For the last week when I’ve gone out in the late afternoon I’ve heard the extended loud whine of a cicada. It’s September they should be considering whatever it is they do for the fall and winter, not singing their alien hum into the solid humid air. For all I know it’s just the one, though it’s hard to pinpoint a Cicada, it always sound I bit like a race car, like it starts off down the track from you and wines past and into the other ear. Hard to pinpoint a location. The sound itself has always reminded me of electricity; by always I mean as far back as my memory goes. I don’t recall ever hearing one in the rainforest, there are other sounds; it the wetlands part of the valley I lived in in Oregon Geese and Woodpeckers were heard year round.
Why the geese hung out year round is beyond me, and the squawking of geese is a pedestrian sound, woodpeckers sound a bit like an angry salesman, knocking on your door rapidly and frequently. I’m sure woodpeckers must have a song as well, I’m sure I’ve heard it, I just can’t distinguish it from other bird calls. Here there are brilliant red cardinals and bluejays with brilliant blue plumage, in the NW west the blue jay is a bluish gray.
I associate the cicada whine with hot humid days, and I’m sure if I tried I could wax nostalgic. It’s a frightening sound, I’m sure, to someone who has never heard it, and I think the June Bug might be a bit scary looking to someone who has never seen one. I think that June Bug doesn’t mean cicada everywhere, I think there are bugs in different areas called June bugs. It’s not a pleasant sound and not a pleasant bug, and yet it’s comforting in a sort of that’s-how-things-are-supposed-to-be-here way.
Although I outgrew homesickness quickly when I moved to the NW, the sounds of the Midwest have stayed with me and some of the scents too. Cow shit would be a good example; it’s as deep seated a scent-memory to me as baking bread.
I think, perhaps, cicadas are territorial, I’ve never heard more than one from the direction it sounds like one is coming, however, by foot or bike there are days when it sounds like a relay, like information traveling along a high pitched telegraph. I suppose I could look it up, I usually follow that by ‘But that’s like cheating’ in this case it’s more like work.
When you don’t know the right answer you have to do some kind of statistical significance search; sample X number of websites and follow the thread that A) occurs with the greatest frequency and B) has at least one reliable source. Without B you are rifling through opinions. I have plenty opinions of my own, I don’t need to borrow any; I need to give some away. I know the difference between an opinion and empirical data; even so, when I’m stating the latter I frequently add the caveat ‘In my experience’.
The reason you and I keep journals, in part, is to give way to the opinion self, a sort of gonzo collection of opinions, a subjective set of observations. Ok, some of you and some of I. No-one really searches journals for empirical answers, although they are as likely to have ‘em as bulletin boards. I wouldn’t take a journal’s answer as the final word on a subject, though it might well be.
Open Diary had journals dedicated to singular threads; atheism/theism, conservative/liberal, and a holy host of others I rarely looked at. In those sorts of journals it seems as though an acceptable way of debating was to take some commonly held belief and state it as proof positive. According to Jeff Daniels playing the anchor of a fictitious television newsroom; a person is smart, people are stupid. Without stating my opinion on any of the issues, I can say, in my experience, the dedicated journals kept running round the same circle. The ongoing debates weren’t going to convert anyone and deteriorated into ad hominem expletives. The next day it would start all over again. If the text could be translated into sound I think it would sound like a cicada.
By two O’clock it’s supposed to hit the mid-nineties here. I might actually have something to say then, I just won’t have the energy to say. In the mail yesterday I received five items, well, six if you count a pair of gloves as two and why wouldn’t you, except, that like shoes or bras gloves are useless without providing for multiple appendages and/or boobies. I think there are probably more women missing a breast than there are woman of any gender missing a foot or a hand. Statistically cancer can be charted; the propensity in any given population can be calculated. Barring birth defects, most missing feet and hands are the result of accidents, and, whereas you could chart the propensity for accidents, you can’t chart the propensity for a specific outcome, e.g. Lumbermen are more likely to lose something to a saw, but the what that something is doesn’t help, like if you charted the number of pinky fingers vs. the number of whole hands there isn’t a precaution that targets the safety issue, a titanium three inch thick pinky condom would just have the pinky slide down the saw until it found an easier prey.
Oh, shit, the other four items were t-shits monogramed with Haredawg. They crack me up.
Yeah, I’m spent, but, as of yet, I’m not sweating.
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