Wednesday 9 August 2000

Pic of the day: And the branches are all bearing fruit, and richly so.

Grasshopper's Bar

As I walked home from the bus, the grasshoppers were playing loudly all around me. Surprisingly, there is beauty to it, despite the loud monotony. From my youth I have loved this song. Yet now I see it in a sharper light. It is closing time in the grasshopper bar. The time grows short to find a mate and fulfill life's most important and holy duty. What would it avail them to have survived the many dangers of growing up in a bird-eat-insect world, and to travel around all summer, if you succumb to the first frost night and leave nothing behind but a tasty snack?

And yet, there is beauty in the song. The song of desperation, no, rather of desperate hope. Their tiny brain is too small to even conceive of defeat. Risking their very life by calling out to females, birds, and rodents alike, they just play the more as day follows day and the sun turns ever lower on the southern sky.

Another time, another year, I walked along the beach one summer day after the wind has blown in from the sea. In the sand lay glass-colored jellyfish, like softly rounded shapes of ice in the sun. I was shocked that death could be so beautiful. When beings more similar to me die, such as a frog in the road, the thing I see is its similarity to me. A frog, or even a snail, makes me think "It could have been me". And I cannot see the beauty.

But I still hear the beauty in the song of closing time at the Grasshopper's Bar. Go figure.

***

While on that note, I can now say pretty surely that my infection comes from the root(s) of one of my upper left molars. The inflammation spreads up towards and behind the temple. (The part of the head, not the stone structure, of which I have none.) It seems to have carried over to the sinus, because I get the extra headache when bending forwards. (And it hardly helped that I spent more than usual of my workday on elbows and knees under someone's desk, trying to get a new PC up and running.)

Now to find out if I should see a dentist, a doctor, or just wait it out praying for the best.

***

Just how quickly I seem to have ignored the danger is evident from me writing a new chapter of my novel today. With some doubt, true, for lying is a sin. But perhaps it is not really a lie, but a parable, an allegory or some such. Hard to say as long as it isn't finished; and it probably won't be if I live to grow older than my grandfather.

Not that it wouldn't be worth a try...