Spring is...

Overwhelming – with tuning bikes and practicing baseball and cleaning windows and tangled kites and avoiding potholes and budding trees with allergies.

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Winter coat, spring coat, winter coat, spring coat, no coat, winter coat, spring coat, no coat, spring coat, winter coat, spring coat, no coat, no coat, no coat.

Dripping icicles and drizzled trickles to plush puddles to gushing streams, forcing rivers, flooded causeways, stressed levees and engulfed...

Chasing bunnies, easing squirrels, recurring robins, flocking geese, visiting mice and happy cats.

Opened windows, ignited charcoal, magnified sunlight, falling rain, cancelled Twins games, walking-to the coffee shop, dropping-in on garage sales, visiting open houses and graduating seniors.

Marathons and 10k runs; rides for life and walks for health (and avoiding crossing Mpls via Minnehaha Parkway and it’s intermittent Saturday morning closures.)

Driving to the range, putting to the green, hacking out the ruff, chipping off the fair, holing-out the birdie.

And even just a week of an overwhelming Spring is better than a year of mediocre musings.

But, what is normal...

Fleeting Fancy passed Hammerschmidt’s Guilt, eyes wide and bulging.

Shock had set apart all predisposed recommendations.

A day crept at similar pace with engaged depth encumbered beyond recollection.

Frantic, erratic, electric, erotic Surge protected but was absent this hour of engulfed strain.

Without altercation and exposed phonetically the weary stigmatized step bound beyond buoyancy.

All said was done to move without question, automatic, no longer a need, randomly a thread simply set into weave, dark and stuck, no hope for escape, simply engaged as a product for consumption not creation, the esoteric instance begged from within but bitstream overcome with pace, survival born to enact and kindness forgotten.

The rush, overwhelmed and underrepresented, torrentially rained denial of service - banked by upended prospects beneath the current and dragged by fiasco.

The string pulled, the sweater undone, contempt rusted as roots bound together deep within crust – the underworld aglow with black, a market but no rule nor system or bounds… a free range commune.

The portal closed and Fleeting Fancy made sense of the exposed injustice enacted to normalcy and welcomed by the absolute cleanliness of the kernel.

...and what is nonsense?

Reset

Being sick <----------------------------------------> Being American

At the back of the typical home router (the box thing that seems to distribute the internet throughout your home), there is this tiny little hole. It is so small barely a paperclip can poke through. This is probably the point, so that only the point of a tiny paperclip or pin, as a tool, can fit through and work its magic.

Which is to essentially “reset” the router. To reactivate the device so that it comes back alive in a completely refreshed mode, or mood. Refreshed to the brink of its creation – the username thing and password are reset to the “original factory settings.” (The benefit being that if a configuration gets messy and mucked up so bad, that you can simply reset it.)

Being sick, should be like that. Ya get sick and take a couple days off, reset yourself.

Individually we need to get reset every now and then. Like when my phone says, “hey big fella, you need to shut me down, or restart me, so that I can get and set the latest software into my system,” so that it doesn’t get caught with some virus or malicious mucus.  You should have that right as well, despite what your employer and their efficiency quota says. The guilt we in America seem to feel about getting sick is enough to make us sick. We’re human, we get sick.

It's fairly petty that someone breathed all over ya, or that you wiped some nanosized bacteria into your eye and caught your cold… Whether it comes on fast or slow, whether it peaks high or low, and whether it descends and moves on peacefully or not, you have been served. So take care of yourself and get reset. Don’t trudge through and be a man and spread whatever ails ya to the rest of the workforce, or schoolforce.

As a whole, it seems that being sick and spreading the sickness has been a benefit to humanity. Survival of the fittest, down with the weak – our people are the most fit remnants of millions of years of sick culture. But, whose benefit is it truly, that we get sick? The germ, or us? If the germs were all gone, would we humans just multiply to every square inch of space upon the planet?

Aren't there World War II stories of the Russian Army, short on rifles, but long on soldiers - sending two fellows out with one rifle and once the lead soldier got shot, the other person would follow and pick up the rifle and carry on? Or as American soldiers took and claimed various islands in the Pacific, a group of guys carrying the American flag up the hill, king of the hill style, bullets whizzing by, just keep following the mates ‘till at least one was left standing at the top, with the flag.

This is where the American workforce seems similar and perhaps this is why we don’t call in sick. We’re too afraid of losing our job because there is some other fellow behind us, licking his chops, ready to take over with the slightest misstep, be him a neighbor down the street or some fresh faced kid. To whose advantage is this... you? your employer? the germ? Don’t get sick, it’s a sign of weakness. Don’t reset, you may catch a breath and come back refreshed and ready to enjoy your work.

And here I am justifying my newfound annual sick event using a router, my phone and WW II veterans (God bless'em).

They Come from Pockets

What fine aspirations one has for their offspring.

To subconsciously think beyond oneself, thirsting for moments of intense pleasure to create beings that have similar genetic makeup. Naturally, one is provided the opportunity to carry forth the new being through a fairly lengthy process, until the bun in the oven is ready to breathe on it's own and spread it's sweet and salty signature out to the world.

Out comes the mite, reliant on parent(s) for daily upkeep and providing said parent(s) with an organically cyclical process of intake, outtake and rest.

Eventually offspring springs forth and creates havoc for grandparent(s) who have begun to struggle to keep up themselves, let alone with a tiny sputtering capsule of their own DNA.

The child takes in immense amounts of data (and milk) from two feet, three feet, four off the ground. Eyes, ears and mouth receive bits and begin to process while sputtering out garble to babel to jargon to balderdash.

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Many of these little people come from pockets. Secret lairs of comfort, perhaps a home or a shire, some set deep within the urban jungles, others an outer fringe or wilderness (all of which have their own "wild things", "secret gardens" and "haunted forests".)


Eventually, they venture off, resilient little vessels of innocence, replicated clones with varying degrees of differences that expand slightly outward with nourishment. The gaps to be infilled with new experience, then perhaps capped or sugarcoated with nonsense.

The parents watch with awareness for how their aspirations are playing out. As kids begin to be influenced more-so by each other than the parents themselves. Yet the folks see what may or may not be and wander towards wonder…

For these little aspirations, the human race has already begun, too bad it soon starts to get overly focused and so darn serious.

The Comet's Tail

At what point will the “Little Guy” want to stop being called the Little Guy? As he trapes his blanky around (to a lesser extent) throughout the rest of the house, it seems he is growing up too...

Too fast and too cute and too quick and too clever.

It is such close agony to get him ready for bed and all pottied up, and changed into pajamas and just about tucked in, when the realization succumbs to fruition that - the blanky is missing! The yellowish colored blanky that has proceeded him around the house like the tail of a comet for the past couple years. It regularly gets left behind and lost down the stairs through the day, amongst the grown up mess of rooms and pillows and cushions.

There was a time, years back now, when the oldest was caught sucking down chocolate early some morning following Easter like a fly attracted to something sweet.  Or when the older brother could be heard quietly retreating down the stairs at 5 AM overanxious to test out his computer skills. Each becoming as independent as Will Smith on the set of some movie about aliens or zombies or alcoholic superheroes. Now the "little guy" is not quite so little.

He is coming into his own, making the jump from instinct to some loose form of premeditated decision making.

The Little Guy is the comet's tail and what a responsibility that is, offering up occasional flash and elemental basics. It's the tail that provides trace of existence in an overwhelming universe of expanding space. A signature flare, like the tail of a peacock, proud and bright and odd - different, existent. The comet’s tail has nothing to do with the direction of the comet, but the solar wind pushes it so that it always points away from the sun. All too often our relativity here on Earth makes "normal" sense - a good reason to think big and beyond.

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So, "Little Guy", don’t become too independent too fast. Stay short and little and feel free to take naps in the middle of the floor a little while longer. At least until dad gets over being sick and mom gets her weekend/bookend sleep-in completed.

Then we will get you some milk and watch the comet circle the sun and race off to places only 3's are supposed to go – but you will still be the comet’s tail to us, though surely at some point, “the little guy” will lose its luster.