the universe that has shaped itself in the next room

the plastic princess tames the dinosaur, a ceratosaurus not to be trifles with, with an incantation and the promise of popcorn. all around, smurfs are dancing insulting ethnic spoofs of native american rituals, and a tree monitor the size of ten busses pleads to be allowed to eat one, just one, because he is so hungry for blue flesh. buildings collapse, pigs balance on the back of the Overdino, a plateosaurus who rules this world with a stern tempermant, and all over plastic dinosaurs and ficher price blue collar vacationers gather to witness the spectacle of a hot air ballon trip to the moon, where apparently, there is cake. this world creates and re-creates itself with such regularity that is assuming some of the attributes of a real place. it has rules. there must be a circus. The MONSTER BALL and the OVERDINO compete for rulership, though only the latter wins, interspecific love affaris are commonplace, as the monarch of the real leans he is the scion of a triceratops, and babies here, as everywhere, must be tucked into bed. A few feet away, a perpetual birthday party is in full swing, invisible cake half-eaten on plastic plates as stuffed monkeys stare at the ceiling and think of something resembling stuffed heaven.

Who made death?

Ruby: Who made this car?
Me: Robots. It was made in a factory, south of here, mostly by robots but also by some human helpers.
Ruby: Who made my doll?
Me: People, in a factory, probably in Southeast Asia, made it.
Ruby: Who made shoes?
Me: Another factory.
Ruby: Who made feet?
Me: Nobody made them. They just grew there. When you were still inside mamma.
Ruby: Who made up?
Me: Up isn't real, it is just an idea. We made up. We can make up any direction we want,
Ruby: Who made Aweoweah?
Me: You made Aweoweah.
Ruby: Who made eyes?
Me: Evolution made them. But evolution is not a person, it is a thing that happens, like the weather.
Ruby: Who made owwies?
Me: Evolution.
Ruby: Who mead death?
Me: Evolution.
Ruby: Who made my doll?

It goes on like this for hours. I am so damned proud of you, Ruby.

A talk with Aweoweah

Dear Aweoweah, or should i put it more informally, since we live in the same house and spend most of our days together, you in my daughter's pocket or running around on the playground, underfoot, your invisibility a great asset to you at such times. You were jumping on the chair beside my daughter earlier today, your own daddy, also invisible, holding your finger lest you catch a bad bounce and hurl yourself to the carpet. Apparently, you are blue all over, and have a very large nose, blue eyes, and a robe and hat a wizard like gandlf would deem appropriate-and yes, tattoos, all over your body and especially the backs of your hands and your nose, of squirrels and god knows what else. I am glad my daughter found you as a friend. Apparently, your employment as the tickle monster brought you into such frequent contact with ruby that you and her struck up a fast friendship. When you are not around, she spends a great deal of time texting you on her toy phone and apparently, you have been known to phone in a tickle now and again, using us as your agents. I am having a beer with your daddy right now and he tells me all kinds of strange tales about the imaginary landscapes you inhabit.

Dear Ruby

Ruby, you went to bed so excite at the prospect of throwing the moon about in your hands, like a luminescent balloon. We were listening to Ronnie James Dio, and there you go, saying phooooo, phoooo repeatedly, and then pointing at the window, which is also the direction from which the music was coming. I finally realize that it is the moon you were talking about, and not the Black Sabbath song I sing to you as a lullaby, which is now playing. You had taught yourself how to say "moon" for the occasion of your first being able to glimpse it from the window of your home. How beautiful it is. I take you across the room for another decent look at it, and there you go, giving me the sign you invented for "give it to me".
So, I lamely explain to you, not quite two years old, that the moon is a place, an object so big that it will not fit in our apartment ore even in our city. I try to tell you that it is a hundred thousand times as far away as Earwax cafe. For the next half our, we gleefully search images of the surface of the moon, the earth and moon seen from space, Mars, Jupiter, Titan, even Io. You are thrilled, but go to bed not wanting to hear Dio or Blue Oyster Cult or any other lullaby, but instead to hear me talk about the moon, which you gesticulate about playing with in your hands like a balloon. Ruby, some day you will either go there or pilot a robot to there, or at least think about a place like Io and imagine the sky on a place like that. Soon, Ruby, I will teach you things.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.


1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.



3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.



The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.



4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.



Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.



5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.




She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

dear ruby

it is tough to know what to make of a perfect day like this-they bloom like flowers and transform gradually into some kind of fruit. nothing is permanent though and there is a little sadness to the experience of such a thing because it cannot last forever, gradually taking shape on a playground with a stuffed bat and perhaps culminating on a patio at earwax, i saw a look in your eyes like you really understood what it means to love a person back, and for the rest of the day we were giggly and soft for each other and I did not know such a thing could exist were it not for you i never would. you tell a wonderful story and were a very good sport about the sandwich shop being closed, and i am glad you call me da da now.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
So, we are in the middle of it..this moving event, and I am dismantling the only world you ever known, piece by piece, and expecting you to act normally and go to bed on time. I brought you to the Zoo the other day and we saw ducks. You have been a good little nugget. We are moving primarily because this place is not good for you. Lead paint enters the bloodstream and disrupts the migration of neurons. That is why we always mop together in the morning, Ruby, you are such a good little cleaner. In the new place, we will mop less and spend more time hauling laundry for blocks to the laundromat.
I wonder what damage I have done to my own brain with that heat gun, that sanding. I hope there was not too much asbestos in that beaverboard we have everywhere. Technologies change, and since the Romans we have been poisoning our children with lead to make them docile and stupid. I do not want you to become docile and stupid and therefore we mopped for months and now we are moving. It is impossible to live in a place like this and not work on it and the act of working on it is what must have made your lead levels so high last fall. This fall we will be walking distance from a decent park and dad and mommy will have a coffeehouse and a pub to go to. I have missed those things, though I will miss the chorusing crickets here. I will miss turning over rocks in the backyard with you and I do not know what to do with your sandbox. You will see more of mommy though, however, and I know that is what really matters to you. It will be much easier for her to get back from work and see you, and that is another reason why we are leaving.
We are renting this house to punk rockers, lesbians, and the sort of young people who live collectively and like to pay very little rent. First of all, this type of person never has children, and second of all, I think they are the only kind of people I could act as a landlord to. The break things, yes, all the time, but they also know how to fix things sometimes and I understand their behavior. I have no idea if this plan will work, but it gets you out of the house in time to keep your refusal to utter the words for "Juice" and "Green" from worrying me even more than they do, but we live in a society where doctors have made any departure from normative behavior and illness, and I think you communicate just fine with your "Yes" and your sign language, and your animal noises. I understand you pretty well and you know it. The fact of the matter is you are important and I do not care fuck all about economic investments when they get in the way of taking care of you. Many, many people were hit hard by the depression the country went into basically at the same time you were born and we have done fine so far so we can afford to take a hit if we have to lose this house. The truth of the matter is, Ruby, that fixing this place up was a fun exercise and I would do it precisely once in a given lifetime, but I would do it that one time. Your mother has itchy feet and mine are more planted, but this city is like a hundred small cities and we long to return to those other places.
We will bring all of the cats, of course we will. We will also bring your rubber duckies. I love you, Ruby.

Lady Gaga

I have been hypnotically revisiting the images in the Lady Gaga videos, over and over again, like a needle-skipping record left on the turntable as a family goes away on vacation, rushing out the door, lights on, dishes in the sink, barely packed, and strains of "Alejandro", "Poker Face", and "Bad Romance" echoing through a shag carpeted living room. Beds burn, the same incendiary autoimmolation striking the same assertive man wearing the same chin prosthetic, on infinite repeat, like the cosmos of the collapsing universe, a time stream somehow bent back upon itself, cause leading to effect leading to second cause. Again and again, I see the magnificent, goggle-clad face lasciviously pull on her black lips with a talonlike fingernail, the suggestive drills of her bodyguard, clad in Calvin Klein briefs and Prince Valiant haircuts, as they obligingly commit acts of nun rape and war crimes in one context, and submit to animal slavery in another. My one point five year old has inherited my obsessive, megalomaniacal disposition, and today I negotiated a brief respite, to show her videos of Fred Astaire, Hansel und Gretyl, Madonna, which she grudgingly tolerated, an early attempt to explain the concept of sharing. The fact of the matter is that the images are burned in her consciousness forever, and she will always desire to writhe and prance around in fancy underwear from now on, to dance with a coterie of latex clad mutants in a white room, to be bluffin' with her muffin, when the time reveals itself, though for now she is content to roll theatrically on the kitchen floor with her monkey, Alex, the same stuffed monkey who borrows my car keys and takes off for the night, to god knows where. I suppose I am being prepared for something, am I not? She will have Lady Gaga the same way I had the Honeycomb Hideout, the Trix Rabbit, the Ishmael who was Captain Crunch, their microscopic dramas played out ad infinitum across a six color canvas, to the extent that I can still remember the specious dictum that "Trix are for Kids". I wonder if her hypothalamus is putting down her first long-term memories, of a heroine in a bearskin casting a room into flames, of tiny pink tutus and the first attempts at dance steps. Hopefully, the same hypothalamus is putting down a few memories of endless afternoons in the park, of sandwiches shared on the grass, of turing over rocks to gather pillbugs to show with Mama, and a strange pastiche they will make. Rock, Pond, River, Mice, Milk, Scissors, Grahm Crackers, KISS, Sid and Marty Croft, GI Joe, Dinosaurs, Pengins, Dolls, Explosives, Peanut Butter, Grass Huts, Fear, Milk, Survival. We have barely left the savanna.

Dear Ruby

Ruby, I am glad I taught you to turn over rocks in the garden looking for creepy crawlies. We have found amazing things together, already. Ants. I cannot comprehend the damage we are doing to their colonies by our frequent intrusion, but the way I see it, I have gone far out of my way to create an ideal landscape for them, and they owe me some entertainment for my daughter. Ants are familiar with the give and take of mutualism, and now I am doing the taking. We have seen beautiful rove beetles in your colonies, two types so dissimilar in appearance that it is only because of years of booklearning that I recognized them. Ruby, I never bothered ants to look for rove beetles before you came along.

We also have an amazing density of millipedes. Curiously, the star performer of our garden fauna, the European earwig, is scarcely extinct locally, after reaching such incredible densities that I was beginning to wonder how this creature came to be so invincible. Much less abundant, but strange and beautiful, are the beetles. I saw a patent leather beetle, in the wild, and alone, looking under a rock, some strange carabids, and a number of beautiful iridescent beetles I cannot currently name.

Soon, Ruby. Scarabs. Soon, fireflies as well. Soon crickets and cicada calls. Soon.

Dear Ruby

it is probably worth mentioning, at this exact moment in time, because such a dispatch as this is really limited to a particular instant in cosmic time, that things are pretty good at this time. the homemade lager has all the fruitiness of a beer that was fermented at the wrong temperature, and i love it. it feels like my invention. the weather is perfect, and the happy little baby is sleeping next to a rubber duck the size of a real duck, a few feet away. true, there is no meteor shower, but there are also no impact craters, and for that, i am eternally grateful, or at least, until an impact occurs. there is rock out there. that is to say, rock, and heavy metal exist. i like this. i like that the world harbors so many species of insects, also. i watched one bee intimidate and harass another today, separate species and both solitary, and i approved. these things go on happening even in urban gardens, evolutionary events such as the transport of strange fish across great oceans.

i have never felt truly like a member of the human race. this may result from an upbringing spent with my face pushed between colored illustrations of ants, or it may result from abnormalities in some prefrontal gyrus of mine, but every glance in the mirror is a surprise, no matter how old i get, because i do not generally expect to see a primate there. seriously, i find its hands beautiful, its eyes and lips interesting, and its sheer bulk paradoxical. it seems curiously degenerate, lacking so many of the features that should have made it a chordate to begin with, and its immune system waging war on the last remnant of notochord. its societies are so complicated, and so much of its energy is devoted to activities which, if anything, negatively impact its Darwinian fitness. that said, i never expected to have any Darwinian fitness at all, and that strange creature i spent the day with has a similar, odd, interest in its own status as a human being. such things as nostrils need to be accounted for. a continuous digestive tract, and heterotrophy, were not forgone conclusions, and the existence of something like the ocean is a like some weird homecoming. i do not know what strange galactic cluster you were at lately, nugget, but welcome to earth and, when you get old enough, enjoy the beer.

Kreator Recontextulized

Despite appearances, Ruby has no soft-tissue damage or repetitive stress injuries from moshing around like this. We have done it every day since she was born, and we know each other's limits. As you can imagine, she has incredible core body strength. I film this, actually, on a day she would absolutely not go to sleep...."metaling her down" is a standard daddy trick, which can backfire, of course, if she is not absolutely dead tired. She is sleeping soundly now, two minutes after the clip is finished.

The song is Kreator's 'Flag of Hate'...we had been on an Iron Maiden kick earlier, but I needed something more brutal.

This sounds incredibly pretentious, misguided, or both, but Ruby seems to need the catharsis of heavy music-electroclash, punk, metal, industrial, to deal with the everyday stresses of living in a world where she can make elaborate plans to distract her mom and dad long enough to eat the cat food, but cannot pull a shirt over her head or flush a toilet. We both live for this, which is good, because it is pretty much how we spend our days.

Life in The Petri Dish

January

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,

  I write these, sometimes, because I know an occasional letter from the past is very welcome.  My old poetry, mostly, those slices of would-be-brilliance, shines like crap on a morning lawn, but an occasional diary entry from the past, a reminder of that person I once was, that stranger that made so many decisions I live with today, is a nugget in the dark, so to speak.  Love you, baby.

You made it to one, Ruby. Nice Job.

My very small knowledge of developmental psychology seems to taper off after one year old, unfortunately.  I need to remedy this situation in a hurry.  As predicted though, you have just about all of your cerebral cortex online, in one capacity or another, right now, and there is always a little person there...thoughts, opinions, expectations...strategies.  Dear viewer, if you think it was crazy of us to let a one year old eat this much refined sugar, you are absolutely right...she spent much of her birthday wired like a coke fiend in Miami, waiting for the 1980's to end.  Now, she is trying to walk, in short intervals, and with careful planning, so as not to fall and look foolish.  She demands to be bounced around to music, as always, but nowadays it is almost always her idea.  The little Nile-esque cookie monster growl has come back, for summoning metal to the cd player, or to indicate any situation where the baby is being watonly brutal, such as hurling stuffed toys onto the floor.  She seems much more concerned with having us name every object she can point to than she does with saying the words herself, as if to satify her curisity that previous humans have named everything first.  Sorry..we have, or we can invent them fast.  "That block is a donut shape...a torus....it is red...."  "Donut, umm, that one is octagonal, there are no donuts that shape.  I know, you are finding all the toruses....and stacking them, by round vs. not round..."  Note to self, "Is there such a thing as an octagonal torus?"

Happy birthday, Ruby.

Dear Ruby,

Yes, Ruby, of course I am an extremely proud father that you now have a low, "cookie monster" growl to voice fits of metal pleasure, such as trying to kick your rubber duckie out of the bathtub, and bouncing around in my arms to Iron Maiden, SkeletonWitch, and Arsis, complete with tiny fist in the air.  Just as pleased, I am, that you seem to have discovered the secret magic to books, and laugh at a drawing of a baby gorilla crawling into bed with the zookeeper and his wife.  You have never seen a gorilla, yet this is somehow funny to you already, at just short of a year old.  Your endless experiments with the Fisher Price ball popper, your conviction that merely hiding your face with a cake pan constitutes the ultimate in crypsis and hilarity, and a thousand other things convince me that you, the real you, are finally here.  Welcome to Earth Ruby, and happy birthday.  This time, last year, we were taking bets that you would arrive amid whatever Thanksgiving meal we saw fit to make, deciding what to pack for the hospital visit, as if we did not live a block away, and airing our confessions that, indeed, it would be fun to dress a little baby and that is part of the excitement, however indulgent.  You look great today.  Love.  Dad.

We All Grow Up So Damned Fast

Ruby was a bumblebee for Halloween this year, or something of that ilk.  She loved the short walk we took through Wicker Park, in a hunt for demon babies and Scare a Vacs.

Here she is at home foraging for pollen.

She pretty much likes the life of a circus baby, and prefers to be upside down.

God.  Halloween.  So many great ones recently..all so different.  Here you can see I removed my disguise and became the devil.  We all grow up so damned fast.

Dear Ruby

I am very proud of you for being able to stand up today, Ruby. You try so hard.

Dear Ruby

I have just given you an iclicker to play with. There is a sharpie around here somewhere too. Perhaps your mother would rather you not play with that. You are underfoot in my office as I type, content to explore the pleasant shape of the clicker, and test its endurance by throwing it on the tile floor. I approve. This world here is like a run-down version of the cities I imagined to populate the moon, in distant 2009, as a boy, entranced by science fiction illustrations featuring rocket ships, fuel tanks bulbous and engines flaring. I warned you about the absence of Titanotheres earlier, but earlier in the day, I was able to show you fancy guppies and ball pythons, bichirs and society finches. I never got to go to the moon and visit those cities. It turns out that the resources necessary to colonize that airless orb would have demanded cooperation on a scale that our species is not capable of yet, Maybe your generation will get to that.

August

Summer and late summer again.  Sunflower season ebbing, and I find myself waiting for goldenrod.  That is the end of it, the goldenrod, setting fluffy seed when halloween decorations go up.  This is the time when my ancient ancestors took in the harvest.  Survival for now no matter what, even the leanest harvests would keep a person alive till frost comes.  Tomatoes now.  A fan buzzes quietly, like the agnostic pencil-chipper at my grandmother's house.  No symbol of late summer is as resonant to me.

I wonder about old Tethys, about goldenrods blooming on the shore of that dying ocean as it finally closed up in Cimeria.  I also wonder, every moment, what strange attributes will materialize in the mind of the tiny being who sleeps in my lap as I write this.  Today, she blindly grabs for gouramis through the glass of a pet store tank, desires to stay awake forever, plays with shoes.  Tomorrow? She is just as actual as I am now.