Answer #34 - Squish the lemons

It happens.  Some days the rabbit's been shot.  Silhouette by the silver maples, it's a boy with a .22.  Good for not much more than killing a rabbit.  I should know.  I own one.  Same little gun the boy took Into the Wild.  Sad.

I'm walking on anyway, hoping the trigger-finger isn't too twitchy.  I should have gotten out the orange blanket, but it's winter and it's summer thin.  Besides, these are my woods and not the boy's.  He's a visitor.  And I can't save the rabbit.

In my story life, I'm never the hunter.  I'm really always the damn rabbit.  For this reason, I can't see films like Shindler's List or Mississippi Burning or the like.. man's inhumanity and all.  For whatever reasons, I don't have the filtration system to dull myself to the suffering.  It's probably pathetic, but this stuff will keep me awake at night.  It buries me in the imagery and the certain knowledge that we humans are capable of unholy horror that no demon ever dreamt.  Our evolution is slow.. and not based on our best traits, as it happens.  We haven't lost the need for power above all things.  Haven't lost the desire for violent and fiery endings.  Since many of our holy texts encourage violent and fiery endings, I can only assume this will not soon change.

I see Beckett and Joyce sitting across from each other, eyes glazed.  Baffled.  Ah.. hopeless.  Ah... crap.  Not this again.

For this reason, my friend Jenny is my book and movie preview guide.

"Yes, you can read this."
"No, you can't see that.  Even I couldn't handle the 7-minute torture scene.  You'd go shopping for arsenic, so let's not go there.  Go see 'Up', it's more your speed."

Go see Up.

I saw Up.  It was pretty good.  First 1/2 hour anyway.  Anything was still possible.

My mind's a fuzzy gray blanket today.  On it, rabbits are sitting silent, ears tuned to sussurrations.  Under it are memories of fallen things and old splintery doors.

How do you get rid of a rabbit infestation without a gun?

Too early for a martini.  Besides, I may as well drink lighter fluid for the way those things taste.  No, best to just tough it out and keep walking until the rabbits start moving and take their blanket with them.

Besides, it was just Saturday morning that the kind, funny little man in wire glasses and wrapped in the flannel duck blanket came out of the house with the lemons.  He put them, one each, under the front tires and said something under his breath, with his hand on the car.  The road was clear all the way to Wisconsin that day and that memory will make me smile forever.

Shoo, rabbits.