BATHOS

About 11 o'clock this morning as I was clearing the old onion bed and prepping it for what I haven't yet decided (the possibilities in gardening are as many as those in youth, which can be at once nostalgic and unsettling, an interesting combo), some of those youth of Japan who are mute in the sociospiritual sense and depend upon incoherent loudness for public expression - hundreds of them in this instance - came motorcycling past on the road down by the Lake, flicking their accelerators to flatulate the fact of their presence.

This usually occurs at night in the city, to the delight of those heavily put-upon urbanites trying to sleep on the other side of thin walls a few feet away, but on nice sunny Sundays like this the mutes sometimes roar collectively out into the country, where they can eructate in the light of day.

As they did so en masse, moving on by in their superficial soundcloud, a startled frog in a nearby kinmokusei tree suddenly began chirping rapidly with irritation. I couldn't make out all that he was saying amidst that torrent of noise, but before he was drowned out he said something like: What the hell is that? Who are those amateurs? How come they're saying nothing so loudly?

Amazingly, he was voicing the very same thoughts that were even then burbling up from what must be the amphibian levels of my bathoconscious!

How unlike an exhaust pipe!