META-4

Something from Above

As the summer slowly draws to an end here in Dixie I find I can no longer even pretend that I have any idea what is going on.    Not in my yard, not in my town, not in my state, not in my country… not on my planet… and so on and so forth.  I honestly don’t have a fucking clue and there is no use pretending that I do.  I can only make “guesses” that this is the kind of feeling experienced by the Romans when the Barbarians were peeking over the hedges, admiring the layout.  It’s a creepy feeling that things will never ever be the same again.  That feeling is bad enough, but, it all gets much worse when you hear one of your neighbors discussing Jesus and how scientists don’t know everything.

I walked in my garden at sun up this morning and it looked “seedy”.  The stems were too long.  There was rot and old dried up centers to plants that were, just a few weeks ago, factories of growth.  It  all seems to be going the other way now. It’s finishing up and doing its last stretching out before death takes it on some yet undisclosed fall night when the black frost comes quietly.  That is still many weeks away, but, my garden is already prepared.  It’s seedy.

Seedy is the metaphor.  I have lived in seedy neighborhoods where the porches were crooked and the shutters were unpainted and improperly secured.  Seedy people lived there sometimes and hung out in seedy places with other seedy people.  Seedy is the metaphor sun up in my garden put in my head today and I can’t seem to get it out.  It seems too good of a fit for so much of what I see around me.  My culture, my country… my planet, all seem a bit seedy if I take the time to look.  Seedy.

Shakespeare wrote, “Juliet is the sun.”  He didn’t mean that Juliet was a giant ball of luminescent gas.  He meant that she was his light and his warmth and the center of his universe.  He meant that Juliet was “like” the sun in certain ways.  He meant it metaphorically not literally.  If Shakespeare was a Redneck he could very well have written, “Tiffany is asparagus”.  I doubt if he ever would have become famous as a Redneck, or, that writing things like “Tiffany is asparagus” would have made any sense to anyone like “Juliet is the sun” does.  There are metaphors and there are metaphors.  Some are very easy to understand and say things and convey truths by using examples of things that are “like” other things so beautifully that they make the truth of something even more true, even more clear.

In my opinion America has gotten seedy.  I just don’t know a more accurate way to put my feelings.  I hope my metaphor makes sense to someone besides me.

I’m not going to leave you hanging (another metaphor) with this “Tiffany is asparagus” business.  Have you thought about it?  Perhaps you know Tiffany, or knew Tiffany at one time, or someone like Tiffany.  These days she is living in a single-wide on her brothers property up on Puppy Creek.   You know how asparagus changes your urine and makes urinating somewhat of an unpleasant experience.