Day 69

Lily went on a walkabout today, the first time out since November, I think.  I had to follow her around because there is a nasty cat who attacks her sometimes, and, at 20, she is a bit wobbly on her pins now.

Sun. Wide Blue Sky.  But everything comes with a price.   Because we have no wolves anymore, Massachusetts is over-run with deer, which are rather beautiful, but deer carry ticks which can give other animals (including us) Lyme disease, a debilitating disease which can cause all kinds of awful things like arthritis, heart ailments, meningitis and even schizophrenia, depending on which part of your body succumbs to the infection.  If I could have a wish granted I would eradicate ticks, because nothing depends on them for food.  In fact, only a few things eat them, like guinea fowl, which we don't have here, and which, if we did, would eat all my bees as well.

A positive about the warmer weather is that it is much easier to pee in the woods.  In winter, you have to extricate yourself from layers and layers, and then, with both the cold wind and the proximity of your nether regions to the snowy ground, freeze your bum off. This is one area where men are very lucky to just have an appendage they can whip out in a hurry.

I'd actually like two wishes today.  Another wish would be to eradicate cars, and travel in small eco-friendly vehicles that fly above the ground, or build huge fences along every road, as Spring brings out all the animals from hibernation and semi-hibernation, to eat and romp and mate in the cyclical dance.  And so many of these animals meet their violent death on the highways.  I flinch with pity and well up with sorrow for every mask-faced raccoon, every shiny-coated skunk, every bare-tailed opossum (who carry on growing their whole lives), lying ruined on the side of the road.  I hate all cars and drivers (including myself) at this time of year.

While running 3.4km today, I thought about having to create 296 more portraits of myself, and it seems just silly, and I am already quite tired of searching this aging face of mine.

Everything we create can be conceived of as autobiographical, in a way.  My 6th grade classes have just completed a colour exercise, an abstract landscape made by drawing a few intersecting lines along a paper, then mixing paint to create colours using only blue, yellow and white, and filling in the shapes created by the lines with all the different colours they have made.  There are about 50 students in grade 6, and not one of these pictures is alike!  And the few idiosyncratic characters, the children teachers complain about in faculty meetings, produced even more individualistic works than the others! We are all creating, even when following directions to the same exercise, with our individual minds and hands, and bringing our own desires, experiences, theories, to our images.  Which is why it is so difficult to perpetrate an art fakery/fraud, and only a few people on earth can do it well.

So I think I will draw more of the 'landscape' of my life, the people and things around me too, because they are all part of my autobiography, my self-portrait.