Early spring, or staring at the decomposing corpse of last year

Ah, spring. It sucks, doesn't it? All through the long winter, snow-loving people like myself have had to suffer through the incessant whining of people who are just "dying for spring to arrive."

And then it does. Beautiful, isn't it? The snow melts to reveal a slimy, ragged carpet of rotted vegetation. Sprinkled about are the decomposing corpses of raccoons, mice, cats, and any other tragedy - great or small - that had lain hidden under the snow disappeared. The ground thaws in layers microns thick, turning every sojourn off the paved path into a mud-splattered slog through half-frozen slop. Tired at looking around at the mess winter has left of the world, you look up into trees that have yet to reacquire their leaves, or even any buds. Nothing comforting there; they all look like half-buried skeletons, twisted by disease or some unknown agony.

So, are you happy now? Spring is here and it stinks - literally. Musty, rotted and moldy as always.

Face it, you warm-weather worshipers; the "spring" you claim to love with such intensity is only a small part of the bargain. You conveniently forget the repulsive post-winter reality of spring in favor of the halcyon pre-summer illusion. Autumn,by contrast, is worthy of your fawning; it is a separate season with a unique an desirable flavor. Plus, you have the pristine solitude of winter to look forward to. Spring? By the time you can look around and enjoy the warmer weather, it's very nearly the official start of summer.

One good barometer of when that small sliver of livable spring appears is the arrival of the cherry blossoms. In Sapporo, Japan, a city with a climate almost identical to that of Chicago, Illinois, the peak of the cherry blossom bloom is the second week of May. That's right; May. The spring you pine for, the spring all the poets write about, the spring that is so representative of life, is only a few weeks ahead of the summer solstice.

So play it up all you want, spring worshipers, but know this: your "season" is only a short prelude to summer, barely discernable from it. I'll welcome summer with you but please, put away the fanfare for the arrival of "spring"; Some of us still have not had time to properly mourn the passing of winter and the end of the snow.


- V.

Inaugural Post

Even with decades of computer experience, writing a web log is something I have resisted. Sure, I've been known to haunt various forums and post my thoughts and opinions, but having a central location on the web where I keep those opinions never held much of an attraction for me.

So what changed?

There was no sudden epiphany, no seminal event that suddenly drove me to create a blog. This is simply another in a string of changes that have taken place along my long, slow climb out of the desert of the quantified, where the only reality was that of the tangible, and into the realm of the qualified, where the only limits were those of the imagination.

I discovered years ago that I had unwittingly sacrificed the creativity and free thinking that was such a part of who I had always been, all in the name of chasing an interest rather than a passion. This blog, among other initiatives and projects, is not simply meant to rectify that sad set of circumstances, but to serve as one of many sign posts and points of interests along the path I have now chosen to travel.

If you are interested in what that path will look like, and what I might see along the way, then you are more than welcome to stop back and see what there is to see.


- V.


ps

Some among you might be asking yourselves, "What the hell is a pharmakos?"

from Wikipedia:

• In Ancient Greek religion, a pharmokos was a kind of human scapegoat (a slave, a cripple or a criminal) who was chosen and expelled from the community at times of disaster (famine, invasion or plague) or at times of calendrical crisis, when purification was needed.

A pharmakos was nothing more than another kind of "folk devil, or a person or group of people who are portrayed in history and in popular culture as outsiders and deviants.They are typically the focus when mainstream society looks for someone to blame for crime and other kinds of social problems.

If you spend enough time on the fringes of culture and society, you begin to see value in the points of view you encounter from the outsiders and the deviants. In this blog, I hope present a point of view that encompasses observations that go beyond the obvious and the mainstream.