Crashing to earth

I've been sitting here for the last half-hour, feeling an obligation to post some kind of news or reflection, and finding my mental self strangely quiet and bankrupt of ideas worth spending bandwidth on. I've spent the morning on worldly pursuits -- crafting a reply to the agent who contacted me yesterday that strikes the right balance between gush and crust, reading about how the retina works, and how it is designed to extract maximum information from the world with minimal cost, dealing with small and tawdry administrative events. It occurred to me that I have nothing to say today. Then I remembered the day, not so long ago, when I was so burned up with an idea while on a walk along the ocean's edge that I had to stop, fish an old bit of paper out of my pocket and, resting it on a stump, write it down before it went away. Fast forward to today. I drove to work (again) in part because I'm still waiting for delivery of the expensive piece of engineering that will allow me to securely fasten Chinese Wonder Girl to the small of my back as we bike to her daycare centre. I'm trying to remember one single thing that I saw on the way. And I can't. I have what passes for a decent view from my office window. I'm on the 4th floor of a concrete bunker of a building. I look out on some manicured grass, an artificial creek, some new growth forest, many apartment buildings and a great deal of lovely sky. I'm reciting all of this from memory. I haven't looked out that window all morning. Now I'm going to get up from this chair and look for one single, solitary moment of something real that has not been manufactured by the glowing pixel fireplace that resides on my desk, nor channeled into my brain by the incessant chirping of a PDA telling me what, where, and when. Here I go....

....my window blinds have not been raised for some time. They make a godawful skritching noise as I raise them. A bad sign. The window itself is streaked with lines of grey dirt. There was a time when window washers, banging against the walls, would frighten me from my workaday trance on a regular basis. It looks as though they haven't been here for quite some time. Perhaps the window cleaning line item in the university budget has dropped a notch or two, as we continue to try to do more for less. Or perhaps the air is dirtier than ever. Through the grey lens, I see a row of three immensely tall blue spruce trees whose crowns are bent downward by a heavy mantle of cones. I remember once, years ago, somebody telling me that top-heavy cone laden spruce trees forecast a severe winter ahead. It was such a lovely idea that I believed it without any reflection at all, even though it made no sense. Believing things that don't make sense just for fun seems a luxury that we can no longer afford, if ever there was a time we could. Our local library is offering a course entitled "Astrology for Teens." No sense.

Outside my window, down on ground level, I can see people walking about. Their gait seems slow, ponderous and heavy. I wonder if it is very hot. I've been inside this building for hours now. I have no idea what the weather is like out there. If it isn't hot, then these people must be very sad about something, I think. They pass one another, heads bent, not a word exchanged between them. This reminds me of my toddlers, who have not made the transition to an urban setting with higher population density. When we are out walking, they pause to say 'hello' to everyone they meet, and they are stunned when, occasionally, they receive no reply. They stop, turn around, plant themselves on the sidewalk and watch the back of the person who snubbed them, calling hello, hello, hello in louder and more insistent tones until eventually they give up, look at me with a bewildered expression as though this person who has just passed them, though looking like a real person, could not have been a real person because they were incapable of friendly greeting. Bless them.

Enough of this. The physiology of the retina can wait. I'm going outside to use mine.