Late Again

A day shot down by interrupted sleep and a night shot down by having to balance my mom's checkbook, which task bears some resemblance to a particular labor of Hercules (hint: it requires re-routing a river.) Then it got very cold with the clouds gone for most of the night. One small patch of cloud passed over the moon a while ago, and it looked like a giant pair of bat wings. Or it was the Bat Signal.

Maybe Google sent up the Bat Signal. Somebody is after them. Google is refusing to turn over to Federal investigators information about searches conducted by the site's users. The Feds claim they want to use such records in preparing their defense against a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the Constitutionality of COPA. Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! have already handed over their records. Of course, this doesn't mean that Google is doing this to champion civil liberties. They may be fighting the subpoena because they fear that a leaky government agency will reveal the search engine's trade secrets. Still, half a loaf....

To get the taste of that out of your mouth, try Hotlix Candy (unearthed by m_leprae.)

Also, I will never catch up with all of yesterday's posts.

Desire

The early morning phenomenon I noticed a few days ago was back today. It must be a feature of the current unusual weather pattern. This time, there didn't appear to be any fog involved, though. The ridge was covered with heavy, low clouds, and then there was a thin strip of clear sky across the southern and southeastern horizon. Beyond this, the mountains and valley were covered with more thick clouds. As I watched the patch of clear sky, it seemed to ripple with blue-gold light, and I could easily imagine that I was looking down on a broad bay, glowing with morning light, and mountainous headlands rising beyond it.

So captivating was this illusion, that I found myself wishing it to be a real place. It reminded me of those intensely romantic illustrations from the late nineteenth century. My house suddenly felt terribly inadequate to its setting (which it is, in fact, as are all the houses here, but the illusion made it seem even more so than usual), and I imagined myself on the terrace of a simple white villa, overlooking a formal garden that blended into woods and fields and a swath of vineyards and orchards dotted with other white houses. The pines I didn't have to change.

I would have liked to walk in that envisioned landscape, and then go down to that bay and sail across it to explore the dark, mysterious headlands of the further side as they slowly emerged into morning and afternoon, to listen its to brooks tumble and watch its birds fly, and sit on one of its shaded hillsides to look back and see this place as my imagination had transformed it, small with distance, a perfect miniature world, and no illusion.