Reprint: Animal Planet

--I'm spending the next little while's worth of writing hours getting my novel project back on track. Over the next week, I'm going to (re)post the first few completed chapters; by which point I should be well and truly onto new material. Until then...here's another selection from the Greatest Hits vault.

Funny thing, this anthropomophization craze we humans have going.

Here we sit, masters of a vast and bewildering ecosystem, strange and beautiful and wholly alien to our experience in any meaningful way...well, perhaps it isn't so odd that our basic coping mechanism is 'Stick that bear into a pair of overalls and give him a hoe!'

It starts early, with childhood daydreams like Little Bear and Franklin; then we move on to fairy tales, then the fables of Aesop and LaFontaine. In all of which we learn about human frailties from a safe and not incidentally cute'n'cuddly distance.
We want the world to make sense - or at least, we want to reassure ourselves that it isn't going to eat us. We want to know that for all its apparent complications, life is all going to work out in the end. And in the animal kingdom, it does, because we literally have the last word.

Apparently, though, we've got no problem at all with the notion that it might be laughing at us behind our backs the whole time...

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Digital memory

So Shoemom and I spent this gorgeous afternoon doing one of our favourite gorgeous-weekend-afternoon things: picking a direction and driving in it.

When we're just feeling a little restless and want a change of scene this is usually north, via Aurora and Newmarket; when we merely want to coo over the wonders of nature and maybe pick a few berries, it's east, through Burlington and Milton. When we really, truly feel the need to replenish our souls and sooth our savage breasts...we head out over the Escarpment, to the sprawling rural community of Pelham, where Shoemom was born and raised on a fruit farm.

As yours truly is fresh off experiencing the worst of modern civilization, in the shape of office superiors whose knowledge of what you actually do is in the direct obverse to how free they feel to criticize you...we opted this aft for c), without hesitation.

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