DAMN THOSE LEAVES

Damn, the leaves are falling...

It didn't used to be this way. I used to look forward to the rainbow of leaves cascading in whispers over the days as the air grew cool, back when autumn was a delightful time of year with just that touch of sadness at the steadfast passage of time, tinged with the beauty of all the bright colors of life on the move from light into dark, warm into cold, yet steeped in the comfort of knowing that they will be back, that there will be bright green tomorrows budding once more in the ancient cycle of things, but right now there's that overhanging threat of distaste, the ominous dread of imminent exposure to the dark side of human invention, because as soon as all the oak leaves fall I get satellite tv again.

It's a toxic cascade with a few bright spots, and it's free, so I can take it for a while, the price being unavoidable glimpses of toxic broadcasting trolls, troglodytes and zombies, strange half-creatures from the cave-dweller side of the mind, causing me to argue with the screen and then with myself. I'm usually on my side, so that's disturbing.

But then, as I say, there's always the comfort of knowing that things will grow once more, that summer will return, flowers will bloom and sweet fragrance fill the air, fruits will swell with actual life, that there will be natural tomorrows budding once more as the ancient cycle of things again obscures the 400 channels with living beauty...

TV is not the SOURCE
of news, to say nothing
of WISDOM

AUTUMN LEAVINGS

Now that the cherry trees have lost their leaves in swirling crowds and clusters of color that I have to hand-pick off the baby spinach, and as the oaks toss their own gold all over the landscape and the chestnut reluctantly begins to shed in single swirling scarlet flashes, the widening access to open sky is rendering me increasingly vulnerable to the perturbations of satellite tv, the growing signal each day affording me more disquieting flashes of world events via CNN, glimpses of movies issuing from the seminal forge that is Hollywood, some benign documentaries, a couple of cooking/gardening shows, some sitcoms, gobbets of pixelfluff into my life, glimpses that leave me unhungry for more, though there is a bit of mental nourishment there for a hungry mind, tantalizing crumbs of how good a medium television could be if it were left to the devices of intelligence and wisdom, rather than to the claws of marketing; by and large, though, I'm grateful that Spring will bring the leaves back to the trees.