On Guard
Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 6:02AM I was out of bed at 3:49 this morning...just in case.
After the Toronto shenanigans I've doubled the sentry duty around my urban compound and all leave has been cancelled.
Okay, maybe that's taking it too far but you never know when some yoga instructor, inspired by the G20 mobs, might read just enough Noam Chomsky to go over the edge and launch his own personal assault on the institution of private property.
That's why I keep a very sharp ballpoint pen by my bed, which in my expert hands can be used as a very tiny but lethal spear.
Anyway, enough of that wild and irresponsible talk. After all, as we all know random attacks by yoga instructors have fallen way off.
The real big news is that Deb and I hiked in Banff National Park yesterday.
I am forever surprised by Banff. The mountains are always more steep, sheer and severe then I remember. It is a cliché to talk about how they dwarf us in the dimension of space, but we are also specks before them in terms of time and force.
If you have the gift of historical imagination or in this case prehistorical imagination it is terrifying and awe inducing to consider forces so old and immense that they thrust up the floors of ancient oceans 14,000 feet in the air. Downtown Banff can be buzzing in it's international and bohemian way, but when the sun catches a cliff face so far above the town site I can't help but think of that Carl Sandburg poem about the rail cars, and that we and all of our stuff will be gone in a hundred years, but not the mountains. I also note that the previous sentence was so long that you gentle reader may have wondered if you were caught in the land that time forgot.
I will only say in my defence that I'm writing this on my berry and don't feel like parsing. Forgive me.
I'm going to go now. If life is but one brief flicker of the candle I'm going to have some more coffee and tackle the day. I have dragons to slay, maidens to rescue and yoga instructors to put on notice.
Monte | |
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