We do the dance upon the plain...

Today we proudly (a little too proudly) present the sequel to last month's Sizzling Cicada Spectacle: THE BODACIOUS BUMBLEEBEE BONANZA.

So I was out in the meadow beneath the power lines today and caught a couple of bumblebees in the act. I'm no entomologist, but I know the bigger one is definitely a female (a future queen), while the smaller is definitely a male (who just buzzes off and dies now). And I'm learning that insects, despite their speedy busybody bustling around, seem to be really slow when it comes to mating (as it were). I had to wait a few minutes before the wind died down enough for a clear and unobstructed shot, and the bees hardly budged in the meantime.

But after the second or third snap (hey, when will I ever get a chance to take another picture like this?), the female exercised her queenly instinct and ducked away from the paparazzo's lens. When she took off, however, she carried the male with her, dangling from her thorax. They landed a few feet away and resumed their royal reproductive duties like nothing had happened. (Is resumed the right word? As far as I could tell, they were never interrupted.)

From a mammalian perspective, it seems peculiar and comical, but it makes perfect sense! When you're a small, squishable, easily-stirred creature who requires several minutes to give and receive gametes, you'll have a better chance of success if, when necessary, you're able to relocate to a safer position without putting the transaction on hold. Critters like us, enabled by our superior powers of perception and cognition to recognize a secure place and time from the onset, had less reason to develop coitus on the go capabilities over the course of our species' evolution. But can you imagine if we shared this ability with our fuzzy and buzzy brothers and sisters?!

...Hmmm.

No, I won't type what I'm thinking, but it might involve my lady friend and a game of miniature golf.

"Now take me to the next hole, my dear! Hahahaha!"

:THUD:

"Wait! Come back! You have my scorecard!"

Another milemarker.

I turn thirty today. Thirty is the most unnervingly introspective birthday I've had yet.

Sure, sure -- age is just a number, but digits are as prone to Sapir-Whorf as any agglutination of letters. Once the two in the tens column tumbles into a three, it's never coming back. After ten years of calling yourself a twenty-something, you're suddenly not anymore; and when one of the attributes by which your identity is defined changes, your identity can't help but change with it. It's hard not to look at this as the crossing of a threshold.

No speeches today. No resolutions, no admissions of regret, no hopeful prognostications. Instead, a poem by Kenneth Koch:


To My Twenties
Kenneth Koch (1925 - 2002)


How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman——
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another——and water!
I’m still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X——  N——, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

And the Beyond Easy Award for excellence in advertising goes to:

Early Autumn Abeyance

My contract at the Quaker center is up. As of last Friday I am unemployed and I'm kind of delighted. There's time now! I can finalize novel #2 and get to work on novel #3! I can finish those three or four short stories I have in the freezer! Maybe I'll do more Sisyphus comics! Perhaps I'll even get around to that MOTHER 3 writeup!

The situation isn't without its drawbacks, though. Sacrifices will have to be made. Tobacco, for instance. The longer I go without buying cigarettes, the longer the money pile will last, and the longer I can go without having to get another job. The prospect of attacking such a big stack of writing projects without the aid of nicotine isn't just daunting; it's really rather terrifying. But it must be so.

oh god i give myself another two hours before cracking

There's another thing I'd like to try abstaining from. Some years ago I called myself an information addict, and said it with some measure of pride. Now it's less of a boast than an admission of a problem. I'm rather compulsive in my Internet use: sitting down, punching in a URL without thinking, and then reloading the page every fifteen minutes in case of an update has become something I just do, even though I hardly get any pleasure out of it at this point.

So! I just installed a Firefox add-on that lets me block websites. You see where this is going, yes? I'm cutting myself off from my usual cyberspace haunts for a month. I'm not entirely severing myself from cyberspace -- just from the places I visit most frequently, and probably most unnecessarily.

Blogger.com will be one of sites I restrict myself from visiting. Needless to say, it won't be updated until early October at the earliest. (If I happen to draw any comics between now and then, they'll appear on the comics page.) I'll still be checking my email because I can't totally disappear, so drop me a line at beechleavesold at gmail if you'd like to say hi.

Now. There is much to do.

In Praise of the Traffic Report

And now here's Arnie Pye with "Arnie in the Sky!"

 
I frequently listen to National Public Radio (man, ten years ago I never imagined I'd be saying that), and was recently struck by the polar contrast in tones between the reporting of world/national/local headlines and the rush hour traffic updates.

A bomb went off in Baghdad today, a soft, yet firm voice will announce. You'll be told the time at which it occurred; perhaps a vivid term such as "bustling market" will be employed to set the scene. You'll be informed of how many were killed in the blast, how many merely maimed. The local correspondent might make mention of broken glass, rubble, and panic, and you'll hear recorded audio of anguished families' screams. A translator will relay an eyewitness's account of the big BOOM, the screams and panic, the human misery and bafflement at the swiftness with which an unbelievable horror has consumed his or her life.

Nothing is ever mentioned regarding how this development might be affecting the late afternoon commute.

And next comes the traffic report. An voice that's almost invariable male -- tinged with a peppiness suggesting optimism in the face of adversity -- will mention that a vehicle fire shut down 476 W for most of the afternoon, but don't worry; they've got most of it cleared away and traffic is picking up.

No mention of the accident's cause. Nothing about how many people were injured or killed. Nothing about the grief of friends and loved ones. Nothing about the guilt of the survivor in the driver's seat, or the tragedy of the victim's inability to pay off the hospital bills once they've put his head back together. Only the most relevant facts of the immediate occasion -- only the information which matters most to the majority of listeners at that very instant is relayed. "There was an event, but not so significant that you'll have to take another route home."

Lately I've been experiencing a degree of information overload, which might explain why the traffic reports are suddenly so refreshing to me. Maybe we'd be better off if all current events were reported with the same integrity as the traffic updates.

"A military strike against Syria now seems inevitable, but Breaking Bad will be airing as scheduled."

Milemarker Quandary

Conall McCabe, Second Quandary

This blog's three-year anniversary is coming up. Cool. That's a fine time to admit to a crisis of purpose.

I originally started Beyond Easy because I'd been writing about virtually nothing about video games for however many years and I wanted to write about something -- ANYTHING -- else. (This change of attitude was most likely spurred by the accumulated fallout of the Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIII experiences.) At the time, writing miniature essays about whatever I happened to be interested in during a given week was positively liberating. But the price of freedom is the danger of aimlessness, and I fear this blog is becoming less interesting because of its lack of focus. I'll admit that it often feels like an obligation -- a prompt like WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING, ANYTHING doesn't exactly put the lead in my pencil.

So where can I go from here?

Specialization? Question: on what subjects can I claim myself an authority, or claim to offer a unique and relevant perspective?

Oh, god. That's a line of self-examination that will lead me to the fabled quarter-life crisis. I'm not sure "blogger as columnist" is an act I can pull off.

Current events? I am increasingly fatigued by the Twitter/Tumblr engine of outraged punditry. Besides: other people already have it covered, and they do it better and enjoy it more than me.

Vanity pieces? In other words, move toward treating Beyond Easy more like a journal (of the "Live" variety) than a topical blog. Sadly, this is what I think I've been closest to lately. I'm still not at the point where I'm posting elaborated Facebook updates about what I did over the weekend and what products I'm consuming, but I fear we're still on the arbitrary chatter side of "freeform." This probably isn't a direction to go any further in.

Mothballs? All things being equal, the kind of writing I enjoy most lately is fiction. Lately I'm wondering if it mightn't make me happier to focus exclusively on that, regardless of where it appears or who might end up reading it. I'd certainly perform more efficiently on this front if I didn't have to pull myself away once a week or so to jury rig a blog post. Putting Beyond Easy on hiatus is always an option.

But I'd also prefer not to work in a complete vacuum (which is more or less the experience of writing fiction unless you're dealt an excellent hand) if it can be avoided. At the very least, maintaining a blog keeps a communication channel open. 

Comics? There's a thought. Stick to writing fiction. Instead of blogging, take breaks from prose by drawing comic strips. There's more Sisyphus strips I'd like to do. I have ideas for another 8EB mini-arc, and cubeblockhead comics are always fun to draw. Unlike blogging, drawing comics tends not to tap into the same well as writing fiction, and it would give me something I can easily share with friends and my adoring public. (Pause for prolonged drag on cigarette followed by barely audible sigh.)

So I'm open to suggestion. And I hope you'll help me out.

If you're reading this, I'm curious to know: what am I doing (or what have I done in the past) that works? If you read this thing from time to time, what kinds of posts do you enjoy reading? Which ones do you skim and skip over? Would it be better if I updated more often with shorter pieces, or irregularly posted longer pieces? Should I just chuck it all and do more comics? Should I just say nuts to all this and go off-radar altogether for a while?

Why don't we do it in the road?

"No one will be watching us."

It was always one of my least favorite Beatles songs. Henceforth I will associate it with the August afternoon when I watched two cicadas mating in the driveway for like fifteen minutes, and I will smile.