Frogs and Ravens

Design Tweaks

You know it's time to modify the design when your own blog fails to inspire.  Maybe this will encourage me to write more...

Newbie Fatigue

It is spring, and I am feeling short-tempered. 

I don't quite know what has changed, but it seems like my tolerance for clueless newbies - in a wide range of venues - has reached the top and it's only surface tension that's keeping my irritation from spilling over.

I used to be gratified that people perceived me as A Person Who Knows Things, and I do enjoy sharing my understanding of things that I am passionate about with people who are curious about them.

But there's being inexperienced and curious, and then there's being incredibly naive, lazy, and... I hate to say it, but some days I think there's no better way of describing it... stupid.

What has topped off my tolerance has been repeated encounters over the past couple of months with people who are not merely new, but who seem unwilling or incapable of doing any of the work of figuring out things on their own.

Goblin Valley

 

The familiar similes arise with the heat: like an oven, a furnace, a kiln.

They speak of making, of using heat to transform.  What is being made, what is being transformed, down there among the hoodoos, down among the goblins?

I do not know.  We are here, my family, so that my godmother can see the goblins for the first - and, it turns out, the last - time in her life.  This is saying something, as she and my godfather have been roaming the deserts since before I was a child.

From the viewpoint, the goblins seem tiny, like the sand castles one makes by dribbling wet sand from childish hands.  As one descends, the heat enswathes your body, a physical presence.  The goblins rise and tower overhead.  Visibility shrinks.

The goblins are made of reddish rock, the sand beneath our feet both the remains of former goblins and the scouring force that shapes them.  Very little grows here. 

Earlier we had released my godfather's ashes in a swirl in the Green River, grey-white calciferous cremains merging with the rust-brown waters.  We stood on rocks and wept.

My brother disappears among the goblins, invisible even after we return to the overlook.  In his indefatigable wanderings, he discovered a hidden canyon, filled with the hunkered forms of goblins.  We sit on the picnic tables in water-soaked bandanas, drinking, and wait.

.

Only a few months later, my godmother too was dead.  Neither of them was as old as they should have been.