Introduction

This is the first of what will be three posts about bureaucracy and its vagaries. In broad strokes, it is a tragicomic farce in four acts (four reports from hell), plus the conclusions I have at last been able to draw from it all now that I'm a geezer with the luxury of time for retrospection.

Civilized people get up in the morning and make their beds. Mom was adamant and unyielding on this point.

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Flying Lessons

Wild bird populations in North America are a fraction of what they were in the middle of the 20th century. Many species face extinction. A significant factor in the demise of wild birds are domestic cats. Please, please, please keep your cats inside.

Domestic cats kill an

Lughnasadh (loo-na-sa) is one of three pagan harvest festivals that stretch from late summer to the end of the vegetal cycle at Samhain (sow-en, Halloween). Lughnasadh celebrates the first harvest early in August; Imbolc, at the autumnal equinox is the second; and the last is at Samhain, on November Eve, after which the world dies back for the winter.

Details. The all-important details. Some say the devil hides there, in minutiae easily dismissed as inconsequential and beneath notice. Aspects of the whole so small as to escape importance.

I didn't think much about insects. Unless

I was righteously pleased with my clever box labeling, and my label that got a lot of laughs from a lot of people for a lot of years. I was a young adult packing to move out of my college dorm room, and was beginning to accumulate things. My things. The things that would express my adult self and

The Exhausting Calculus of Harming None

I recently killed the first two paper coffee cups I've killed in over a decade. My community service commitment obliged me to attend several days of training in a seedy desert casino a couple of hours north and west of here.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If the Spring Equinox is the subtle stirring of an initial thaw, Beltane (May Day or May Eve) is a luscious, tumescent awakening. Beltane cherishes the power of the Sun as it warms the Earth into Her season of fertility. This is no fleeting, adolescent crush. This is that heart-pounding, ecstatic moment you first find true love; the moment you know this is The One (capital T, capital O); the moment the flirtation quickens and grows into the kind of life-affirming love you can trust enough to build your life around. Love that we all share with Goddess and God in this season of reincarnation and generation; a tidal pull far too delicious and compelling to resist. This is a time for lovers in the most Sacred sense.

Now there's something you don't see every day.

My brain struggled to process what my eyes were seeing. It was the scale I couldn't quite grasp. It was as though a child had flung his toy road grader down in the sandbox when he got called in for dinner. But this was a real road grader, impossibly huge. It wasn't just stuck in the mud, it was buried in it. It was in the ditch, and rotated ninety degrees on its long axis, so that the axles were perpendicular to the surface of the road. Only half of it was still sticking up out of the mud. There was no need to ask myself who had so carelessly thrown this thirty-foot-long, five-ton behemoth down in the mud like that. This had Wally written all over it.