scotch on the rocks...
almost sounds like the bad seafaring adventures of someone named McCleod, doesn't it? Well, it's only Dewar's White Label over ice and it goes well with this typical New Jersey early summer's evening. It's thundering and raining in the back yard and the setting sun is bathing the front yard and porch of Stately Sad Old Goth Manor in that almost orange hue that I love so much. It's the perfect situation for a rainbow, so you must forgive me if I get up once in a while to peer out the bay window in the back parlor wall to see if we are graced with one. Nope, not yet. Maybe soon. Interesting things, rainbows. As a matter of fact, when I was young it was a rainbow that ushered in the beginning of the loss of innocence for me. Looking back, I'd rather that it had been brown haired and freckled Susan who lived across the street with whom my adventure into reality had been begun, but, alas, it was a rainbow. When I was very young, I was enchanted with the things. I would wait for weather like this in the summer so I could see one and I would stand in the hot, steamy rain and stare at it, much to the chagrin of my mother who was terrified of lightning and was sure I was going to be charred on the spot, but it never happened and I was able to see my rainbows every time one was around. Then, when I was about nine years old, my parents bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias from a traveling World Book Encyclopedia sales woman and they were my eventual down fall. I started reading them from morning to night, even sneaking them under the covers with a light until the wee hours of the night, absorbing everything like that much proverbialized sponge and then it happened... right there in volume "R" was a detailed description of the mechanics of rainbows... rainbows, it turns out, are not some miracle, but merely the refraction of low angle light through small suspended droplets of water in the air, a neat optical trick requiring just the right amount of moisture and the absolute perfect angle of the sun... there was no mention of pots of gold or chasing of said rainbows, only in passing comment that such fanciful things were assigned to and by the weak of mind and most un-learned souls, to whom the whole concept of light and water were too deep to comprehend... I was so proud to find myself at last among the great learned souls of the ages, I could explain, with minute detail, how such a thing could occur, even predicting them with great accuracy. And then, I realized that they ceased to be magical, like so many other things that I learned about from those heavy, red volumes of The World Books. Deep and dark Africa ceased to be a place of mystery and became just a hot suburb of Europe; The apple blossoms that graced the ancient trees in the woods behind my house were no longer the special scent of spring, they were only the reproductive parts of the trees that, with some lucky visits by bees, would become apples in the fall; Clouds became merely ordinary. The age of innocence was ushered out by 10 point Garramond and halftones, deposited on clay coated paper by a roto-gravure printing press... And, like riding a bike, once you learn something, you can never un-learn it, there is no going back to that day when wonder was the common place thing in life and facts and figures, the tools of the stupid adults, were things that got in the way and made life miserable and complicated...
So, I guess I'll finish my distilled spirits, sitting in a blow-molded cylinder of fire hardened silica, with small pieces of cold, solidified water and go outside and see there's any rainbows to be had... they still blow my mind, anyway, in spite of myself.
later

pearls before swine...