Category Archives: animals

marginalia

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Pretty Coyote

My Dad has an expression: If someone is clever, he says, “that’s pretty coyote.” Well a couple of days ago, Dad was coyote enough to be up before the crack of dawn – 5:00am – and he stepped out in his front yard to watch the dark go by. But what he got to watch go by turned out to be two coyotes – real wild coyotes, not dogs – strolling up with center of the street in the shadows.

Dad said that he looked up the street and thought “that’s a very big dog,” then saw another coming behind it. And as they got closer he realized they weren’t dogs at all.

My folks live about two miles from me, here in a little beach city near Santa Barbara. They’ve lived in that house since 1963, and this is the first time coyotes have been spotted in their neighborhood. Which begs the question: why? Why now? What strange new world does this portend?

Mistah Clarke, he dead

Speaking of strange futures, Arthur C. Clarke is dead, they say. He was a fine writer, no doubt. But he was more than that: the man had vision. He not only imagined the future, he understood our place in the context of time.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run – and often in the short one – the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
— Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951

Deadlines

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

— Douglas Adams

wolf week

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October 14-20 is National Wolf Awareness Week.

I like wolves. I’ve had an admiration and a fondness for them for many years. I think they’re amazing animals. I don’t want to go out and play with one. I don’t want to cross one with a Husky and bring it in the house. I’m not an idiot. They’re wild animals. I just want to see them stay that way.

I think people in Alaska should stop shooting them from aircraft. What a destructive, vulgar, stupid thing to do. But then I feel that way about hunting in general. It’s not a sport unless both sides know they’re playing, and have an even chance to win. Hunting is a knuckle-dragging vestige of a culture that rightfully should no longer exist.

Look at that savage moron. What good has he done for himself, for his family, or for the world? None. He has simply killed. No right, no reason, just death. He hunted down what Is – life – and made it what Is Not – death. To encounter the universe and make vacuums of Nothing out of Being is, in my mind, a good general definition of evil.

Anyway, maybe more about wolves in the week to come. They are beautiful creatures, as are bears and elk and squirrels, and I just love knowing that they’re out there, as God intended.