I was working at the computer this evening, past the cat’s feeding time. She was sitting right in front of my screen and following my cursor around, occasionally reaching up to bat at it. It occurred to me that she might enjoy watching something more exciting, so I went to YouTube and searched for “videos for cats.” I didn’t know there was such a thing, but of course there is. This example popped up, and I started playing it. She knows the squirrels aren’t real, but she’s not quite sure what to do with them. She does a little investigating toward the end.

She was back this afternoon.

Take a handful of semisolid hogfat. Mix in some of that banana granola that wasn’t very good. Stick it in the birdfeeder, and presto! Hours of fun for all concerned.

Also, I just got a phone call from my friend Ruth. She was at the gym this morning, watching CNN. They were showing footage from a Christian Broadcast Network report on the gay marriages happening in Iowa today. For a second, she saw me and my ex Amy Rubin on the screen, getting married on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco five years ago. The Christian Broadcast Network? What were they doing at my wedding? It reminded me of this panel from a cartoon I once did about lesbian-specific phobias.

Since the chipmunk incident, I have put a collar with three bells on the cat. So far this has stemmed the tide of wildlife that had been flowing into the house.

I went on a lovely hike with Hol out in the woods yesterday. I was thinking about the idea of watersheds because I just read a poem by Gary Snyder called Watershed. He supposedly signs his emails with it because it’s his “address.”

North of the South Yuba River
Near the headwaters of Blind Shady Creek

In the trees at the high end of a bunchgrass meadow.

(I learned about this in the book I just reviewed for the New York Times Book Review. I can’t tell you yet what book it was, but my piece will be in the 3/29 issue.)

I’ve always been rather fond of Gary Snyder, ever since reading Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, in which Snyder is fictionalized as the wild mountain man zen poet Japhy Ryder who takes Jack and Allen Ginsburg hiking in the Sierras in the fifties, before people really did stuff like that, and Japhy was so free and alive, he took off his clothes and bounded up a mountain wearing nothing but a jockstrap.

I kept all my clothes on yesterday, and I did not bound up Camel’s Hump. But I got this pretty picture of it with its snowy white bald eagle head catching the afternoon sun.

I’ve been working on my own watershed address. So far all I’ve got is,

Two miles uphill from the Winooski River
Next to a seasonal stream
That feeds Duck Brook.

I just googled “watershed address” trying to find Snyder’s poem, and I got this actual EPA website which will locate your watershed. So you can find your watershed address too.

Here’s a little movie I shot yesterday of some of the snowmelt beginning its trip down to the Winooski–which lies between me and Camel’s Hump.

Holly’s a Snyder fan too, (hey, her Compost Maven blog has moved and gotten fancier) and coincidentally alluded to his work and watersheds on her Facebook page recently.

She was showing these new t-shirts she had made for her “compost local” campaign, and our friend Cathy Resmer commented “Wait, where else would you compost?” Holly explained,

Good question! Well, for starters you could send it away from your backyard or your garden. One could consider that non-local, even if you’re sending it to the Intervale which is in your watershed. You could even put it in your (gasp!) trash bag and send it to the landfill in Coventry. Or worse (shudder!).

For me, this message is about raising awareness (and look! it’s already working!) about the importance of composting as a local issue. Composting matters because it ties together all kinds of important natural cycles and connections between people and planet and brain synapses. Compost local is about putting myself in an ecosystem. It pinpoints me somewhere on the earth with a precise watershed address where I eat food that is grown in living topsoil underfoot that needs organic matter derived in part from my own table scraps.

I have pledged my allegiance to the soil and this is my clarion call, my love letter to dirt!

So there you go. Dirt, and water, which is perfect because it’s Mud Season here right now.

Plus Here Are Some Other Items:

•I just opened the latest New Yorker to find a piece by Ariel Levy on the Van Dykes, a roving band of separatists in the seventies. Why are august and hidebound publications suddenly having this spasm of nostalgia for lesbian separatism? I haven’t had a chance to read the story yet, but at first glance it looks good.

•Another LGBT bookstore bites the dust. Not just Oscar Wilde, but now A Different Light in West Hollywood is closing.

•Hot Librarian Action: Ann Seidl’s wonderful documentary The Hollywood Librarian is now out on DVD. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s your chance.

•Also, Ann’s sister Amy, who lives just across the river from me, has a book out, Early Spring.

In Early Spring, ecologist and mother Amy Seidl examines climate change at a personal level through her own family’s walks in the woods, work in their garden, and observations of local wildlife in the quintessential America of small-town New England, deep in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

•Attention Octavia Butler fans: Beacon Press wants to publish a graphic adaptation of Butler’s novel “Kindred.” They’re currently “inviting proposals from cartoonists who appreciate Octavia Butler’s legacy, and reflect her commitment to social justice in their own work. Those interested in
discussing a proposal should email the editor of the Graphic Books list, Allison Trzop, at atrzop@beacon.org.” The deadline is March 16!

This morning, in the biography of William James that I’ve been making my way through at the pace of about two paragraphs a day for the past year, he described the New England autumnof 1908 as “heartbreaking in its sentimentality.” And indeed, even one hundred years of disastrous human history and climate change later, the foliage is so spectacular, it’s almost maudlin. Here’s the moose yesterday, carrying Mt. Abe on her shoulders.
And here’s a movie I made this afternoon while I was yanking up roots from the garden and flocks of wild geese honked by overhead.
Check out my pal Phranc’s daily variety show on YouTube. If Mister Rogers and Peewee Herman gave birth to a l’il bulldagger, this is what she’d be like.

This morning, in the biography of William James that I’ve been making my way through at the pace of about two paragraphs a day for the past year, he described the New England autumnof 1908 as “heartbreaking in its sentimentality.” And indeed, even one hundred years of disastrous human history and climate change later, the foliage is so spectacular, it’s almost maudlin. Here’s the moose yesterday, carrying Mt. Abe on her shoulders.

And here’s a movie I made this afternoon while I was yanking up roots from the garden and flocks of wild geese honked by overhead.

Check out my pal Phranc’s daily variety show on YouTube. If Mister Rogers and Peewee Herman gave birth to a l’il bulldagger, this is what she’d be like.

As I drove home from the moose’s house in town this morning, there was a story on the radio about bobolinks. Their diet in South America, where they spend 8 months of the year, has changed as the wild grasses of the Pampas are farmed under to grow rice and sorghum. Rice isn’t as nutritious for the birds, and it’s making their 6,000 mile migration a little more dicey than usual.

The moose and I have begun complaining about how arduous it is to spend time in two places–driving back and forth, schlepping work and clean underwear and groceries–but compared to the lives of migratory birds I guess it’s not so bad.

When I got home to the woods and stepped out of my car, I was greeted by hermit thrushes. I’ve been anticipating them for days, and now they’re here. They don’t come from as far away as the Pampas–some of them only go as far south as Arizona–but still, it’s a haul. And here they are, with their clean underwear and groceries, all ready to get to work.

I’m posting this video of their song on Flickr instead of YouTube, for a change. (Please excuse the alarming state of my hair.) There’s a chance this is a wood thrush and not a hermit thrush. I don’t know why I can’t tell them apart. I have a good visual memory but a shoddy auditory one. In fact I often forget what people are talking about halfway through a conversation, and have to draw a diagram.

Can you identify the birdsong?

P.S. I often wonder if it’s a bad idea to mention aspects of my personal life online, like in this case the moose commuting situation. There are all kinds of problems with it. It’s exhibitionistic; it reveals information about another person’s life which they may agree to in the moment but regret later; it seems harmless enough when things are going well, but if we break up or something bad happens, that would be public too, if only by the sudden obvious omission. After making this post this morning, I went to check the news, and there’s a big story on just this topic in the NY Times. It’s about a million pages long, and I’ve only read the first one. I’ll go finish it now.