Another Ruckus

A pack of dogs had treed a coon on the compost pile. I usually wouldn't interfere but I hate that fucking yapping, and after thirty minutes or so I finally flip on the back porch light and step into the fray. A bunch of red eyes. Bonny Raitt on the radio, doing something South African, "Help Me Lord", and I threw a rock, a major league fastball, that made contact with something and the animals all disperse, except for a beagle-lab cross that I seem to have killed with a stone to the head, I should feel worse than I do, but the mother-fuckers were disturbing my sleep. There's a cleared area, down in the State Forest, where I can open up the carcass, tomorrow, on my way in to work at the pub, a few minutes work, and all trace will be gone within a couple of days. A Tibetan sky-burial. I agreed to re-upholster the bench seats at the pub in exchange for a couple of free lunches. It's a fair trade, I don't need money, and I eat lunch there every day during the work week, a day's work for a week's free lunch seems about right. The Tibetan sky-burial is a product of necessity. At ten thousand feet, mid-winter, the ground is very hard, and a dead body is merely an empty vessel, food for birds, dear Percy. Mac should get that, "food for worms...", Prince Hal, soon to be Henry the Fifth, standing over Hotspur's body. Atoms to atoms. 1600, Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, and he had discovered this internal dynamic; he'd played around the edges before (in Antony and Cleopatra especially), but this was the real deal; his son and father had died, and he couldn't deny certain things. The finality of life. What is germane to the argument. A squall line moving through, I'd better go.