Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Dude, you haven’t taken a walk in the park lately.

Behold the Twitterati. That cohort of iPoded, everywhere cellphoned screen-starers, thumbs wearing away in repetitive stress, in a frenzy of hoped-for connection. Instead, they are offered more technological toys (iPad! The maxi to the MEphone’s mini), the inevitable endless dissatisfactions of consumption (this used to be a ghastly wasting disease, and frankly, it still is), necessitating always wanting more. Does “friend” even mean anything anymore? But I digress, Savonarola that I am. Will I ever forget that day when the Divine Lawlor, in response to a question at yet another Agency.com pep rally back in the dot-bomb days about the purpose of it all, said “O, I thought it was to stop and smell the roses” after somebody suggested that the purpose of it all was to maximize the stickiness of eyeballs to the interface, hollowed be its name. It’s February, the roses come mostly from hell (toxically-saturated distant factory farms where the workers are ground-up for some obscure Catholic saint’s day turned yet another consumptive’s ball), but the nuthatches are making noise in the park. The woodpeckers, on a good day you might see five species of them, are tapping away. Starlings and robins flock and cackle. Was that twenty cardinals? And all those ducks! Mallard, shoveller, ruddy, the escapees, plus swans, coots, geeese. Have you seen the drake wood duck at the Boat House? It looks like a painting by a 18th century Chinese artist-scholar.

The squirrels are looking at you, wondering if they can get away with beaning an acorn at your head. Get out there and get beaned.