ONIONS KNOW ALL ABOUT IT

What with all this global freezing going on, here we are in mid-April building a fire in the woodstove to keep from shivering even with a sweater on, I bet this is what happened to the dinosaurs or maybe it swung the other way and got hot; on the other hand there might have been a meteor or it could even have been some kind of major dinosaur flu; whatever happened, the dinosaurs didn't have a chance, except the ones who could fly...

Onions are survivors too; they know all about this stuff. Even though rooted, they adapt on the fly. Which is why all my onions are now prematurely (from my point of view) sending up flower stalks, because they have been paying attention to the weather patterns a la their how many eons of experience and they're no fools, so our diet will be heavy on premature onions for the next few weeks, apart from the monkeys' cut.

As for us neodinosaurs - enraptured with sapience as we are - the upper ones talk a lot about global warming, bird flu and terrorism to keep the lower ones distracted, but the true problem with our modern interregnum is lack of Reality. Not the Action! Cut! reality as portrayed by the upper ones on Faux News or "reality" tv, or by the gladiators of today, action-packed movies and cage fighting - which make the everyday boring in the same way fast food makes true nutrition boring - but capital-R Reality, of the kind that love is and children are, that trees are, that play is. Birth and Life, Joy and Sorrow, Self and Death, that kind of thing. The actual stuff.

It takes a kind of unlearning, an undesiring, to get back to where we were when we first got here, to where we can once more look around and see what is truly there and what life time is, regain the mental status that flies in the face of everything disney, vegas, mcdonalds, survivor et al. stand for, in their respective variations on the Glitzy Premise: that we must suspend common sense in order to find joy and be nourished, that we must step aside and stop looking, stop being like little children, stop noticing the rips in the fabric, the man behind the curtain, instead have a big glass of coke and some fries, buy a ticket, make our bet, settle back on the couch to watch Transformer 42 so that when it's over we'll need more of the same, so that never having won, we'll have nothing to lose by the time whatever's coming comes, so who cares...

Next autumn I'm planting seeds, not sets. If onions can learn that much, so can I.