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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Wednesday, January 29 2003

The other day I finished Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and it's left me feeling like there's no more use for writing in the world. More so even than Cat's Cradle, that book has it all. A much more impressive religion than Christianity could be founded on its wisdom. Vonnegut is even better than Orwell at using straightforward language to expose the unpleasant scaffolding supporting the façade we think of as our world. It's wishful thinking I know, and the guy doesn't read anything except children's books, but still I have the feeling that if George OrWell Bush were to read and comprehend Breakfast of Champions, he'd be compelled to hurl himself into a volcano. Now I'm reading Time Quake, which has an even stronger autobiographical feel than the other novels.
This afternoon Gretchen and I took Sally for a walk on the property of our other next door neighbor, the one who didn't have the kids who sold us our house. They'd told Gretchen she was free to hike on their property any time she wanted to. Some distance down the driveway, we came upon a car stuck in a dusting of fresh snow. The car had Quebec license plates and Gretchen told me that it belonged to the mother of the couple who own the house. We came upon this woman some distance further down the driveway and helped push her car out of the snow. She then showed us a snowshoe trail we could take to get to an enchanted waterfall deep in the woods. It turned out that her son owns hundreds of acres that he as accumulated in a piecemeal fashion through the years. It's good to have such a large buffer on the other side of our property.
The waterfall was spectacular. It marked the place were a small creek plunged over the edge of the Dug Hill plateau into the Esopus valley. Unlike most waterfalls, this one was nearly silent. It was frozen solid and looked like a sculptural snapshot of a waterfall. One could hear muted gurgling beneath many layers of accumulated ice.
Sally was having a great time bounding through the snow and discovering parts of deceased animals. One such part was an articulated section of deer vertebræ.

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