The vernal equinox arriving earlier than usual this year seem to catch me by surprise. Presently, it's only about 6 hours away.On the east coast of the U.S. it happens at one o'clock tomorrow morning? For some reason I keep thinking Spring is further away, but the astronomical event that represents the first day of Spring is undeniable. March did come in like a lion. The wind is roaring outside even now. I'm glad that chilly breeze that has a hard edge to it is gone for a while.

The last couple of days have been sunny most of the time, but there was this incessant, lingering polar influence that made the objects laying around in my yard look shiny. I stayed inside all day. Beware the Ides of March. Why would I not? It's easy enough to jump on my Cardio-Glide and pretend I'm training for the Olympics. I figured I could wait winter out. It can't stay cold forever. Where is the global warming when we need it? The equinox is immediately upon us. Granted, there could be a hard frost or two before the dragons emerge from their dark lair to bring their electrical storms and swirling winds, but come hell or high water, Spring has definitely sprung in my neck of the woods!

Like any other occasionally sane person I realize that a late frost could still descend and nip the new vegetation in the bud. It happened last year and killed most of the early blooming fruit trees back to square one. My fig tree just outside my house never recovered in time to bear much if any fruit. Besides having a late spring frost last year, it was also the beginning of the longest drought in the recorded history of this area. The plants of all kinds suffered last season. Only the hardiest grass types that had deep roots stayed green last summer. The figs that somehow survived had a rubbery consistency when I tasted them. Trying to eat them was like trying to chew stale Gummy Bears. There wasn't enough rainfall for the second-try figs to plump up.

I get a little obsessive about my fig tree. It's one of the only plants I've ever had much luck with over the years. In my world, it's the little engine that could. I've suspected for years that I planted it over some hard pan clay that keeps it's tap roots from going straight down. Compared to the growth of the cutting my youngest brother planted about the same time, my fig tree is a scraggly dwarf. His fig tree is now almost as big as his house. My fear of a late frost is real. Somehow I find being possessed by this worrisome mood about a stupid plant is amazing. It's like finding out I'm a real person and experience real emotions like regular people. It makes me feel like I'm okay. I'm not made of wood. I don't have a long nose. Besides, I have a history with this plant that is more stable in my childhood memories than all the houses and little towns we constantly moved to when I was a kid.

My father planted cuttings of this plant everywhere we moved to along with his milk cows. The original cutting came from his father's farm in Mississippi. His father's plant was brought to Mississippi from the cotton plantation his father owned just north of Mobile, Alabama. After my older sister got interested in genealogy. some of her research revealed discrepancies in the stories my father told about the conditions under which he was raised. It became apparent that he liked to embellish the grandeur of his agrarian upbringing. It was a different world in that part of the country back then. The Civil War was still less than a hundred years old even when I was born. We lost the war, and with it the economy the people in Mississippi depended on resolved to slim pickings. My great-grandfather himself never recovered from the Battle of Petersburg, and died, they say, from shell-shock and a broken heart. Everything he worked except the land was lost in the Civil War.

I don't actually know what the truth is, I'm not sure I want to. The embellished stories of my father are great material for me to embellish even further. Why would I not? Any ol' lie my pappy favored is a good enough lie for me. Two of my grandfathers before my great grandfather was said to be living around here on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. One story is that the original guy to come to America fled through the coastal swamps to this area when he jumped ship in Charleston Harbor.

A goodly number of the old families in this immediate area immigrated in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Several of them claim their original ancestors got here by jumping ship in Charleston. Some say they knew their destination when they jumped and ran. What allowed them to get away was the same swamps the Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion of South Carolina was famous for. The Swamp Fox. A man can't be chased on horseback through these swamps unless the submerged high ground is known.

The original ancestor who lived here on the coastal plains as a runaway, eventually had a mess of children who in due time got a land grant in the western territories for fighting in the Spanish American War. The western territory back in those days was Alabama and Mississippi just east of the land bought in the Louisiana Purchase. It was my great-great-great-grandfather who brought a cutting of the fig tree from here in the coastal plains to the southern part of Alabama in the vee-shaped delta between the Black Warrior and Tombigbee Rivers.

Nobody knows. When I bought this rooted cutting from Lowe's, they had fifty other plants of the same variety as my so-called family fig tree. One way or the other, it makes it easier to understand why lying comes so natural to me. According to some, I was a child prodigy at it. '-)

According to my older sister, a scholarly Aquarian who studies genealogy as a fashion statement, I come from a long line of liars and loud-mouthed braggarts who were reputed to possess ancient secrets about potting grains to see what come outta the other end of them weirdly shaped pipes. Their occupation was said to be exposed by the ruddy colour of their skin, especially early in the morning hours before they took their first sip of their own makings. Buffoons, country lawyers, and stern-faced preachers that liked to stand tall on fresh-cut stumps and concoct morality plays in the spur of the moment just to see if it would bring mo' money to the offering plate.

The offering plate was often the only possession some my ancestors owned, so it's said, along side their revered family Bible, and what passed at the time for a pickup truck, to haul what they needed in this granular spiritual endeavor from the flatlands to the glens and hollows that's hard to pick through without a trustable guide. Their innate abilities to give spring water an added value was as guaranteed as a knockout punch.

One of the false impressions my parents appeared to have about their heritage was that a lot of it was supposed to be Scotch-Irish. As in actual Scots from Scotland, but who were forcefully migrated to Ireland, where it is rumored they weren't very well liked at all. After the western immigration began in full swing to the western hemisphere and Australia, they fled here to escape their indentured tribal misery. The problem with my parent's reckoning is, this particular migration happened much later than the religious persecution that drove our original ancestors here a hundred fifty years previously. The Scotch-Irish were a kind of second wave that happened around the same time as the Potato Famine.

According to my sister's research, it's possible our blood line has a smidgen of Scotch-Irish blood, but surprisingly not all that much. There was considerably more French Huguenot blood on my father's side, with a mainstay of Anglo-Saxon. Sphinx. My grandmother's maiden name was Sphinx. I never knew her. Two of my direct grandmothers who married the men of my family name were of French blood, but according to my sister, that only happened after all of them got to America. None of these people come from hoity toity families. They were pretty much Celtic tribesmen without much education. From the handed down stories, they came here less to follow their own heathen religion practices, and more to escape being the victims of the Inquisition and life-threatening persecution from the Druids who had now turned Papist.

I don't know the particulars, but recently the trial records of the Inquisition were opened to the public. There was some serious ethnic cleansing going on in the nayme of God. There always has and always will be, I suppose, but reading a little about what my ancestors were facing if they didn't get the hell outta Dodge helps me to understand why they might overcome any inclination not to leave any way they could manage it.

I'm disclaiming the truth. I don't know what it is, and if I wait for it to arrive before I can properly amuse myself, I'd never write nothing. I'm playing around with my own facticity, when probably don't contain many real facts at all. I'm reinventing myself by reframing my personal history. Why would I not? Nobody knows. Nobody can know, not even for love or money. When my readers read, they "see" what they might have written if they wrote what they opine I wrote here. They have to interpret everything just like me. If they don't, it doesn't matter. When they explain myself to me I'll make what they say to mean exactly what I think it does. Only this, and nothing more.

I bought a new fig plant from Lowe's. It's the same variety as my old fig tree. I keep calling them trees, but they're really just large bushes. There are really huge fig trees along the Congo River in Africa, but these ain't that variety. They're brown. How's that for categorizing?

I won't say that I've suffered this new plant into being healthy. The people who grew the cutting had practically everything to do with that. I just dug a hole for it, and observed the instructions that were printed on the shipping container.

I watered it faithfully until the rains came. Along with a grape vine I bought on the same shopping spree. I still can't tell if the grape vine is alive or not. Nothing on it has turned green. Buying two plants in one day ain't exactly a shopping spree for ordinary folks who have a stable cash flow. I don't... and don't... and probably won't.... aaiiyyyeeee... even manana!

The extremely candid entry I wrote for my other blog this morning revealed something to me that I've carried hidden inside for a long time. I don't like having the skeletons in my closet being rattled any more than anyone else. My selfishness and uselessness to the other is a plague to society, and a personal blindspot. It's not so much that my past has caught up with me recently, but that my past has always caught up with me at the worst possible time. I can't deny that I've tried to feign innocence in many cases when misunderstandings arose, and it worked just fine. In other cases my pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears. So?

I watched this woman's video of her talk at this gathering of intellectuals about what happened to her. She was a brain scientist who realized she was having a stroke because of a blood clot in her left hemisphere. She describes what happened to her:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

I empathized with her visible struggle to describe what happened to her. I felt like I subjectively understood every phase and aspect of her physical situation, and her seemingly detached, but somehow unconcerned knowledge that she needed external assistance as soon as possible. I found myself weeping with her sense of loss, and then her exhilaration that she had survived.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by other people's joy and pain. I bear it as if it were my own. I don't deserve to have this thrust upon me as a punishment, it's real pain, and yet, I know I do deserve whatever punishment is meted to me. It's as if I deliberately instituted it myself, and yet I know full well I didn't. This double bind seems to be the foundation of the Existential Movement in the years after World War Two.

The most damning aspect of this perspective is the unavoidable realization that any aspect of what's what could go any ol' way on the turn of a dime. It's absurd. No, really, it was also called The Theater Of The Absurd. This is the opposite of practically everything I was taught in my formative years to hold an ideal by which to guide my life. Since I was in my impressionable youth during the most active period of this philosophical movement, even though I was raised in a series of villages and small towns on the coastal plains, I was somehow made familiar that it was happening in real time somewhere else. The reading assignments of social studies and literature I guess.

Recently, while I was reading Sartre''s Being and Nothingness I stated that I hadn't read Sartre much, and that was true then. I followed up on the ideas of this Existential movement in college because it made me feel important. It was definitely not what the other kids was reading. I read Jean Genet's stuff, and acted in several one-act plays written by some of the popular dramatists considered to be associated with the Theater of The Absurd.

I don't think I obsessed on Existentialism like I have other topics, but enough probably to allow myself to entertain the absurdity of nay-me-d objects and shape-shifters. It might take something that doesn't change to observe change, but I can't figure out what difference it would make if such were observably so?

I don't know if I perform tacit favors for people that they cannot easily repay with either love nor money, and yet I do regularly as a mere aside. I can hardly believe it myself when I watch it happen, and my first thought is usually, "That didn't really happen. It couldn't be me.", and yet it is. Occasionally I can even stop doing it and it doesn't happen any more. Nobody knows. Not even me. But, I would say that, wouldn't I?

The absurdity of it is that I expect to be appreciated for something nobody can know i go outta my way to make happen. I'm not going to tell them! I don't really believe it myself. Since I appear to slothfully allow this odd "don't ask/don't tell" dynamic to break my heart, you might think I shouldn't complain, and I can't really, but I do. Sometime long and loud. Instead of gratitude, I get the opposite response for what I honestly deserve for being considerate. Simultaneously, and to my utter amazement, I know perfectly well i deserve to be ignored as a supercilious ingrate.

Just to amuse myself, I pretend to disagree with someone that they're an ignorant slut. In that moment of confusion (who expects to hear that?), we both know they really are nothing special, and generally consider themselves as dumb as a box of rocks. But, since there's nothing else to say, I just say no. "You're not an ignorant slut. You know better than that. You can't fool me, you sly devil.").

They immediately become clever to keep from proving me wrong. How many people argue with a person who claims they're not as stupid as they look? Once I stop supporting their sudden burst of ingenuity, however, they immediately return to being an ignorant slut. Let it be. More often than not, it hurts their feelings to have realized they were cheating themselves out of being-for-themselves.

It's still strange to me it comes down this way so predictably. I watch myself do it too. What continuously amazes me is that I can trick them into being-more-of-themselves-for-me, but they wanna trick themselves and leave me out of the equation. That's what i want too. But, they can't know/see themselves that way. Nobody can. It takes two to tango. By themselves, by ourselves, we are the moving target we're trying to stand back and shoot at.

People generally don't understand nor can they unless something drastic happens. Lightning bolts? Car wrecks? Shot up in a war? Suddenly, they did something they didn't realize they could do, and now they can't do it of their own volition. Do I get any thanks for tormenting them? Of course not. Nobody loves you when you're down and out. But, some people won't listen to anybody who ain't been there.

Life is made simpler by fifty cents words because they're so confusing to more people than some might think. Induced states of confusion create hypnotic portals that come tailor-made with their own possibilities. Possibilities that can be anticipated because they're designed to announce their arrival to the designer just in time, who can then act like it's a gift of prophecy for whatever the traffic will bear.