*Written August 2nd, 2023, from my parent’s home in Indiana.*
Today has been a lazy day, and I have spent the day as such. Just lazing about. Some days you just really don’t feel like grinding. You have no desire to check off the boxes on your to-do list, and you really can’t be bothered to take any of the steps you know you’re supposed to be taking towards achieving your goals and dreams.
That has been today, for me. But, (I’m telling myself this at least), what’s great about life is that you can do nothing at all and actually still make progress.
I think that’s a great thing about life. That some magic happens when you’re just sitting around doing nothing. And today, that’s been happening. I’m just existing, and letting the magic of the universe do its thing.
My dog does this every day. She’s just existing. She’s really good at that. And I’m sure this is one of the major reasons why we love animals so much. They help pull us out of our super-mega-fantasy brain world that teleports all across time and space and conjures up all kinds of wacky and wild and anxiety-inducing scenarios, and into reality. Into the present, you know. The here and now.
Me and my gal, we’ve been swimming. Every day, we swim. We’re lucky enough to be able to do that these days, being on a small lake in the summer, and we’re taking full advantage of it. It’s a blessing, a blessed thing. We both agree. Every day around noon, she starts to pester me. She comes right over to me, plops her fat butt down on top of me, starts pushing on me with her nose, and tries to eat my hands. Alternatively, she will just stand next to me, and stare. You know exactly what she wants, and you know she knows you know exactly what she wants. It’s swim time. She’s waited patiently all morning, for you to do your morning business, she’s been patient, and waited long enough. And now, it’s swim time. These days, it’s the only thing on her mind. It’s everything she’s living for. You can see it in her eyes, and by the way her face lights up when you say the word, the word that she has oh so keen an ear for, the S word. You have to be careful, very careful when you say it around her. I noticed she was going crazy around me when I would be walking around without a shirt on, and I realized it was because she thought we were going swimming. She knew I was always shirtless. So today, after my morning work, of some emailing, some phone calling, and some generation of AI cats drinking milk from saucers in the style of Pablo Picasso, and I sat down to play a little guitar, Daisy decided it was swim time, and came right over and sat her butt down on top of me. Into the water we went!
(Oh, did you say you wanted to see those Picasso cats?)
Tell me, are they not genius? DiffusionBee took 20 seconds to make each one. The exact prompt “orange kitten drinking milk from a bowl, by Pablo Picasso”. These are the cream of the crop. I cranked out hundreds, at least fifty. It’s addicting, making these things. You never know what’s going to come out, and when you land on a really juicy prompt like this one, you just don’t want to stop. (Yesterday I spent seven hours churning out AI images.)
Daisy likes to splash and snap at the water with her massive maw. She is very otter-like in the water. Or a giant water rat. My dad has taken to calling her “the famous swimming dog.” She is renowned throughout the neighborhood. A couple weeks ago I let her loose, which is an incredible joy to see, that first sprint off the pier, the leap, and the plunge into the water. There is a perfect freedom in it, a total, raw, unbridled joy. It is one of the most beautiful things in the universe, and I hope that everyone can find something that they love as much in their lives as Daisy loves swimming. I let her loose and it was so joyous that I had to applaud, and cheer, from the main floor deck balcony, and as I did so, two neighbors across the lake joined me in celebration. We were celebrating joy, and there to bear witness to the presence of great joy in the world. After she exhausts herself swimming around with me and splashing her heart out, she will patrol the shores, going both ways, out to the neighbors, striding through the filthy muck-silt and the shallow water, climbing on the small rocks that line the shore, prowling for fish and other creatures. Our lake was carved out of a bog, and would probably immediately revert back to a bog if not maintained by people. I think it’s not that old and only fifty years ago or so was a bog. We have a spring right out from our pier, and the water is ice cold, shooting up out of that spring. Daisy will then spend most of her time, after all her patrolling, on the pier, looking down into the water, at the fish. We have a sizeable pontoon boat, and in the gap between the boat and the deck, she sticks her head and looks for fish. I stuck my head down there with her the other day and looked too, and it was just like being in an aquarium, standing at the aquarium glass, the fish would swim right by, with no sunlight reflecting off the water, so you could get a really clear view. She tried to chomp some of them. I think the fish must like it too, playing with her. Sometimes she will get too excited and fall into the gap. She swims around to the front of the pier and climbs up the ladder like a regular human. The more exhausted she is the harder it is for her to lug her big butt up out of the water. She has a really massive butt.
She likes to play a game where she will try to jump directly on top of you when you dive into the water. It’s dangerous if she succeeds because she has razor sharp talons and will marr your baby soft skin with them when she lands on you. She’s smart though, and is hard to fake out. So you can try and fake her out, try and wait her out, or just go for the dive and hope that you get far enough away that you’ll be safe. I’ve left my legs trailing on some of the dives and have been severely maimed as a result. That game is more fun for her than us.
I did an exhaustive aquative workout yesterday, so I didn’t swim too much today. Mostly I sat in a shaded spot not far from the water, in the shade of some large tree-bush with large bell-shaped white flowers. We have these giant trees, called cottonwoods, with leaves that rustle beautifully in the wind. A very soft and soothing rustling. They piss a lot of homeowners off because they spew crap throughout the year, thousands and thousands of airborn fluffy white seeds, pod seeds, like a string of green beans, sticky, incredible sticky seeds, coated with a powerful superglue sap.. and worse, they shed their limbs too easily, and have to be pruned all the time. I know this because I recently commented on them to my dad, about how much I loved the cottonwoods, and his response was, “If I had the money I’d cut them all down.” And I was aghast, and then he gave me his reasoning, and told me the money he spent pruning them, and I thought, well that’s fair. They go through multiple phases of releasing their seed into the world, first via extremely sticky pods that will adhere to anything, especially bare feet, and then fuzzy dandelion-esque whiteness, that when it really gets going makes it look like snow in summer. Not the best for homeowners I suppose, but their leaves make such beautiful rustling sounds, and the birds love them. The birds really love them. We’ve had orioles, nuthatches, red-winged blackbirds, hawks, woodpeckers, and recently even a kingfisher in them. And of course, we’ve had Jimmy Squirrel. He has made the cottonwood right outside of our living room window his estate, in fact. But anyways, I sat in the shade, in the grass, and kind of just zoned out. I wasn’t intentionally meditating, but I wasn’t thinking too hard about anything either. Zoned out is really the right word. Zoned out, and let time pass, and listen to the rustle of the cottonwoods, and watch Daisy play in the water. While I did this, I watched the little microbugs crawl all over me. This was only like two hours ago, by the way. I’m sitting outside now as I type this because I felt like doing something. They were some of the tiniest bugs you’ll ever see. Two of them were extremely tiny Hymenoptera, which are the bees, wasps and ants, and I’m not sure what it was, and I don’t think it would have been a fly because it had wings that folded over onto themselves, but I’m not sure. These little bugs were about a millimeter long. If they squished together, probably two-hundred of them could fit onto my pinky nail, and I don’t have a big pinky nail. They were probably the smallest bug that visited me, but the other ones weren’t much bigger. I had a nymph mayfly on me, only slightly larger, and a very vivid, fresh green color. That one was really tangled up in my belly button hair, and I thought it was going to fall into my bellybutton, where it might never get out. I didn’t exactly want that to happen, but I was ready to see it. There was a small beetle on me, one of the long ones with the big butts. I don’t remember what they’re called. Buprestids, maybe. Then, of course there were ants, which tickle too much, and I threw them all off. There was a little, tiny, tiny-teensy green spider, running up my thigh. I only even noticed this spider because I was wondering why I had this giant blue vein running up the middle of my thigh, and I then I saw this little spider. It was so small and light that my nerves simply couldn’t register it. That was adorable. It had a body that was light green like celery, with a little yellow circle around its dark-green cephalothorax. (You know, that’s what spiders have. A cephalothorax.) Body and head is fused. That would look horrible with humans. And that reminds me, as I sat there and played with a stick, I thought, me picking a stick up off the ground is kind of like me picking somebody’s severed arm up off the ground. Kind of morbid, if you think about it. I liked having these microbugs climb all over me. I felt like a giant, a giant tree. We really are giants, comparatively. Even a baby human is absolutely massive compared to a small jumping spider. I don’t think those little microbugs knew any different, that they were crawling on a tree, on the earth, or on a big ol’ human, and that was nice. I liked that. They accepted me for the lump of matter that I really am, and made me feel like I was really a part of the fabric of life. That’s why I like spending time in nature. You don’t often get that feeling sitting around on your computer, or driving your car. But it’s a very important one.
Also while I was sitting there, I heard a strange, furious fluttering sound, and looked up to see a large hummingbird right over my head. It was getting some drinks from the big white bellflowers. I watched it there about a foot from my head, and it even rested on the branches. That’s a real treat, to see a hummingbird just chilling out. My grandma noticed one the other day, I’d bet the same one, from our window in the kitchen, seated in a tiny curve in a skinny branch, like it was sitting in a little swing. Like a little doll in a dollhouse. They are the most fragile and adorable looking creatures ever. A tiny, beating, fluttering emerald and cream jewel. It must live around here. It’s a good place to live, for a hummingbird.
Well, I’m finished writing. That was nice. Two swallowtails have just started dancing, right in front of me. Two gorgeous, yellow butterflies.
HAKUMUSU 