Ever since the cat moved in, he's spent the majority of his time curled in chairs, on the floors, on the bed -- anywhere there's a warm patch of sunlight shining in the window -- with his head inverted and looking at the world upside-down. It made me wonder whether there might be some reason cats do that. Does the world look more interesting when up is down and down is up? Is it some form of feline transcendental meditation? Or is it just comfortable?

I asked him, but he just stared blankly at me, probably enjoying a little private amusement at the sight of me dangling downward from the ceiling. He wouldn't tell me. Cat secrets, it seems, are sacred.

Curiosity, that old cat-killer, got the best of me, so I lay down on the floor next to the cat and looked at the topsy-turvy world for a while. The world, I saw, really is more interesting from that perspective, but then I spotted a five-dollar bill on the floor under the dresser. Turns out they're only in it for the money.

Dear Bucephalus, my friend,

Yesterday, my injuries had finally healed enough to make a trek to the top of the mountain to bid you farewell. I packed your ashes in my backpack and hiked the path to the top. I never would have guessed that on our final trip to the summit, you'd be riding on my back instead of me on yours.

I spread your ashes on the ground at the top, near the stream from which you used to quench your thirst after a hard run, and I planted a willow tree in their midst. One day, it will be as big and strong as the one at the edge of the creek where we finished our rides. One day, it will be big enough that I will be able to look to the top of the mountain from my bed and see it. And when I do, I will think of you.

I'll think of you, not as you were in your final moments, but rather as you were at your best.

I'll never forget your mane billowing in the wind as you ran. I'll never forget the way your spirit soared when you looked down at the mountains below you, mountains that we conquered together. I'll never forget the entertaining times we had, or the spectacular things we saw together. I'll never forget the way you set the bit in your teeth, eager to run, every time we turned onto the mountain trail. And I'll never forget that you helped me remember me why I love to ride.

You never ran a race in your life, old friend, so no one ever bet on you. Except me. When I bought you, I wagered that there was still the spark of your youth deep down inside when all others thought otherwise. And the first day you carried me to the top of the mountain, running hard the whole way, I won.

Now, I pray there is some paradise where horses go, some place where the pastures are green and the trails soft, some place where the shade trees are tall, the grass is sweet, and the creeks sing.

But most of all, I pray that there is a place where great horses ride again.

Goodbye, my friend. I miss you.

As I type this, the autumnal equinox is taking place. Earth's wobble on its axis has reached its midpoint, halfway between leaning over and standing up straight. Night and day are of roughly equal duration today.

Autumn is coming. Its first traces were evident this morning. The dogwood leaves are tinted orange and a thin mist of frost covered the grass when I walked out to get the newspaper. The birds know it. They're flocking in great clouds of flight, stripping the trees bare to fatten themselves for the flight south. I can smell the cold coming. I can almost take a bite out of it. It tastes like steel. Soon, the trees will begin to howl with color and I will make my annual pilgrimage to the mountains to watch the show.

It is difficult not to become reflective during the three months leading up to the winter solstice. If winter is death and spring is birth, then summer is life. And autumn...well, autumn is Earth in its agonizing death throes.

Archeologists have discovered that, at some point, our Cro-Magnon forefathers began burying themselves. It was the big bang of the human psyche, the recognition of death, and we saw death and did what none had ever done before: we dealt with it. We hit upon the idea that death was not permanent. Just as winter leads to spring and rebirth, we recognized that death is not an end, but rather a passage to a new beginning.

Curiously, at about the same time as our ancestors began burying their dead, they began burying bears, too. What does that mean? It means that we recognized that earth, like us, enters a passage in its own death each year. That's why we gave the bears a proper funeral, so they wouldn't come back pissed.

We were just trying to make sense of the unknowable, what Joseph Campbell called the "Awakening of Awe." In Earth, we saw ourselves. And in ourselves, we saw Earth. It was as it should be.

So, it's autumn, people. Time to die.

I'm not usually one for blog memes, but it's been a while since I've answered one, so I decided to do this one. Besides, I'm not feeling very creative today and my lack of inspiration has resulted in a mild case of writer's block. Here it is:

• One book I have read more than once:
  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (my favorite book)

• One book I would want on a desert island:
  How to Build a Boat, by David C. "Bud" MacIntosh (duh!)

• One book that made me laugh:
  Anything by P.G. Wodehouse or S.J. Perelman (too many and too funny to narrow it down to one book)

• One book that made me cry:
  The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Evans (admittedly, my choice may be slanted by recent events)

• One book I wish I had written:
  Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins (there are several, but if I had to choose, this would be it)

• One book I wish had never been written:
  The Bridges of Madison County, by Robert James Waller (the only reason people liked this book is that they were unaware they weren't supposed to)

• One book that I am currently reading:
  There are three at the moment:
  1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann
  Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
  Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, by Ronald McNair Scott

• One book I have meant to read:
  Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of e.e. cummings, by Richard S. Kennedy

• One book that changed my life:
  Tie:
  Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman (made me fall in love with words)
  Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut (made me want to be a writer)
  The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner (made me want to be good at it)
  

• Current book recomendations not mentioned above:
  Practical Demonkeeping, by Christopher Moore
  Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, by Tom Robbins
  The Floatplane Notebooks, by Clyde Edgerton
  A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman

Rather than tagging others, I'll make it voluntary. Do it if you want.

Last night, a friend whom I haven't seen in several months called me on the phone. The first words out of his mouth after I answered were, "I heard your name on the radio a while back," and I was crestfallen. I knew instantly to what he referred.

A few weeks after I moved to the lake, I had some errands to run back in my hometown. While there, I ran into a friend of mine whom I shall call "Kyle" (since that's his name).

Kyle is a talkative sort, always bubbling over with things to say, though I doubt any have ever made any significant impact on the lives of others. I often wonder if the sole reason he talks is to ensure that his vocal cords remain in proper working order in the event he should ever find himself with anything meaningful to say. Coupled with his low-brow loquacity is the fact that he is also possessed of a pair of vocal cords which resonate at just the right frequency to carry for miles and miles. One tends to feel Kyle's voice more than hear it.

This is particularly so when there is alcohol in Kyle's vicinity. There is a positive correlation, I have noticed, between the volume of his voice and his blood-alcohol content. The correlation, however, seems not to be linear, but rather exponential, in such fashion that as his blood-alcohol content rises, the pitch of his voice seems to increase tenfold, not unlike the Richter Scale.

Kyle also has a keen interest in comedy, particularly jokes of the sort that make old ladies faint and mothers cover their children's ears when he tells them. Unfortunately, he possesses an uncanny lack of ability to discern when such jokes might be appropriate and when they are not, and this lack of judgment has revealed itself so frequently that it has left many of the townsfolk wondering, every time they see him, just what the Hell is wrong with him.

So it was, that during my chance encounter with Kyle, I found myself entertaining him with a dirty joke*, and in so doing, I suppose it should have been foreseeable that I might have been planting the seed of my own eventual humiliation, but at the time it did not seem obvious.

One of the things I missed most when I moved to the lake was attending the local minor league team's baseball games. I had season tickets and hardly missed a game last summer. This summer, however, the one-hour drive back to town was more than I was willing to undertake, so I resorted to the next best thing and listened to the games on the local AM radio station.

This being a team in the lower eschelons of the minor league heirarchy, the ballpark is fairly small. The radio announcer's booth is located just above the beer concession, from which conversations rise to the microphone with such clarity as to be easily understood when broadcast over the airwaves. The announcer's booth, in fact, is so close in proximity to the beer line that the conversations from below frequently drown out the crowd. It is not uncommon to hear the announcer say, "And Rodriguez goes down on a called strike three, and folks, that pitch was in the dirt. How the umpire could call that a strike is beyond me, and the fans are letting the ump know they don't like it," and in the background, the only sound that can be heard is someone saying, "Two Bud Lights, please, and a bag of peanuts."

On one particular night, I was listening to the game and heard a distinctive voice which I assumed had emanated from the beer line and wafted up to the announcer's microphone. It was Kyle's, and judging from its volume, I'd say his blood-alcohol content was around 0.92. I snickered, intending to deride him later about hearing his slobbery drunken voice on the radio, but then I suddenly realized he was telling that same joke I had told him (his delivery left much to be desired -- his accent flowed from middle eastern to German, to something I couldn't place, and then finally to Irish as he reached the punchline).

When he finished the joke, I heard no laughter, from which I deduced that the person to whom he had told it was likely someone who found it offensive.

What he said next, however, left me horror-stricken. He asked, "Know who told me that joke?" I thought, "Please, dear God, no! Please, don't let him say it! Please don't let him say it!" God, it seems, must have ducked out for a moment (or, more likely, he failed to hear my pleas because his divine fingers were jammed in his ears up to the third knuckle to avoid hearing the joke), and my prayer was not answered. Kyle said, loudly and with more wind backing it than could ever be mustered by Luciano Pavarotti, my name. And then, to make matters worse, he repeated it.

Since that night, I have buried the incident with all the emotional avoidance tools at my disposal -- denial, displacement, repression, projection...if Freud named it, I used it. I had almost reached the point of believing that the incident had gone unheeded and that, through sheer luck, I was the only unfortunate soul listening to the radio that night.

So it was that last night when my friend said, "I heard your name on the radio a while back," all those visions of horror bubbled back up to the surface. I realized that everyone in town, through guilt-by-association, now likely equates me with Kyle, and that I shall ever be an outcast, forced to wander the nighttime streets alone, shamed by perversion.

Oh, the humanity!

Do you see all these buildings, these houses and temples? I built them with my own hands, but do the people call me "Achmed the Builder?" No, they do not.

Do you see the fishes that the people eat? I caught them with my net in the sea this morning, but do the people call me "Achmed the Fisherman?" No, they do not.

Do you see these children? When they are ill, I heal them. That man over there had a broken leg and I mended it, but do the people call me "Achmed the Healer?" No, they do not.

But you fuck one little goat...

I received a flyer in the mail a few weeks ago announcing a writing competition. The contest is being sponsored by a literary magazine to which I have contributed articles in the past, so I doubt I'm eligible for the competition, but I decided to give it a try anyway.

After I gave the prompt some thought, however, what I ended up writing is surely too short to win -- not much for the publisher to publish -- but I would hazard a guess that it is a compact summary of what every other entry will say.

The prompt that was given is:

Imagine a boat filled with immigrants approaching the Statue of Liberty. As they pass beneath her, imagine them all looking up in wonder at the symbol of their new nation. Write a letter, with 500 words or less, from the Statue of Liberty to the new immigrants expressing what you think she might say to them.

Here's my entry:

Dear Newcomers:

Welcome home.

Love,
America

Brevity, it has been held, is the heart and soul of good writing (and this is particularly so if the reader happens to speak little English), and there simply is no means of expressing it more succinctly.

We both knew it was temporary, that nothing could ever be, save for a few brief moments when the paths of our separate lives happened to converge, so we spent every moment enjoying it while it lasted. And when it was over, we made it clean and quick, ripped off like a Band-Aid so that the pain, albeit more intense, would not last long.

On the night we met, she told me she was getting married at the end of August. "Lucky guy," I said. What else could I say? And even though we were inseparable for those few weeks, in the back of my mind the whole time, I knew she belonged to some other place and some other person.

She showed her entire self to me and I loved it. And I loved her. And after she left, every time I thought about her, I felt like I was drowning. I felt that same panicked urgency to reach the surface, to use every ounce of my being to reach a place where I could breathe. To reach her.

We made a point not to contact each other. "It would only complicate things," I said. She agreed. It was best just to let it go, to chalk it up to lost opportunity and move on in our respective lives. She quoted Tennyson: "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." I quoted Seuss: "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

It was easier said than done.

The days went by and though I expected the void to eventually fill, it only got deeper. I found myself thinking more and more about her, longing to be with her under the stars again, wanting it more than anything. Whenever I was bewitched by a fantastic sunrise or looked down from the top of a mountain on a grand scene below, I wanted to share it with her. I wanted to live every minute again.

I just heard from her. She called off the wedding. For me.

I seem to be getting a lot of these lately. Here's another e-mail from the lurker mailbag:

...I've just recently started writing as a hobby, but I'm not bold enough to start my own blog. Maybe I will after I gain some confidence. I was wondering if you could give me your top ten tips you'd give to someone who wants to be a writer. I understand if you don't have time, but maybe just a couple if you can't find the time to give ten.

I am flattered that you consider me authoritative enough on the subject to ask this of me. I confess, however, that whatever guidance I might provide may be left wanting. I've said before that I consider myself more a student of life than a teacher - "more sponge than fountain" I phrased it — a trait which may well render me wholly incapable of dispensing anything resembling wisdom on the subject.

As evidence of this, I would proffer the fact that the list I began compiling when I read your e-mail was, without my realizing it, little more than parroted responses I have heard other writers give when asked the same question — everything from basic mechanics ("Avoid poor grammar and spelling."), to discipline ("Write every day. Set a goal of X number of words and increase as you become more proficient."), to stylistic development ("Just as we learn to speak by listening, we learn to write by reading, so make a point to read every day."), to tongue-in-cheek practicalities ("If at all possible, be single.").

All of their advice seems sound, I suppose, but every morsel of advice I have ever heard any other writer give on the topic has had one common theme; they all address, in a fashion, the physical act of sitting down and writing. To me, however, such advice is of little use. What I consider to be of much greater import is what writers do when they're not writing.

Yes, good spelling and grammar count. Yes, discipline is a key. Yes, reading what others have written (both the good and the bad — frankly, I learn a great deal more from the dreadful books I read than from the good ones) helps a writer to develop his writing voice. Those things alone, however, will not make anyone a good writer.

A writer's greatest asset, I believe, is his vision. Anyone with a modest amount of skill can describe a bottle of vinegar with sufficient detail that a moderately intelligent reader will know what it looks like, but it takes experience, years of it, to be able to describe how it tastes.

With this in mind, I offer you the one piece of advice I believe lies at the core of good writing. It is this: Pay attention to doorknobs.

Doorknobs? Yes, doorknobs. Read on...

Human beings are creatures of habit and repetition. We do the same things over and over, day after day. We're busy people, and busy demands much of our attention. Busy has its place, of course - without it, we would likely never have flipped the calendar over from the Stone Age - but when it consumes us, it becomes dangerous. The more of ourselves we devote to busy, the less we pay attention to details, until our existence becomes humdrum. Interestingly enough, the Chinese pictogram for the word "busy" is a combination of the pictograms for two other words, the one for "heart" and the other for "killing." I have no way of knowing whether this combination was intentional, but if not, it is at the least fitting on many levels.

Shortly after I finished college, I rented my first apartment. When I first moved in, I made a mental list of things I wanted to change. It needed a fresh coat of more coloful paint, the blinds needed to be removed in favor of curtains, the brass doorknobs needed to be polished — all things I noticed while the place was new to me.

As time passed, however, I became preoccupied with other things — work consumed me, my car needed new tires, the cat needed to go to the vet for her shots, baseball season started and I spent many evenings at the ballpark. Without my realizing it, life's mundane tasks consumed me, and before long, I forgot all about the doorknobs. Despite my touching them countless times every day, I never once noticed them during the three years I lived there.

When I moved out, however, I made one last walk-through to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. I noticed, for the first time since I had moved in, the vacant echo my footsteps made in the absence of any sound-damping household items. I noticed the dull off-white dinge of the walls. I noticed the army-barracks blinds. And when I finally left, I reached for the doorknob and thought, "I never got around to polishing the doorknobs."

Our minds work like that. They shut out all the superfluous aspects of our surroundings and focus solely upon the tools it takes to get through the day. Great and wondrous things could happen all around us and we would never notice. It is only by actively diverting our attention from our busy lives, by actively taking time to stop and smell the proverbial roses, that we can shed the blindfold and begin to see again, and those things — and people, too — which we begin seeing when we do so are the only things about which there is any worth in writing. So, that being the case, my advice is to begin looking at everything around you as if seeing it for the first — or the last — time.

Go look at your doorknobs. You'll see what I mean.

I am blind: I have never seen
Sun gold nor silver moon,
Nor the radiant noon.
They speak of the dawn and the dusk,
And the smile of a child,
Of the deep red heart of a rose,
As of God, undefiled.
But I learnt from the air today
(On a bird's wings I flew)
That the earth could never contain
All of the God I knew.
I felt the blue mantle of space,
And kissed the cloud's white hem,
I heard the stars' majestic choir,
And sang my praise with them.
Now joy is mine through my long night,
I do not feel the rod,
For I have danced the streets of heaven,
And touched the face of God.

They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat...And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged...Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.

I'm not sure whether I believe in omens. There are times when I hear others describe instances of dumb luck as prophecies of bad tidings to come and I think they're loopy. Other times, minor inconveniences seem so fateful as to stand my hair on end. Today, I wish I had listened to that voice of doom inside me.

This morning, I woke to the sound of sirens. I looked out the window and saw two firetrucks and a few other emergency vehicles at my neighbor's house. I've been looking after the place for them while they've been away at a wedding, so I pulled on some clothes and grabbed the key. As it turns out, it was a false alarm. A thunderstorm had rolled through this morning and knocked out the electricity. Evidently, when it came back on, there was a power surge that tripped their fire alarm. That happens a lot around here.

After the commotion had died down, I put the kettle on the stove for tea and dropped it when I was taking it off the stove, burning my hand slightly. After I cleaned up the mess, I started to walk out on the deck to read the newspaper and noticed that the cat was missing. He's normally right at my feet wherever I go.

I went in search of him and finally found him hiding under the bed in one of the guest rooms. I couldn't get him to come out and thought he might be injured, but every time I tried to reach for him, he cowered and hissed. I finally extracted him, managing to get my arm scratched several times in the process, and checked him over. He was fine, but when I set him back down, he slinked back under the bed and hid again. He's still under there and I have no idea what might be bothering him.

Then, when I finally went out on the deck with my newspaper in hand, I saw that one of the SeaDoos had come unmoored from its lift, probably during the storm, and I had to swim out to retrieve it.

All of these things, minor as they were, should have told me something bad was going to happen today. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

This morning, I took Becephalus for another ride up the mountain and we took a tumble. It was an ugly and freakish accident. I'm okay, but Bucephalus is not.

Halfway up the mountain, near the place where I took the middle photo in my last post, the trail is narrow with a steep bank leading uphill on the left side and a sharp dropoff on the right. As we approached the area, I noticed a sudden commotion in the brush above us on the bank on our left. I glanced up the hill and saw a huge rock, evidently loosened from the soil by the morning's rain, tumbling down the hill toward us, and I realized we were directly in its path.

I tried to pull Bucephalus up short, but he was at a full gallop and I couldn't stop him in time. The rock, a little bigger than a basketball, undercut his front legs and he went down hard on his left shoulder. I managed to free my left foot from the stirrup as we fell, but my right tangled in the stirrup on the other side. Unable to free myself, I grabbed on to the saddle's horn and rode it out as Bucephalus slid down the hill feet-first.

We came to a stop at the base of a tree several yards down the slope. Bucephalus was kicking and thrashing, trying to regain his feet, screaming the whole time. Despite his flailing about, I was able to free my right foot and get clear of him, and once clear, I realized I was okay, a few bruises and scrapes here and there, and an ankle that's likely to double in size over the next several hours, but no major injuries.

After I realized I wasn't hurt, I turned my attention to Bucephalus. At that point, I was unaware where the rock had hit him. I thought that, perhaps, it had only hit him in the shoulder and that he'd fallen mostly out of surprise than anything. I thought he'd be okay, if I could only calm him down enough to get him up and lead him back to the trail.

When I made my way to him, however, I saw differently. Both of his front legs were clearly broken and the white jagged end of the cannon bone of his left was protruding grotesquely through the skin. It was immediately obvious that he had suffered mortal wounds.

I have no idea why, perhaps the tug of the ominous voice of doom whispering from the back of my mind as I left this morning, but I took my cell phone with me today. I've never taken it with me before when I've ridden the mountain trail since it's nearly impossible to get a signal. Today, however, I was able to call 911 without too much trouble.

While I waited for help to arrive, I managed to get Bucephalus calmed down, and I sat next to him, stroking his shoulder and telling him that he'd be okay. He knew differently, though; it showed in the whites of his eyes.

Before long, two paramedics and a veterinarian arrived on ATV's. The paramedics made their way down to me and helped me back up to the trail so I could lie down while they checked to make sure I was all right. On the way up the hill, we passed the veterinarian, who was struggling to lug two cases of equipment down the steep hill to administer to Bucephalus. As we passed him, I told him, "It's okay. All you need is a needle."

He just looked at me and said, "I'm sorry."

I went for a mountaintop ride aboard Bucephalus this morning. The fog was as thick as milk at the trailhead and I had hoped for a photo looking down on the clouds from the top, but the fog never dissipated, so pics were a wash for the most part.

I did manage, however, to take a couple of pics that were at least clear enough to identify. The first is of the trail as it heads into the woods to begin the ascent. The second is about halfway up the mountain where a cutback in the trail looks out over a break in the tree cover, normally giving a fairly good view of valley on the opposite side of the mountain from the lake. The last is a spider web drenched with condensation from the mountaintop fog.

Right after I took the last picture, I turned around just long enough to stick my camera back in the saddlebag, pat Bucephalus on the shoulder and talk to him for a few seconds, and then turned around and walked face-first into the web. My short-term memory is apparently affected by the thin air at the top of the mountain.

(Click images to view full-size)