's lips, a pack in every purse.

Simultaneously was created the capnolagiac -- the man who found a woman's smoking to be incredibly, intensely erotic.

I can tell you the exact brand -- Tarreytons -- that a neighbor was carrying around one night nearly thirty years ago, when I was just a bitty kid, as she was saying farewell to friends before a move -- and that I followed her around like a puppy hoping she would light up.

I can tell you the exact brand -- Winstons -- that a woman was smoking in front of us on the grass at some horse race thing I went to with my family, when I was almost that same age.

I was seven when I watched Olivia Newton John (in Grease) grind out her cigarette under red heels and then shove those heels into a woozy John Travolta -- and the sight electrified me.

Later, when my family would go shopping at the mall, I would beg to be let go on my own -- and then dart for the smoking bench in hopes of being doused with secondhand smoke from some lovely and thoughtless lady.

As I have grown, the passion has certainly not subsided. A pretty hand extended from a car window in front of me, tapping out cigarette ashes? She might as well be doing a naked lap dance.

The fragrance of smoke on the air as I round a corner somewhere? Everything in me begs for a woman to be holding that cigarette when I espy it.

Just the way I am.

Hiding in plain sight

Let's just say that someone I know is now dating a so-called "free-gan."

That is a person who, for philosophical, not necessarily financial reasons, collects their daily food from a Dumpster.

Since such a person is first and foremost a vegetarian, it's not as if they are carrying home maggot-riddled meat. Just vegetables that are perhaps too wilty for your local Buyalot store to offer their precious customers.

I wouldn't have the guts to go so far.

But this post isn't really about free-gans. It's about identifying the dater of one and what that would mean.

I.e., I created this blog as a means of expressing myself in absolutely anonymity -- of letting out some thoughts and feelings of which no one who knows my real world self has any idea.

How long can I keep it up? Is the internet big enough that the chances are infinitesimal of me letting out some identifying detail of my life and someone close to me coming across it, to their shock and horror?

What would they think of my doubts about my faith; and my peculiar -- but absolutely legal, please note -- fetishes?

Really, I'm harmless, though. No kiddie porn on my hard drive. No mouldering murder victim under my floorboards.

In the year 3000...

If I stepped into a freezer and some thoughtful soul thawed me out a thousand years from now, what would I see?

Would Christianity, most of whose thousands of sects revolve around the anticipated return of the Messiah, have quietly faded away? Or would I be smack dab in the middle of his millennial rule?

What about Judaism, which also anticipates a Messiah?Would it have shed this doctrine, which does not seem as central to Jewish worship as it is in Christianity, anyway? Or would I find the Jewish Messiah in charge?

Or would the Seventh Imam greet my blinking, incredulous eyes?

Would I be in a horrible world where all religion had faded away but nothing as effective for guiding the ethics of mankind had been developed in its place, leaving an extreme social Darwinism as the rule of life?

Or would this religion-free world actually be a paradise, with some irresistable ethical innovation having been invented to guide human conduct for loving thy neighbor, etc.?

Of all the features of mankind, religion is the most durable. In England, one still finds Druids and wannabee Druids, circling Stonehenge. In Greece, resurgent worshippers of the Olympic pantheon are demanding religious use of the Parthenon. In Iran, one still finds believers in Zoroastrianism, the religion practiced by the Persians of 600 B.C.

Around the world, numbering in the dozens or the millions, one finds devotees to some concept, some man or woman living or dead, or some book. The Yazudi eat no lettuce. The Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions. The Mormons drink no tea. The Jainists fear to tread on sidewalks or kill a germ. Some Christians play with poisonous snakes. Jihadi terrorists who condemn Westerners for moral laxity and resent having any women around who aren't burquaed head to tie, blow themselves up to go to a heaven where they consort with nubile and apparently unburquaed young women for all eternity.

How bizzare, how bizzare.

Someone once said that only religion is capable of motivating good people to do bad things. That's a little simplistic. Who defines what is good or bad, anyway, and by what authority? If I stab an enemy soldier to death in some trench somewhere, is it a good or bad thing and am I therefore bad? You need context. Religion need not be the motivating factor in that scenario.