Mouse lemur

Indulge me for a moment, friends, for what follows is another little foray into pretentiousness. (Like: the little mouse lemur building rock burrows which lightning always topples--indirectly of course; like: that Yates poem which pretty much says the same thing; like: the Eels ("the elephant won't forget / what it's like inside his cage...")).

I've lost it: the little spark that comes with an outsider's persspective. I've written before about people watching. What I probably didn't mention was that it was one of the finest moments of my life to make up wild stories about the semi-wild people walking the intersection (the Russian chemist, the closeted gay hipster dating the closted fag-hag, the mountain man--actually, I probably did mention it). It probably attests to the lack of proper video games or hobbies or parties or sex in my life.

How do I write about the scenery when I have melted into it? (O! What a statement! How fucking melodramatic!) When I have become, with my hat and thick glasses and messenger bag, exactly the same as everyone else: one of the minor "characters", the "flavour" of this "hipster enclave"? When I have taken on the functional significance of the fire hydrant or awning over the untold little family-owned vegetable stores?

Of course, is the loss of the outside-in outweighed by the greater detail I can bring to bear? Maybe actually living the midnight drum circles by the light of torches in trash cans in the back-alley parkettes will spice up the routine of "look: a person; nay, a living force of nature; how I wish I were (s)he!".

Long Stolen Passage: "It has taken our species thousands of years of communication and investigation to begin to find the keys to our own identities. Our newfound capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf those of all the rest of the life on Earth. It has been estimated that ten thousand years ago, the human population comprised a small fraction of 1% of the mass of vertebrate life on land; today, we, together with our livestock and pets, make up about 98% of that total. We exploit an ever increasing share of the planet’s resources, but we do offer something in return. Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future—an asteroid on a collision course, or global warming—and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us. We are responsible for the future of life on the planet, in a way no other species could ever be."