WOOLLY BOOLLY

colors


Odd autumn. Half way through October and still have not had a night below freezing. All the trees are changing colors and shedding their leaves. The ground and gravel roads are covered in leaves now. The mountain ridges have the patchwork quilt suggestion of this time of year. Yet, up close the trees look ragged. The white oak across the road that is always the last one to turn has lost most of its upper leaves while the lower leaves are still green with branches full of brown parchment leaves dried and curled, still attached. Look up into a tree of yellow leaves and they're all drying up, a short time yellow then brown parchment leaves curled up, not falling, but staying in place. Leaves with color have their outer edges burned it looks like. They've just dried from the outside inward. It seems like nearly all the leaves have those brown edges of drying from the outside.




It's an unhealthy seeming autumn to me. Leaves don't turn until after a freeze. There has been no freeze. They turned colors from drought. I've never seen this. I stopped in the Chamber of Commerce today to see Pat and Bob. Pat was saying she's been seeing only all black woolly worms. I said I had too. And last year there were a lot of black ones, more than I'd ever seen before. The year before, the occasional black one. We laughed at how we both try to avoid woolly worms crossing the road and hate it when we nail one.




It seems to me notable that the woolly worm has this traditional forecasting quality, but nobody seems to know why or how it's interpreted. I'm guessing that over a couple hundred year period in these mountains without electricity the people saw a tremendous degree of weather changes, and maybe the woolly worm's color changing has to do with changes in all of them. This year there's no question about all the black woolly worms. I still see a little bit of the orange frost on them, and next year they'll probably be opaque black. It is a definite progression toward black, it appears, in all the woolly worms at least of our region. It makes me wonder what somebody who doesn't know what an eclipse is thinks when it happens. The Rider Haggard novel SHE is a story around spooking people who know nothing about it by predicting it using an ephemeris.




Pat said she'd heard a weather forecast saying we may have a steadily cold winter. Sounds like last winter, maybe moreso. The only thing I can say for sure is that no two winters I've seen here have been near alike. Each season from year to year is uniquely itself. Last winter was uniquely itself in an alarming way. Winters always came in waves before. Last winter was one long wave. The winter before it almost was. Going by the progression I've seen toward dryer and less cold all in one wave. The woolly worm was representative of the waves in the winter, a cold spell, then a warm spell, then a cold spell again. Now it's one long cold spell. It gets curiouser and curiouser.




I can't help but think about 5 or less years ago seeing the cross-hatched chemtrails in the sky over us. Nobody has been able to find out what all that was about. One of the suspicions, since it was done all over the country, was that it had to do with weather. Like daylight savings time was established so shopping wouldn't decrease so much during winter, there must be a corporate interest in perhaps keeping weather more uniform. Who knows? Obama knows. But he aint sayin nothin. He's one of them. How do you get to the top of the dog heap without being a dog?




Looking at popular movies as collective dreams of our society, and popular music too, I see a lot of destruction going on. Movie after movie of capitalism and all its props falling down after a reign of fascism until it implodes. Movies galore of vampirism now in the time of the banks putting the vacuum hose into our billfolds, sucking our blood. This foreclosure boom we're in is vampire teeth to our collective jugular. Dracula lives. He's moved from a Transylvanian castle to an uptown New York apartment with a summer place on Cape Cod. The king of the dead. And all the serial killer movies and best-seller books for so many years now. What's that about? Deranged white middle aged man tortures and kills white teenage babes. A very popular theme in our collective dreams.




At the same time in the collective dreams we have Eddie Murphy and a long string of really funny comedians, Larry the Cable Guy. There is a great deal of riotous comedy, romance stories, falling in love. All our human characteristics are represented in our collective dreams cataloged at the video stores the same as they were represented in the Greek and Roman gods and all the other gods around the ancient world. They were each one human characteristics; Zeus, the higher self, his brother Vulcan, who is the physical, and his other brother Neptune, the emotional part. Athena was wisdom, her symbol the owl. It looks to me like our collective dreams are in the veins of the gods and goddesses as we've become psychological thanks to the scientific method, independent of the gods. We're on our own to interpret reality.



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AUTUMN LEAVES

red yellow green

Woolly worms are crossing the roads. My first year in the mountains Tom Pruitt told me the lore of the woolly worm, making certain I didn't think he believed any of it, just telling me what he's been told some people believe. Black at front and back and orange in the middle. The amount of black in the front told how long the first part of winter would be, then the orange is the mild spell in the middle of winter, how long it will last, then the black at the end tells the last part of winter. Already, I didn't believe it, because I'd never seen two alike. How do you choose the one to go by? This year all I've seen crossing the roads is solid black ones, which I would interpret to mean a long winter of steady cold like last winter. Having already said I don't believe it, I do find it interesting the woolly worms over the last few years seem to be more and more solid black. Don't take this for a face. I've not done a scientific study, just drive-bys, sometimes rolling a tire over one, sometimes not. I try to avoid them, but sometimes see one roll up into a fuzzy marble in the rearview mirror.

My friends Lucas and Judy Carpenter arrived Friday for the weekend. The leaves started turning that night. Then the next night more, and by the time they left today the mountains were almost in full color. It's an unnatural turning according to what I've seen over the years. We have not had a night below freezing. I was told in biology class that a membrane where the stem of the leaf joins the branch closes after a freeze, the leaf gets no more nutrients and dies, changing colors along the way from vibrant green living leaf to dried paper on the forest floor, nutrients for the roots next year after they dissolve into the soil after rain and snow. Talking with Jack Nichols today, he said it's so dry the leaves died from lack of rain. That's what I see the leaves doing, just dying. They curl up and turn brown after one or two days of color. Curious. Every Fall season is different like every winter is unique to itself, like every Summer and Spring. I've never seen this before. I suspect Jack has seen it before.

Uploaded 16 videos of Skeeter and the Skidmarks' show last Friday night. It took until today. I wasn't home much, in and out. In, I'd set one to uploading and leave, come back and start another one going. That was every one I'd recorded. I started at the beginning and kept on going. Everything they did was dynamic. They had the groove. They were flowing with each other musically and flowing with the audience too. Their groove encompassed the whole place, everyone concerned. During a couple of them, I remember Whiskey Before Breakfast being one of them, I started grooving through the camera, moving in a flow with the music. Sometimes I like to move the camera around while the music is going. Including the heads of the audience is the best learning I think I've had from the experience. It seems to add to the spontaneity of the moment. The 17th one was Dori's Work Song, put up last so it would be at the top of the list.

As usual, I was grateful for the opportunity to archive almost an entire show of Skeeter and the Skidmarks in the time they're preparing their 3rd cd 15 years after the 2nd. Their first round of playing a few months ago at the Front Porch, they were mighty good, but this time they were on top of it. They were feeling good together and the music was flowing. I wanted to get the entire show, but needed some still shots and a bit of rest for my arms. I'm better now at holding the camera still than I used to be. I don't want to hold it too still, however. I like movement of the camera. Makes the video feel alive, like it's a living eye seeing through it, which is indeed the case. I love this inadvertent role as video recorder of some of the best music going on in SW Virginia. I like things that just happen like this die. It just happened. I had no dream, no ambition to do such a thing. Never entered my mind until I did it. That tells me it's in the flow, that I'm in my flow. That's where I want to be.