Just witnessed a battle between caution and curiosity in my mind. Caution won. It enlisted a louder and more creative slice of my imagination. So I'm walking past a cemetery, rather than "one of Austin's only open-air drug markets."

Whenever people wonder out loud what other people are thinking or, especially, when they wonder what their dogs or cats are thinking, I think about worms. I wonder what they're thinking, what that thinking is like, how it is to be a worm.

Recently, thanks to The Secret Life of Plants, I've started wondering what the little strawberry sprout in the living room is thinking, how it experiences the world.

Only somewhat coincidentally, a few days ago, I read my first few pages of Terence McKenna, these sentences included:

Not sure that really answers much of my question about the strawberry. Sure does make me think about worms again, though.

I just posted a quote on my other blog.

It's really only a piece of a quote.

Here's the other piece, which also does a pretty good job pretending to be a full quote:

I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative works, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

I guess it's time to start writing fiction.

When competition for females is fierce, males of some species have evolved bigger testes to trounce their rivals, a new study has confirmed.

I read that a few days ago on National Geographic's Daily News site.

I imagine scarred, tattooed, smiling mice, standing on their hind legs, smoking cigarettes, and swinging their scrotums like maces and chains.

This is a mud crab:

This is what a mud crab does to a finger when he can just barely reach it with his claw:

And this is one way in which mud crabs have contributed to Australian literature:

When I first heard that, I loved it. I've spent a some time with mud crabs. I've had a little bit of interaction with the indigenous people of northeastern Australia. And I can see the boat and the river and the crab swimming away.

So I found out who was talking and looked him up.

He's a white man, performing in black face.

And that's tough to handle. I keep playing the track. I keep listening closely. But I can't smile as much. I miss my imagination's innocence, the picture of an aboriginal comedian performing for a mixed audience.

(The photos above are Lauren's. The finger above is also Lauren's.)

Max: [pauses, tastes, thinks, swallows] Hmmm. Not bad.
Danny: Max, don't pretend you know anything about beer.
Jon: There's a pretty awesome documentary called Beer Wars...
Zeeko: WHALE WARS!?!?!?

Apparently Whale Wars is a real thing. Which is very cool for whales. But which makes that moment of misunderstanding less awesome than if Zeeko's ears and imagination had transformed the words Beer Wars into a world combo / concept he'd never before that moment considered.

Overhearing the conversation (and never having heard of Whale Wars), I assumed the full awesomeness, smiled big, and quickly typed the dialogue into my phone.

And I post it anyway, even given my overassumption and overjournalistic reaction, because, if nothing else, it demonstrates the speed and unpredictability with which conversations turn.

Why are there so many gypsies in rock and roll?

Or is this just my imagination?

Of course, the only example my faulty memory can offer at the moment is Melissa by The Allman Brothers Band, and all my Eat a Peach tracks are scratchy and unpostworthy.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that the internets need a catalog of all beautiful and brilliant and otherwise influential gypsy lyrics.

Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.

Be pretty fun to say that to a bunch of students one day.  And even more fun to have them show up years later with stories to tell.

And I also love the implication that every student can escape the limitations of her teacher's imagination.  I think it's truth.  And good news.  And something to remember not to forget.

Thank you Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the Religion Department at Columbia University, for writing this article and including that quote.

Totally crazy to go to a concert alone?

Or totally awesome?

Never even imagined it until tonight.

I had imagined going to an imaginary local bar down the street from my imaginary apartment in an imaginary city on the imaginary night on which the imaginary neighborhood DJ plays music I love and dancing like an imaginary lunatic.

But concerts are significantly different from mixed music for me.  Impossible for me to dance completely alone at a concert.  I'm always dancing with the band.  Whether they know it or not.  Which they almost definitely don't.  Unless they're the kind of band that's always dancing with all the serious dancers in the crowd.  Whether they can identify us or not.  Which is the kind of band to be.

Anyway, Mason Jennings is playing tomorrow night at my favorite venue ever.  And I'm tempted.

Butterfly is track 2 on Mason Jennings.

I'm reading Philip Pullman, loving it, thinking about it in relation to (comparison with) the JRR Tolkien Middle Earth Project, and wondering about value.

I think Tolkien's work is immensely impressive in its imaginative scale and as a demonstration of accessible but ambitious storytelling, and I think it's educationally valuable in that it turns people into readers, writers, and explorers of the originally weird thoughts we all have.  In my opinion, however, Tolkien's orcs are a very big worry.  I think it's fundamentally unethical to tell war stories in which the bad guys don't have families.

So.

How do we teach Tolkien?  (If we teach Tolkien.  Which I'm pretty sure we do and I'm pretty sure we should.  Because of the imagination, the fact that his work can be a gateway to literature and learning and love of stories, words, and communication.)

Maybe we teach the man with the work? Explain his personal weirdness and how it contributed to his (in my opinion problematically simplified) vision of good and evil and the virtue in violence? 

Worth some thought I think.

And then there's Pullman.  I'm halfway through the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, so far, I love it.  So far, it feels questioning and complicated and real. 

So.

So far, I say teach it.  For imagination.  For storytelling.  And for truth.

Yikes.  Bold statement from someone that still has 500 pages to read.