While going on a walk today along the flood control levee behind my humble abode, I came across a curious thing.

There is a graveled roadway that runs across the top of the levee. It is closed to traffic by means of large padlocked gates, and the only vehicles that ever run down it are the tractors that mow the sides of the dam every few weeks in the summer, much less frequently other times of the year.

Right in the middle of the roadway was a small dark brown field mouse, extremely dead. I stopped to look at him/her/it, wondering how it may have ceased to be amongst the quick.

My first thought was that he may have gotten run over, but he was not smushed. In fact, there was no mark on him at all. Were it not for the ants that were beginning to crawl on him, you might have thought he was just curled up asleep.

Why is this curious, you might ask? Well, from what I've read on the subject, the odds of a small rodent dying a natural death, and by this I mean from non-violent means, as getting gobbled up by a hawk or a snake is a very natural way for a mouse to meet his little mouse Maker, are very slim indeed.

The other likely answer would be from some sort of disease, but he seemed to be in peak health; his fur was glossy, he was plump. Wouldn't a animal feeling poorly instinctively crawl into a dark corner somewhere to die in peace? Yet here he was right out in the open, as if he'd just keeled over from a stroke while traipsing about on his daily rounds.

Well, little guy, it seems your death will remain forever one of those many things that mankind will never know the truth of.

Once more I am reminded of how lucky I am to be alive, what an unlikely intersection of fortunate coincidences have led to my, yours, and the planet's life, and how short a time we have to enjoy it.

Along with that is the less happy realization that a few thousand years from now, my existence will have been of as minor import as that tiny mouse's.

Carpe Diem, my friends...

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"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

"Happy Thoughts," from "A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods" by Robert Louis Stevenson

I recall reading that couplet as a child, and it has stuck with me through all these years, although I didn't know until just now, after I googled for the closing phrase, who or where it came from.

It's been one of the major themes of my life, the feeling of drowning in information, things to be learned, places to see, people to know, skills to be mastered and then abandoned to make time and room for new ones. Life is just too damn short for all that I'd like to do...

I get tugged and pulled every day over how to spend my time. Stacks of books call to me like sirens, and the net offers hours of new info every day. Just trying to keep up with science and technology, and enough of current affairs to be able to discuss them without seeming a clueless moron could fill a day.

It is the curse of being a generalist, a man of wide interests.

All over the world, bright, interesting, creative folks are putting their thoughts, music, art, discoveries and insights up for public consumption, and I want to know them all.

The agony of decision, the paralysis of analysis, the knowledge that every door I open irrevocably closes hundreds more, for lack of "world enough and time," if nothing else, makes me resent just about every thing in my life that pulls me away from this pursuit of knowing, to include eating, sleep, and the few hours a day I'm now spending trying to turn back the body clock.

I feel an equally agonizing pull to do something with all this stuff in my head, to synthesize the answers to all the Great Questions, to preach, to teach, to organize it all into some Great Final Truth worthy of all the time spent in this impossible pursuit of Life, the Universe, and Everything. :-) (42?)

However, it's near impossible, for me anyway, to decide when the process of education should take lesser precedence to the process of relation, re-formation, or less daintily, regurgitation. :-)

Every book or article I read, every artwork I see, every song I hear, makes me smarter, richer, more well-rounded, and, ultimately, a better writer/teacher/preacher. But to just read all day makes me no more than a net consumer (pun intended) of information, with no real contribution to the global dialogue.

I've lists of story ideas, essays, rants, whatever, sitting on the shelf, while the perfectionist me thinks, well, I need to finish this book or that before I get started, the story will be better. At some point, I have to just quit getting ready to get ready, and start typing.

As if that were not enough, I need only come back to a story I've written a few weeks later, and be faced with near irresistible urge to tweak it somehow, add to it, strike a phrase that now looks awkward, add something pertinent that I only just discovered, whatever.

Add to the mix the tendency I have to spend much time and mental effort with twistifying the actual presentation of the writing as manifested in the HTML code, and it's a stone-cold wonder I've gotten anything done.

No author ever got anywhere this way. So it seems I will have to write things with which I will forever be dissatisfied.

So, you, Dear Reader, stand well warned. Don't you ever think that just because you've read something of mine, that you actually have read the Real Deal, the Release Version, my Final Answer.

It has been ordained by the Powers That Be that anything I write, like my life, is doomed to be forever in Beta.

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...is my Dalmatian. I haven't finished her entry yet...

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