Where the Wild Birds Go

Some who follow me, and they should probably know better than to do that by now, will know that for the last year I have been tending a bird feeder and watching birds... it has kept me somewhat sane when I would rather be working more often, earning a wage and paying bills.

My friend, fellow writer, and correspondent David Coyote earlier in the year sent me these photos.



I was intrigued by both the small bird and David's amazing hand. I asked him what the story is behind the photos.

When as a boy I delivered newspapers there was a an old man along the route who lived in a very very tiny house near 6-mile creek. He was a frugal man and lived simply. He had boards stacked up all around his yard against trees. Boards that he pulled up out of the creek. Often as I came up to hand him his newspaper he would be standing at the street beside an hawthorn tree and he would feed nuthatches out of his hand. He would make little noises and they would hop about and chatter at him. I was always amazed at this alignment of an individual with the delicate order of the bird world.

David kindly responded to my inquiry. Here is the story in his own words:

The bird is a common sparrow. As we did most mornings, Pamela and I had been sitting outside at the table, having our coffee and watching the birds. Not more than a few days earlier I'd said, "I wonder where birds go to die? I never see dead birds lying around - and there are so many birds - one might expect to see a dead one now and then." Pamela agreed. "Maybe they have a bird graveyard, like elephants, a place to go when they're dying." That's the last we spoke of it - until this particular morning.

The sparrow flew over to the table, and then to my hand. It sat there quietly - I didn't move. Pamela got up quietly and got the camera. She took a couple of pictures. I moved my hand closer to the bowl of water, thinking that perhaps the bird was thirsty or wanted a bath - the bird didn't fly away. Pamela and I looked at each other, questions behind our eyes.

"I think the bird is dying," I said. I turned my hand slowly and the bird got into my palm. It simply lay down and left it's body as I held it - as we watched.

"It's dead?" she asked - and then began to cry. I held her hand and told her that the bird came to the safest place - and to be glad that we were chosen to be with it at its passing.

I buried the sparrow in the garden.



PS: Now, there's an herb garden growing at the sparrow's grave.

Two vids frm Iguana House

frm Ohioan Larry C. Simpson, author of the novel, The Lost Cave of the Jaguar Prophets

It seems like only yesterday that Larry was warning us to look out for cone nosed kissing bugs.


Filmed in Kentucky, excellent canoe vid, and I like the eco-lit poem a whole lot.


If you lived through this era in American history then this vid will seem uber familiar. Otherwise ... it is a powerful historical interpretation. Share it with your parents? Share it with your grandchildren? Good music, too.

Last Man Living, But Don't Know It

"Hey ho all you good buddies out there! This is WPBX 131.2 FM pirate radio coming to you off the coast of Montauk. I’m not sure what is going on here today... I don’t mean the weather; it is sunny, those black clouds are gone, black, drack, clack clouds... ozone levels are low, not a single jetliner in the sky -- on the water we got gentle waves with a light breeze... oyeh boy! I’ve not had a call-in in three hours. I hate to tell ya’ll but it is a bit difficult to keep a call-in show going for eight hours without a single call-in. Ya know! So... buddies, listeners, if I don’t get any calls in the next fifteen minutes I’m going to have to put this mike on automatic while I go take my afternoon shower. I know how much ya’ll like to hear me singin' in the rain, now. That all-natural soap my Aunt Minnie made is real slippery. Hoots and hollers! Who wants to hear that? So do the whole world a favor and give a call right now to 917-237-9503. And while you at it take a minute, take a long minute and tell me what you think about that dead thing washed up on the beach in Amagansett last week. Was it man or beast or your Uncle Willie? Ha, ha ha!”

Leaf Raking

My friend -- I believe them on all things environmental and weedy -- said that they were raking leaves... to which I was inspired to write about my not raking leaves.

They also reminded me that as we live very very close to the Atlantic Ocean and the salt-hay marsh that our residence is an intruder on the saltwater wetland... and though they are a bit inland they noted that they are intruders on a freshwater wetland. Oh, my, we have so much responsibility in so little time.

When it occurred to me after reading Bill McKibben’s book (Deep Economy), and my reaching out to friend Mr. McKibben on FB -- on the day that he was doing an intensive at 350.org, -- the primary a reason we do not live in a super-kool place (like Ithaca, NY) is that we don’t do enough in the intensive local of ‘me’ to make our daily place super-kool. Not raking leaves, and feeding sparrows at the bird feeder makes for a portion of my answer to the feeling of uncoolness to be overcome.

First appearance of this article is at Blogcritics.com, which means that an editor looked at it and made modest corrections, said nice things to me, and had sense enough to show me where it made no sense whatsoever at all... things like the subtle difference between if it were the leaves that were indignant at my laziness, or my family, or the neighbors, or the yard police. At times it can be very important to know exactly who it is that is indignant. Regardless, if you have the energy and the wherewithal to hop over to my posting on Blogcritics and leave a comment on my leafy commentary it just may encourage me to keep gassing on in a similar vein, and it may attract a few more readers, and a few more lawn care savants to consider -- to rake or not to rake, there is no question.

...............

I want to share some thoughts on leaf raking.

We live in a suburban neighborhood on Long Island that is lowly enough, working class and lower, where neighbors pretty much let neighbors be, though we do relate with each other. Guy across the street has turned his lot into a pool-table flatness of green lawn over the last few years. For decades it was a jungle of vines, poison ivy, and dead fallen branches. Now he has it mowed regularly and he put in sprinklers (note: though he works the lawn he does not mow it himself). Neighbor on the other corner works as a groundskeeper for a local school district... which means he mows a whole lot of lawns, and his lot is pristine, except the area where he stores his weekend freelance equipment and plays with tuning up his chopper.

Though I have no qualms about mowing the lawn, and enjoy the work, the smell of new-mown grass, and the pleasure of a flat (well, almost flat) green area, I also like weeds. I do have qualms about the use of fertilizer and herbicides. I enjoy plants that persist on their own – so our lawn is not exactly a monoculture of bluegrass fescue. When I do mow I avoid disturbing the devil’s paintbrush, and I never mow when the violets are hardy.

For a few years now I have been resisting mowing the lawn at all, and in particular I hold out until the grass that will grow in the acidic/sandy soil will seed. It is not easy to get grass to grow in our lawn and there are areas of persistent dirt. There are also areas where moss seems to thrive, and I like moss. I will even introduce moss into the scene. The failure to mow I call my "prairie restoration project." I do this act of landscape resistance in fear all summer long that the self-appointed citizen "lawn police" will come down on me for having a house that looks abandoned. They do come down on me if I leave bricks lying about in obvious piles (I threaten back that I am storing up to build a large bear sculpture). I think about maybe installation of an interpretive sign. People do like to read things. The professional lawn-mowing neighbor occasionally stops around when he walks his dog and asks if everything is OK with us.

We have oak trees, whose leaves are fairly acidic as leaves go. Raking leaves in our household is not a communal activity... if it gets done I get to do it alone. I get to mow alone also. There is nothing wrong with this, to my mind, it is just that it is lonely, and in preference to a lonely mow I would rather watch a group of sparrows fight at the feeder.

There is also a difference of opinion as to the proper disposal of leaves. I am a stubborn and frugal sort on some things, and this is one of them. Most leaf raking activity that I see in our neighborhood consists of putting the leaves in paper bags and setting them out on the street. My immediate reaction to this practice is wondering why my neighbors are giving away their biological wealth. The trees suck up nutrients from the ground of the lot, they put a portion of that into their leaves, then they drop their leaves, and we bag them up and send them away to a landfill site – or a facility near the landfill where they are processed into mulch, which we can then pay for, spending more energy to drive our cars around with processed dead leaves bagged up in the trunk. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

It costs fuel-energy to run the trucks to move the leaves. This is also true of all the leaf-blower machines that are so active in the autumn season (though I am all in favor of keeping the illegal alien population busy and employed, particularly out in the Hamptons)... Yesterday I saw a man using a pressure washer to move leaves (not to clean, but to move leaves) off of a commercial sidewalk. I will be the first to say that using a pressure washer for this purpose is a whole lot of fun, but it is, to be honest, an indulgence, a waste of a finite energy resource – though the guy did not look like the brightest mind on Long Island and I felt that at least he could be proud of his work. Hydro-power blowing includes throwing away otherwise potable water, in our case water processed through the public system, water sucked out of the Pine Barrens aquifer. Though I suppose after impacting a concrete sidewalk it goes somewhere.

At one point last year I considered an investment in pelletizing machines for a garage-industry to take tree leaves and turn them into fuel pellets for pellet stoves. I am interested in suburban recycling on a DIY basis. And I was really pissed about the cost of fuel oil to heat the house. Though tree leaves are not anticipated to produce as much heat as wood pulp, the lower energy return may be balanced by the fact that they are recycled and zeroed against the energy saved by not having to truck them to the landfill.

When I do rake the leaves (note, I say "when I do") I have locations on the property where I rake them into a pile and leave them. In essence our lot in life becomes one large composting operation. This hording of leaves seems to bother my associates to the point that they refuse to participate in the making of piles, no matter what I say – and if I cannot win an argument at home then how can I expect to go up against the entire lawn care industry? And who will buy all of those paper bags? I notice that not putting leaves in bags takes less time and energy, on my part, than simply raking them into a corner below the butterfly bush. Used to be I raked them across the street into what is now the pool-table lawn, back when it was a jungle and I could readily hide my organic subversion, and they composted up real well for garden soil. The energy expended in that transaction was the equivalent of a beer and a sandwich. Though nowadays what I also notice is that we have a fairly amazing population of worms on the property. I like to keep them well fed and happy.

I have also got in the habit, over the years, of holding out later and later into the fall season in the hope that there will be a groundswell of familial indignation at the steady accumulation of leaves on the lawn. Enough leaves piled up in layers will form an impermeable mattress to suffocate whatever green stuff we have growing there, threatening to make us Orgreases appear even more dejected and socially unsavory next summer. But that seems a false promise of a poor strategy.

Nowadays I simply let the leaves fall and the snow land and melt (it only stays for a few days), and I leave the leaves alone until spring when it dries up a bit so that I may give in and, alone, go rake leaves, or not.

I’m not sure about the psychological implications of off-season leaf raking. It is nice to talk about leaf raking with leaf raking peers. It is a variation on the usual chatter about the weather and climate change and the impending extinction of human life as we know it. "Have you noticed how the leaves fell sooner and they had a tinge of purple to them? I hear in Vermont the tourist industry is going gangbusters. Yes, it is terrible. Terrible. We need to do something about the international leaf problem." This spring, though, the crocuses got there with their life mission before I did. I was hesitant to rake the leaves because I wanted to see the pretty crocuses... purple, white, yellow... scattered haphazardly around the "lawn." I feel less depressed when I see them. They bring on the audacity of hope. So what happened is that I thought, “Oh, my gawd... this year I have really done it. I have killed the lawn.”

But nobody told the lawn that it was dead, and the grass, the weeds, the wild lettuce, the white clover, and the poison ivy all just came right up and flourished. It was so damned abundant that I worried I was in even more danger of being caught by the yard police. I broke down and mowed once this year (it helped that the town sent me a threatening letter). I am not exactly sure where all of the oak leaves went but I did absolutely nothing at all about them. And I suspect that we have an organic biomass cycle ongoing here where we are not using up energy of any sort to deplete the wealth of our small lot. Or at least I fancy that is the case.

In future I may add to my prairie restoration spiel and tell folks that I am indignant that we are not allowed to burn leaves, that I love the smell of burned leaves, and that I refuse by civil disobedience to rake leaves until I am given back my American individual free citizen entitlement to burn leaves and stink up the neighborhood. I will proudly flash my NRA membership card just to reinforce my leaf-bagging resistance.

There is one other consequence of my laziness that I notice this year. When my neighbor with the pool-table lawn comes back from a day out on his boat and stands bare-chested on his lawn, he has to keep swatting at the skeeters. A hundred feet away I sit on my porch and don’t notice any skeeters. I notice all the spiders, and I am often frustrated when I walk out the front door in the morning and I get a web in the face, but we don’t have nearly the skeeter population of our neighbor. I would like to ask him if everything is OK, but I can look out across the street and quickly see that it is.

The Master and Margarita | The Truth About Lies

The Master and Margarita | The Truth About Lies

My friend the novelist Jim Murdoch provides a very detailed and interesting commentary on Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. An astounding novel that I first read last spring. It was one of those books that sort of popped out at me when I was browsing the bookshelves in the bookstore while looking for something else entirely. As Jim says, and I agree, every writer should read it. Perfectly delightful.

Sufjan Stevens, BQE

This week while driving on the Long Island Expressway we heard on WNYC Spinning on Air an interview of a musician and selections of his work.

The comment made in our truck while on our way to Home Depot was something like, "Yeah, I think this is the guy I started to play his music and it freaked me out. I had to shut it off. He did an album of electronic music about animals that sounded like someone who had never done electronic music."

But there was something else going on here in this orchestral music that we were hearing on the radio. As soon as I had an opportunity I followed up to get hold of the entire symphony, laid back with the headphones and let it rip. As some of my friends & family already know I have one hell of a lot of hours driving on the Robert Moses built expressways around, within and out of NYC. Plus a bunch of years living and working in the Willy-B/Greenpoint area of Brooklyn.


It is not solely a dedication to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, or the original commission by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, or the intimacy of my decades of familiarity with the expressway, either on it, near it, under it -- there is something gloriously grand in Sufjan Steven's symphonic composition BQE that makes me feel that it could only have been bred, born and nurtured in the soul of Brooklyn.

Though that sentiment may be in great part an illusion seeing as Sufjan is originally from Michigan. Though his banjo wings and his Methodist upbringing could be magically misleading.


I am not a reliable music critic, don't intend to be , I know my taste is eclectic (give me Dongjing any day), but anyone that titles a composition "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois", would not remain off my radar for long. Though I will say that if you breeze around looking up YouTubes and such you will find a very mixed bag.

The largest complaint that can be found on the internet about Sufjan centers on his being stylistically all over the place, either a pop-folk indie, or symphonic composer, and if you listen to his work (other than his symphony) you may immediately notice that it varies in quality, at times remarkable then just as suddenly it falls off a cliff somewhere. I was asked why an artist would behave in this manner and it caused me to reflect on how, as a writer, I can hit a note here, and miss there, fall off a cliff or bash my face into a brick wall, and that my own work is, as with Sufjan... it is all over the place. I never really have a feeling for when it is good, or bad, I'm involved and engaged in the minutia of the fungus on the tree trunk, let alone looking at the forest from outer space. Difficult to hold down, difficult to pin down, an existential leap through an obstacle course brought on by a being alive and awake. Perfectly willing to change the rules of the game to take the game onto another playing field, or to evaporate the playing field entirely in favor to sit on a sofa and eat chips. If one follows their creative inspiration, as obviously Sufjan is doing, and they have the least bit of a complicated human nature then they are not going to fit very well into the boxes provided by audience expectations in a world of mass-commodity media, either in music or in literature (and it appears Sufjan is also a writer). What one needs to anticipate from Sufjan is something entirely else next time.

THE BQE- A Film By Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

Interlude I—Dream Sequence in Subi Circumnavigation from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

Traffic Shock, BQE - Movement IV
Album, DVD etc. available at Rough Trade.

A full CD soundtrack, the DVD of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway footage, a 40 page booklet with liner notes and photos as well as a stereoscopic 3-D Viewmaster reel. Asthmatic Kitty, Stevens' label, to release a limited edition double gatefold vinyl edition of The BQE on 180-gram vinyl with a 32 page booklet, and a black and white version of a BQE themed Hooper Heroes Comic Book.

Deep Economy, the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben

When I read this book I kept reading passages that made me desire to buy more copies and send to specific of my friends as McKibben brings up so many issues that I have heard expressed regarding the need for a sustainable human built-environment, as well as sustaining the resource of traditional trades.

Preservation of old buildings, and the people who practice the craft of historic preservation, is not solely about a near-religious fixation on ancestor worship. It is also about not discarding the embedded energy and resource of the existing built environment, and a conscientious understanding of how most optimally to preserve that previously expended use of energy resources, and it is this perspective that the practitioners of traditional trades embody in a collective knowledge. To bring these people together to share in their knowledge is to build a sustainable community toward a durable future.

You can paint it GREEN if you so desire, but it is so much more than choice of a color pallet.

“Consider the most influential new program on television in the last decade, Survivor, which ushered in the reality show craze. Along with its uncountable offspring, it operates on the premise that the goal is to end up alone on the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone else goes away and leaves you by yourself with your money”

And then we have the father of balloon boy.

Can one say that Richard Heene and his family is not living out the American dream, or soon to be nightmare, in a sort of modern morality play of Everyman as reinforced by our mass-news media?

I have been building a UFO out of cast iron for many years now... on a test flight of an early prototype it sunk off the south shore of Long Island. Possibly I should have called the Coast Guard? Or possibly the answer to capture maximum broad-band exposure is more gas and we purchase more better duct tape?

After many years of working in the construction industry I am often struck, and a bit outraged, at the prevailing public opinion that the low bidder on a project, particularly one paid for by taxes, is the least cost and the most efficient. On the surface it makes sense that we would want to pay less for more, or for just enough, but once the public spotlight on a project is gone, once a project goes into contract there are a whole host of “hidden” costs. These are costs that are in the interest of various players, particularly the ones who receive the windfall, to want to keep hidden. The name of the game is to bid low, which assures getting the project, then fight for change orders on every single discrepancy that can be fought over. It makes for a cantankerous work environment. Contractors who master the low-bid game also master the change order process. I say this as the largest change order I was ever involved in manipulating, from the contractor side, was $2.5M and it had more to do with bureaucratic incompetence than it had to do with necessity. Give it a few years later and the entire project would likely be done over again at an even higher cost. There are techniques of manipulation and negotiation that one learns as in any profession.

None of this low-bid outrage has much to do with Bill McKibben’s book, least ways not much on the surface. This book sat on the corner of my work desk for more than a year before I finally picked it up. In part my slowness in taking it on had to do with the recession, having to work hard enough already to stay solvent and not wanting to focus on those problems, and a reluctance to maybe look at what is hidden beneath our current economic trends. There is one thing that comes out to me very strongly in the current economy, and that is that healthy community, connections, relationships, networking is vital to our personal survival. That is a bit of what McKibben talks about, the relationship of hyper-individualism, the uninhibited pursuit of number-one as opposed to the common good, and posits this social relationship against a backdrop of a closed-earth system with a limitation on progressive growth, and a limitation on the resources of energy, and a strain on the natural environment that human life itself is dependent upon.

Something that I picked up on in New Orleans post-Katrina is that the historic structures that survived tended to be built not only in survivable areas, but with local materials (cypress for example, plaster made with burnt oyster shells for another) that were understood by the local building culture to be appropriate, but also that the local building culture had been influenced by centuries of French experience in Equatorial and tropic climates. And yet, post-Katrina one of the problems encountered was the tendency of sheetrock to get black mold (unlike with plaster, and who knows how much of the sheetrock came from China and may contain poisons?), or the replacement of exterior doors or windows with the latest mass-manufactured big-box substitute. McKibben in one passage talks about local forest harvests and what some may call “alternative” building technologies that re-jigger the mass production economics in the building industry (think home building industry, and was it not the home building industry, mortgages etc. that fueled the last economic bubble?) to increase local labor (decentralized, potentially in work teams, as in communal and/or barter exchange) and in the end come out not only less expensive in the long-range (avoidance of long-term debt and usury) and often with materials that can be replenished within one human’s lifetime.

Regardless what one believes about climate change it is fairly obvious that humans are running out of resources as populations increase, and as emerging 'growth' populations take on a rapidly expanding conversion of non-renewable energy resources -- but what is not so easily noticed is the hidden costs of our state of mind, of the ferocity of our individualism, our demand that an individual has a right to rise to the top “by their own efforts”. Unfortunately nobody rises by their own efforts, they rise by the efforts of the community that selects and supports them to rise. One can bend the language to create a myth of self-reliant individualism, but it remains just that, a myth.

One of the things that I hear, and feel, is that a long-term sustainable economic recovery cannot be obtained if we continue to push toward “progress” in the same manner as got us to where we are now, and that a future economy will need to be different, will need to be more communal... and I mean this in the sense that not every home needs to be a McMansion, and not every McMansion needs three cars and a speed boat too large to trailer behind their SUV. McKibben provides a host of examples and contemplation on the hidden costs and the need for sustainable, local, community based economic models. What I come away with is looking at the immediate lives around me, my own included, and a desire to figure out how to make sensible adjustments toward a sustainable business model and life.