A Day in the Life of Chaos

Outside my office building there is a tree root that that has enveloped an irrigation pipe.  The pipe is lifted and is slowly buckling as the root grows over and under its captive.   The pressure on the plastic pipe must be enormous and in a matter of time the pipe will inevitably break.  Water will spill and maintenance will fix the leak.  Everything will seem the same but in truth it won't be.  Nature will again have proven that in man's never ending march toward progress it will always ultimately define the outcome. It seems as I grow older I find myself seeking to find my place in the world.  It is a world filled with change, constantly adjusting, never quite the same.  I  feel like the pipe, twisting and turning and some day I will break.  When you are young there is no limit to time yet some day you will wake up and realize that time is changing all that is around us including ourselves. When you live in a modern country like America we gain little sense of the past.

I have a scar on my right cheek, or is it my left?  I have to think about it for awhile before I remember.  I have had it since I was a little boy and when I look in a mirror it is invisible to me.  Others may see it but when something exists with you, like the color of your skin, in time you no longer see it.  I used to ask my mother if it was as small as a GI Joe scar yet?  "Close," she would tell me, "close."  When others would look at me the scar is what they would see first.  They would want to ask me the cause yet they would refrain, thinking it was an invasion of my privacy.  Eventually after a long time the topic would come up and they would sheepishly ask.  I would of course tell them that it was caused by some fantastical circumstance like a violent girlfriend, a shark or the slash of a sword.  In truth, I stumbled over some rocks when I was running and a particularly sharp one cut my face. In life everyone carries wounds with them.  They etch our emo

A few weeks back I wrote an essay on things that go yelp in the night.  It was a recounting of a terrible sound that nearly froze my blood in the darkness of the night.  Coyotes were on the loose.  Nature was at my back door.  I live in a town with a buffer of woods edging the back of my property.  It is an area where deer roam and coyotes stalk the night.  Snakes hide under rocks by a stream and turtles move from sun spot to sun spot.  Hawks circle over head and occasionally a lake heron will fly buy surveying the gold fish and koi in my ornamental pond. While frightening and savage there is something peaceful about knowing I coexist with the natural world so close to my door. Just beyond the flickering light of the Animal Channel on my 56 inch LCD tv is a primeval world of hunters and the hunted. The people that populate my job are a curious mix of educated northerners transplanted here by some cosmic design and red neck Task Force officers.  A Task Force officer is simply a pol