O, Beauteous Gladsome Season!

First, here is a portrait of me from this weekend:

It is artwork committed by one who loves me, so I will refrain from critiquing it. Admittedly, it possesses a resemblance to my inner self, my homonunculus, who was not born into captivity and ignorance as I was. He is wild, canny and has fierce orange teeth. I am working to cultivate these virtues into my corporeal self, except the teeth. I like my real teeth, made of hard white tooth stuff --a scientific dental term-- and not carrots, which are no good for gnashing, rending or any fierce articulation of wild canniness.

Only once do I recall looking in a mirror and seeing an approximation of  Veggieface. It was many years ago, when I was a child in college, after an evening forum that covered all known but unknowable subjects and made everybody fall down. My roommates and guests had overtaxed their brains and underestimated the refreshments. Chief offender was a local red wine, available at the time at 75 cents per gallon to connoisseur oenophiles of all ages, which turned out --upon later suspicion and consensus-- to be a coal-tar derivative. I survived that intellectual insurrection firmly resolved never to resemble bunny food again.

This brings us to our next picture:

It shows the southwest field purpled in redstem filaree. Cottontails and jackrabbits often bounce and kaboingulate through it. These are normal, natural, free bunnies --not born into captivity but not bothered by homonunculism either-- who are unencumbered by psychology and metaphysics. Although joyously brainless, they do announce the advent of Springtime, not like the Easter Bunny --who doesn't resemble his Biblical description at all-- but just by being their bunny selves. Although they are phenomenally athletic and quick, I don't know that they set much of an example to young people, human or not, or help them pick careers --except maybe, those who aspire to become flyherders.

Flyherders must be nimble enough to drive flies to market where they are purchased for turtle feed. This is the job all those little soccer players in elementary and preschool are being trained for. They view the world, even into adulthood, as a big gym class or field of filaree. They are quick like bunnies, perhaps quicker. But nature has its stabilizers. More and more flies are developing canniness, pretending to be bees, hovering and landing on blossoms, communing with their irreducibly dinky houseflynunculi and escaping the turtle food abattoirs. There's one now: