Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Metamorphosis and the Power of the Prayer
So I was lying by this pool in Desert Hot Springs - this trip is increasingly inexplicable - and I decided that in precisely twenty minutes I would swim 50 lengths. After ten minutes a small group of young people came and stood - stood! - in the pool. One girl was eating - eating! - as she paddled aimlessly about. My eyes closed, I willed them to leave. One minute later I heard shrieks and splashing. I opened my eyes. A reddish snake about 2 feet in length was swimming across the pool. As the gilded - though zoologically ill-informed (the only poisonous snakes in the state are, I gather, all rattlers) - youth of California leapt from the pool, the snake slid elegantly up the steps and on to the lawn. The Y of C fled the scene as did almost everybody else. I looked up. The snake had now metamorphosed into a humming bird hovering over my head. I grinned, it dipped and plunged. Completing my 50 lengths, I rose dripping from the pool to be greeted by yet another incarnation of my spirit friend - a roadrunner. It stepped elegantly past me before accelerating into the bushes. The desert understands me.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Awesome trip, man.
ReplyDelete'tis best if what happens in or near Vegas, stays there. And the un-holy glee you display having put an ocean and 98.5% of a continent between yourself and BBC broadcasts of Piddick et al, is just not nice. Not nice at all. Worst of all, I suspect you have forgotten, would that we could. But if not the blonde poll of a Hereford calf or a glass shattering voice, 'tis the fellow with the name like a very bold word.
ReplyDeleteBTW, the Swallows arrived a few days ago and the Swede is getting the boot from city. Good news, eh.
Bad move Bryan, enjoying a holiday, the greater the degree of enjoyment, the deeper the depression upon arrival at Heathrow, returning the this rain soaked Ellis island of a country of ours.
ReplyDeleteBumped into Hoss Cartwright yet ?
"I rose dripping from the pool"
ReplyDeleteYou the new James Bond then?
Having willed them begone, rather than prayed to a divine being, does that mean you are your own God?
I'd cut back on the cactus juice if I were you.
ReplyDeleteAnyone remember Carlos Castaneda?
ReplyDeleteExactly, Nige, I have become a Shaman.
ReplyDeleteExactly as the careers master advised all those years ago. Glad you've finally seen sense. Any sign of the Waters/Obama pig yet?
ReplyDeleteNo but I can conjure it up with my new powers if you like. Strange place, Amerika
ReplyDeleteThen it is true what they say, 'the man from Norfolk, if he travels to the New Land, will be as the Nagual, commanding the birds that fly and the creeping things that creepeth, and the beasts of the field, and lo! the people shall fear him, and his black truth of death.'
ReplyDeleteYup, sounds like peyote to me.
ReplyDeleteBryan, don't mistake Kalifornia for America.
ReplyDelete