King St. John's Jim

(Jim’s note:  I got a big backlog of stories, and hope to get this distribution thing working with as few surprises as possible.  Thanks for your patience as I get all the subscribe/unsubscribe HTML links in place and under control)

Yesterday was warm and bright and humid.  As the afternoon sun mellowed a bit, the light filtering through the trees brought out the tiny zits on the face of our sweet nature pentacle goddess: Portland.  Nature, for all her beauty, is intimate with a few ookie things that we rather ignore.

Not yesterday:  The bugs were everywhere.  Tiny midges thick in air of the avenues.  When the sun dims behind a cloud, the midges magically disappear: I breath easier, then I realize the flies are still there, and each breath is likely sucking in three or four of these protein filled vermin.  So what do I do about it?  Continue walking.  Get to Storybook Theatre before Happy Hour ends and find a great story to write.  In fact, a King of Pentacles shared his secret with me, but that’s another story.

That was yesterday.  This is today, and this story is about ookie midges.  And their fate.  Nature knows it takes ookie to fight ookie, and the midge’s ookiest predator is the spider.

I’m walking into St. John’s in the rain.  Rain freshens the air, washes the streets and spatters droplets onto the webs, making them as visible as the midges were yesterday.  One proud spider, as plump as a Belgian Burgher, has imagineered a web that seems to support its bamboo thicket, rather than the other way around.  Tiny drops on the web make like lighthouses for the midges’ radar:"Breaker, Breaker, this is garbage-guy-23, be advised of a spider web two clicks NorthWest of the mildewed dog poop.  That is all."

The droplets on the webs are as tiny and shiny as the bugs were tiny and black.  Sparkling with the sun behind, but nearly invisible from the other side.  If I were walking in the other direction, there would be no visible droplets, no visible webs.  As the sun dries the webs and brings out the midges, the spiders will make a killing, as they say in Pentacle Town.

It’s like that with stories.  You have to look at the day as if you were several people at once.  From all angles of perception and emotionality.  And then bring out the highlights of the moments.  Some are ookie.  Some are hilariously ookie.

I walk along a bit further, and spot Southwick coming out of his place on 3 Gunas Loop.  He says hi, and we talk a bit as we walk.  Southwick wants to get away from his roommates for a while: it seems that his room-mate Tommy is out to erase his recent lady problems by using monetary negotiation as an aid to seduction.  Tommy told Southwick to get showered up and the very friendly lady was going to arrive soon and take on the world for a bit of help with her house payment.

Southwick tells me that he is kind of appalled at the idea, but Tommy has the morals of, well, um. Er.   Actually Southwick has no idea of the depths that Tommy’s morals go.  Can’t be lower than the urges and actions of our midges and spiders, can it?  And well, we do things for lots of reasons.

It took Southwick a few minutes to come up with the most outrageous answer to Tommy, one that takes a tiny dig at Tommy’s manhood:  "If I have to get washed up, she’s not the kind of woman I want to be with" –  Nature knows it takes ookie to fight ookie.