Lucifer's Deceit

The moon begins to dim as sunrise nears, and the silky-sheer clouds will soon outshine it. That deep shade of blue the sky now takes, the warm air quickened by a soft breeze, the pine needles the breeze wakens, all vibrate with anticipation. Some hint of color takes form where the mountain ridges brush the eastern horizon, and the last star gives a last twinkle and goes out. Night's vague trailing edge is slipping past, and rather than seeing dawn as a curtain rising to reveal the world, I see it as a curtain falling to conceal the universe. All Earth's dusts and gasses catch the light and blind the world to stars, shrink our vision, make us focus on the nearby and common sights. Our sky, conspiring with the sun, becomes a mirror like Narcissus' pool, but one in which we gaze upon ourselves in our small mass, forgetting the vastness beyond. We are blinded by light. I have always been a lover of the night, when the vast distances, opening, detach me from the mass and propel my thoughts into a solitude defined by falling light more ancient than any works of man. It is not the daily world and its distractions that illuminate individual consciousness, but the immensity that only night reveals.

Death and Destruction!

There was further arachnid slaughter today. Yet another black widow had chosen to ensconce herself in a location that was, from my point of view, most undesirable. She was in a place quite near the front porch, at the base of a ledge on which my cat likes to sit and which abuts the front wall of the house. Not only had she constructed a large web, but, when the sunlight fell into her dank corner, I could see caught in that web what appeared to be two small, shiny stones, one a bit smaller than a pea and the other a bit larger. They were, of course, not stones at all, but egg sacks. Each was capable of emitting a swarm of small black widow babies. This had to be dealt with. The spider was destroyed, her egg sacks crushed, and her web swept away. I'm not having a nursery of venomous spiders adjacent to my front door. I now look askance at the row of bushes which extends along the house front from the place the spider was discovered, all the way to the end of the building. It is dark and damp in there among the dense growth, and a perfect place for black widows to be lurking. It is also cool there on hot days, and my cat likes to secret herself in that shade. I'm considering a severe pruning at the first opportunity. My window is directly above those bushes! I'm glad we no longer have a wood stove, as I'm sure that the woodpile would soon be crawling with black widows this year.

Aside from the latest battle in the spider wars, the day was uneventful, and typical for the time of year, the temperature very nearly reaching 100 degrees. San Franciscans, incidentally, sweltered at 70 degrees today -- lucky bastards. It won't be much less than that here until after midnight.

Someone in the neighborhood is kicking off the holiday with a barbecue, as the air is redolent of roasting flesh. A majority of the neighbors, however, have decamped. I picture them sipping drinks in the bar of the Fairmont Hotel, (which is what I would like to be doing at the moment) but it is more likely that they are either in RV's crammed into some state campground that is as busy as a Safeway parking lot, or losing their Social Security checks gambling in Reno. This is not a town of urbane and sophisticated tastes.

In lieu of a vacation, I feel like letting my brain vegetate for a while, so once I have shut Sluggo down, I will probably be spending the evening with the television. There are a hundred or more channels. At least one of them must have something worth watching.