to ladysmith black mambazo

night before last i caught the end of this heralded series with this heralded sir SIR david attenborough or is he a lord by now? for its imperturbable or genial narrator. insects in depth, in color, acting a fool, by way of the hottest & coolest in new technology and lenses, so they looked the size of our everyday dogs and baboons. two summers ago when the cicadas buried winchester and missed us in charlottesville, he'd meanwhile touched down for a hot second somewhere in the northeast (maple bark and sugar leaves told me so) and filmed it there too, and we saw him perturbed only then, when the male cicada he was tantalizing with the female cicada sound- close enough to the snapping of fingers for his pet to follow it- cut the shit, made haste to desire his filleted head and cuddled his ear. pfoo! oh! i never! i had myself, after his o-british example, cooing for the rest of the night like teacozy dalloway in st. james' street. when the cicadas encountered winchester two summers ago i had wished they'd come here, too. i can remember the last time they ALL CAME OUT AT ONCE, when i was three, in certain friendly shades of sunlight that lit up all the cicadas and me zipping by one another, hot on our loopy way to nowhere,

also there was a Feature on insect supercities, afterwards, pursuant to a glass of wine and one of champagne, i walked home and fell into bed in contacts and unwashed- the last few weeks have me taking adult pride in going unwashed for a day or two- and promptly found myself in a dream, of which i remember very little except a hard-driving sense of function trumps all: so maybe i was a robot, maybe an ant. a shadow of antennae asking another pair remains to tell me it was the latter. certainly i remember no chrome and no silicone. i did wake up the morning tired still: champagne, or speedy delivery? sir david puts forth a glance, or perhaps a pheromone- quite unintentionally, you know- such that the ladies have crushed the others to bruising under their pandemonium, and he's had quite regularly to knock the extras aside with the face of a shovel. he revealed that army ants choose their new camps not on a dossier through central intelligence, but through a matrix of chance (imagine!) and the decisions of thousands of individual ants. so maybe i was telling myself the story of My Big Day as an Ant, when my intrepid scuttling led the others into, instead of around, this comfy rotten hole.

there was just a wrong number. i sounded inexplicably confused (who no this is hedge fine blooms) and the vigor of that guy's apology accorded with it