Ecce Signum

This past Sunday I found myself at a small pond at one end of the Aquinas College campus. It was not yet noon, so the grass was damp and the small trees cast shadows long enough to sit in, away from the already too-hot sunshine.

The only visible movement was dozens of large dragonflies skimming the surface of the water, putting a serious dent in the local mosquito population and providing me with over an hour of entertainment. There were maybe five different species, some powdery blue, some iridescent green, red, brown, clear-winged, black-winged, and some with spots. The occasional brawl, sounding like a crinkling of cellophane, was the only sound.

After a while a woman and her six-ish year old son arrived. The boy had a fishing pole with him, maybe four feet long, with a big red-and-white bobber and a trout fly for bait. Now, this pond is lightly populated at the best of times, but what with the complete lack of rain in the last month, it is now at most two feet deep. The only surviving fish are minnows, three-inch bluegills, and twelve-pound carp.

Not really fly-fishing-type fish.

There was no way, other than accidentally snagging a carp half his size, that the kid would possibly catch anything. Carp are scavengers, and unless the kid had rubbed the trout fly in roadkill on the way to the pond, the carp would never even notice it. The kid was having fun, his mom was taking a break from her routine, and it was a beautiful day to just hang out and watch the fish.

So I was kind of surprised — and a little disappointed — when a police officer showed up on a bike and told the kid and his mom that there was no fishing allowed, and that they would have to leave. And he didn’t even help the kid retrieve his fly, which he had managed to cast into a tree.

After struggling to free the fly — and I offered to help, but they didn’t want any — mom and son packed it in and left. I felt kind of disappointed. The kid should have jumped in the water and tried wrestling one of the carp to shore. That would have showed that cop.

So I woke up just before 6am yesterday and haven’t been to sleep yet. Worst bout of insomnia yet. At 1am I picked up The Green Mile, and I finished it at 6am today. Then I tried to sleep again, then I went to work. I left work at noon, came home, tried to nap for an hour, couldn’t sleep, then went back to work. Now the time is 10:15, and I feel no more tired than I did at this time yesterday. I decided that the idea of missing a night’s sleep is a big part of the hell of actually missing a night’s sleep. And with that realization I woke up a lot.

Part of the problem was a thought that occurred to me at work yesterday: can we actually perceive the three physical dimensions, or are they metaphors we use to orient ourselves to the space we inhabit. After a night of something loosely resembling thought, I have to say the answer is {b}. There is no objective width/height/depth. These parameters exist only in relation to physical space. There is no platonic ideal of “3 dimensions”

That got me thinking about time, and the perception of the passing of time. Again, is that something we actually notice, or do we only notice its effect on the world around us? Again, I think we are only aware of the symptoms of passage through time: entropy, chaos, age, change, hunger, boredom… things and events which change, not through obvious physical intervention, but merely by existing for a while.

On a completely different note, for a mild spot of amusement, go here . Do a search on a word . Any word . (may take a while to load)

Sheesh! The stuff people throw away…

For the past three weeks the temperature has not dropped enough for dew to form on the grass or the windows of my car. I have even forgone one of the great pleasures of my life — walking to work. At night I sweat myself to sleep and wake up in the morning feeling like I spent the night running.

My apartment is in an old hardware store, built around the turn of the century. The walls are 18 inches of red brick. During the day they absorb sunlight, and at night they expel that light in the form of heat into my apartment. Thus my apartment as night is at least ten degrees hotter than the air outside.

Not long ago I commented that if I ever go into business for myself — building websites — that providing support of any kind for Netscape 4 would automatically raise my rates by 25%. Well, after discovering the breaking point for that browser, I have decided that, no matter the hit my business would take, I will do naught for NS4 other than create a redirect to the Mozilla upgrade page. To Hell with old browsers.

Damn, it’s hot out.

I just finished watching The Shawshank Redemption for, I dunno, maybe the tenth time. Sure, it is one of my favorite movies, and I have seen it enough that it is familiar, and comfortable, and something I can have on in the background while I do other things.

This time a single scene caught my attention; one I have noticed before, but not really *noticed*, until tonight: the scene when Andy (Tim Robbins) locks himself in the library and plays Mozart over the loudspeakers. The looks on the faces of the prisoners. The look on Andy’s face. Red: “I don’t know what those two Italian ladies were singing about. I’d like to think it was something so beautiful that it couldn’t be expressed in words.”

I spent most of this past Sunday sleepwalking, in a haze from lack of food and sleep. As I was stumbling around a supermarket in the afternoon the intercom came on playing “Perhaps Love” — the John Denver/Placido Domingo duet. I have never paid much attention to that song, but at that moment, me half dead from exhaustion, and tiny bits of hallucinogen floating around in my brain, it was…extraordinary. I stood in the aisle with my eyes closed and just listened to those beautiful voices, singing that beautiful song, in a place where I had never before heard music.

Or perhaps I just never noticed it. I was back there shopping this evening and the intercom was silent. Only the sounds of groceries being bagged and lobsters tapping against the glass walls of their peculiar prison. Maybe the weekend manager was a music lover. Or maybe the weekend manager was not there at all. Regardless, that couple of minutes of song at that moment stuck with me, and in trying to tell my friends about it and seeing smile-and-nod reactions I realized that there are indeed some moments of beauty that can’t be expressed in words.

So far the highlight of this otherwise uneventful, mildly boring week was the Blues on the Mall this evening, in sunny downtown Grand Rapids. The Chicago Rhythm and Blues Kings played up a storm and around 500 people danced and jived the night away.

I realized today that I need a vacation. Yes, I just returned from a vacation, but slow days inside, away from the sun and the music and, well, sleep — those days drain my energy and willpower and what little there is to do remains unaccomplished.

In another few days I will have the generic pictures-and-thumbnails template complete. The first gallery will be of the martial arts demonstration my class performed at Festival two weeks ago. We kicked ass.