Just thinkin'...

Ever notice how little you really need to be content? I mean, seriously. I'm an American. I live in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and despite what the buggers who call themselve sour leaders are doing to it, one of the best. Our whole society is bombarded every day with messages insisting that we can't be content, let alone happy, unless we have stuff or do stuff or think stuff (usually relating to getting stuff). It can be downright amazing when you realise how much of that message is bullcrap.

A little extra warmth when it's cold, a little extra coolness when it's hot. Clothes that fit reasonably well and don't itch or invite people to attack you. Food that won't make you sick, that doesn't taste bad and maybe turns out to be something you like. Water for drinking - clean water - and extra for washing. A safe place to live, a safe place to be. Other people to associate with, without being hounded or mocked or threatened. Work to do that has meaning beyond 'something that keeps me busy'; time where the obligation of work isn't hanging over one's head, when you're free from other obligations, too. Freedom from non-vital obligations, actually.

That much for being content, I think. That's the minimum. I'm debating whether love falls under content as well, or is the first thing on the list of things required for happiness. Probably contentment, if we're talking love in a general community-type sense (forgive me, I don't remember C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves very well, so I don't know the proper term), but more personal love would fall into the happiness category... Bear in mind that I'm thinking of absolute minima here. There are people in this world who can be quite content without the company of others for long stretches of time. I doubt I'm one of them, although I enjoy solitude a great deal. I need people, although not always on the same terms as they want to deal with me (case in point: this post has been interrupted by five or six phone calls so far), and I need to feel that I am loved and to love other people (again, not always on the same terms other people think of - definitions vary so wildly that the whole thing's a minefield).

I don't know, really. I'm just thinking about this, and about how much crap I have and how much crap so many people think is important, and wondering why I let myself get all het up about this kind of stuff when so little of it is really all that important or even all that necessary. Granted, fifteen minutes from now I'll probably be frothing about how expensive something is or drooling over something I want, but I hope to steer myself back to this kind of thing and try to regain a little sanity from it.

If I hadn't

been seeing this go on for the past four Octobers, I'd be worried about the local level of general omenry - it's swarming season for the local starlings.

No, seriously, the little imported menaces* get together in huge flocks that don't seem to be bothering to migrate for about two or three weeks this time of year, every year. They're most common at sunset or close to it; when I drive home around 4:40, 4:45 PM in the evenings, there's usually a week or two when the starlings suddenly stream out over Highway 46 en masse, looking like an extraordinarily diffuse serpentine dragon. I don't think they properly flock together until close to nightfall, but during the day a lot of them gang up on the lawn outside my office window, and a bunch of them just dropped out of the nearest large tree and landed on said lawn in what looked like a feather waterfall.

This means crow season can't be far behind. There's a stretch of year in the late part of October and parts of November - maybe even later - when, at around 5 PM EST, the crows pass overhead in threes and fours. They're usually flying east, and there's an enormous number of them, but they fly very high up and they're not flocking. There's just a few birds every minute or so, almost too high up to see, cruising along for... who knows what. I think it's the local murder - there's a couple of VERY big murders of crows that make their residences in this area, including one that's the absolute despair of local car dealers because guess where their flight path takes them?

On a slightly more unusual note, there are still blossoms on two of the plum trees. Including one that hadn't bloomed before I went to Canada. Tres odd.

*Fifty strokes of the heavy bamboo to the moron who wanted to bring every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the United States, for we would not have the foul-tempered, swarming invaders known as starlings without their idiotic ecological intervention.