BAD NEWS

 Fall is about used up. It happens every year. It’s like life. It goes along following a prescribed course, never wavering, but with a different story line for each of us, through the good and the bad, right up to that last sweet breathe. It always ends the same. The seasons and life, intertwined together in an intimate dance. I had some tarragon planted in a pot that needed to go into the garage. After all, winter is coming. That’s when I saw it. A menacing looking little devil.  A yellow- lime color, like pistachio pudding, but without the pistachios. Lime Jell-O wouldn’t work to describe it. You can’t see through it, and I doubt it would giggle. While not a very imposing little thing, it shines in that faded yellow-lime color, like it could glow in the dark. Like it belongs in the dark. It burrows down into the soil, some of its flesh falling off to the side, reminding me of a Halloween scene with the faces of Zombies peeling off. Not to say that I’ve ever seen one in real life. Only movies.  Make-believe. The body of this hideous thing gleams clear and bright enough to see yourself in, about 3 inches high, getting thicker towards the bottom, with a ring about a quarter of an inch down from the top. The head reminds me of a Chinese hat, sitting on top of a pudgy body.  I have no idea why, maybe an old cartoon. They didn’t worry about being “politically correct” back then. The base seems to go deep into the pot, almost to the bottom, but not quite. The pot is terracotta, clay red with a bright red band around the top. That bright band was put there for a purpose.  That thing is not going to get out of that pot, thank God. I don’t think it likes the brightness. My thoughts catch me off guard: What if you were to ingest this thing? The mind can play funny tricks on you. Right when you think you got everything together, you drift off into some primordial muck that is stuck in your past. A mushroom I once ingested made me see music and I could smell color. It would have been a frightening experience, if it were not for the shaman I was with. He helped smooth over the edges. This thing makes it look like you would regret the stupidity involved in trying to find nirvana in a mushroom. This thing looks like bad news.

Flying in a six-seat Cessna at 5,000 feet on a clear night can be an exhilarating experience. What a

sense of freedom and escape. Looking at all the lit-up towns is truly fascinating. Small patches of 50, 100, 5,000 lights. Single lights off in an isolated nowhere. Imagine, under all those lights, the stories: fathers struggling to teach their sons how to be a good man; a wife wondering why she married an abusive husband; daughters yet to be married; careers yet to be realized, others cut short by untimely circumstances. Births, deaths, town heroes, town whores, lovers of life, killers of hope. Things beautiful and thoughts ugly flood into my mind.  The plane turns dark, except for the lights below and the millions of stars above.  Stars all over the place. The constellations look like they are alive. The Milky Way, pouring out its miracle elixir. Orion, ready to do battle with evil. The North Star, about to get a job. It will need to guide us home.  The regulator on the plane is out. The instrument panel is black. There is no way to know if the landing gear went down or not.  It was a pity such a beautiful night ends with such bad news.