Yesterday morning I fully intended to go to church. I had the check for the offering in my shirt pocket and had worn my favorite pale gray stretch jeans. But the journey north to church included a stop to photograph sparrows at a park in Geneva called Prairie Green. The abundance of birds got in the way of my travels to church.
This is peak bird migration season. And while sparrows may bore you in concept, in reality they are quite beautiful to see when you know how and where to look. There are fifteen or twenty species that come through our area. Some have plumage that is quite striking. Others are rich in russets, browns and streaks.
That also means they can be hard to see against dense brush. That’s the point. There’s this thing called cryptic coloration in nature, better known as camouflage, that birds and many other creatures have evolved over millions of years.
Plumage, fur and scales have diversified into all sorts of patterns and “kinds” of living things. These adapted traits contribute to their individual and collective survival. Evolution is a remarkably ingenious thing because it functionally prepares creatures to occupy niches not at will, but by design.
That is not to say that creation is the product of what religious folks like to call ‘intelligent design.’ The whole thing works just fine without any help from above.
I even say this as a person of faith. I view the Creator as the manifestation of love and wholly real to the spiritual side of human consciousness. I’ve seen evidence enough of that in this world to truly believe. But I don’t think we have to break apart the laws of nature and material reality like they were so many theological croutons to try to prove that God exists as some kind of control freak author of all creation.
Personally, I don’t think God cares all that much if we grant the Almighty that status. God certainly doesn’t care who wins a football game or even a footrace. When people point to the sky and say “Give God the Glory,” I want to ask, “Why would he favor you over all others?” It’s false humility. Case closed.
What God does care about deeply is how well you treat your fellow human beings. And that means win or lose. Wise people know this. That’s why Pope Francis recently said, “All scripture that does not lead to the love of Christ is obsolete.” In case you don’t discern the cryptic meaning there, he’s speaking directly to the legalists and literalists among us who are such theological tight-asses they behave just like the religious authorities of Jesus’ day. And he called them hypocrites and a ‘brood of vipers’ for their manipulative law mongering and public praying.
And what about all those ‘go along to gain power’ evangelicals who voted for Trump? In the words of Colonel Slade in Scent of a Woman, “Fuck you too!”
They’re the same bunch who can’t conceive that evolution is capable of all this creativity. They also ignore the fact that Jesus taught using highly metaphorical parables based on organic sources drawn directly from nature. Get. A Fucking. Clue. In other words.
But yesterday I didn’t go to church because after birding, I spun around back home and got dressed for cycling. The wind was not strong and the day was so bright it absolutely demanded that I take the Venge for a spin. So I rode my favorite route of late and wound up circling past the cryptic little farm near my house where there are real flocks of guinea hens roaming around, fat hogs with bellies that touch the ground and even a chrome buffalo sculpture made from car bumpers.
I paused to take a photo in front of a farm gate which is decorated with funny signs. The humor was hilariously dumb, but I thought, “Look at this, I fit right in!” It was like cryptic camouflage for this guy, the main perpetrator of Stupid Dad Jokes and Bad Puns.
Which meant I was very happy to pose by the signs that hid me from the real world for a few moments. It was shady, I felt good on the ride and I felt like I was in the company of kindred liberal spirits. God has a bad sense of humor, why shouldn’t I follow the lead?
Later that afternoon, I was planning to join my daughter and her boyfriend for a trip to a different farm named Kuipers, an apple orchard west of my old high school that sits on a glacial rise in the open fields of Kane County.
I ride by that farm many times over the cycling season. It goes from a cold spring property where the apple trees are bare and spare and a few bad apples, like sinners still hung from the cross, cling to the hard black branches of winter.
Then comes April when hopeful blossoms greet early pollinators, and bees for the most part venture out to gather nectar on warmer days.
Come June the leaves come in full and shroud the tiny apples budding from the blossom points. Then come the hot days of July and August when those fruits turn gold and red and yellow. There is no single tree that sits at the center of the orchard by then. They are all tempting.
Riding past all this transition during the year marks the passage of summer days and pending fall. Indeed, it even calls up memories of early childhood, which seem like past lives to me these days. I am a reincarnation of my younger self in so many ways. So this Polaroid taken yesterday by my daughter feels like it was snapped in 1962, but is so very 2017 at the same time.
It has been hot in Illinois these past few weeks, so nothing resembling a true October chill has come close to us. And no first frost. So I keep riding past the hill where the apple orchard crouches, and it still looks like summer. But now there are thousands of cars coming and going on weekends and pumpkins litter the grounds.
The cars headed to Kuipers roared past me on my way up a country road toward Kaneville. So when I stopped at the intersection in town I asked through an opened window, “Where is everybody going?”
The woman inside the car told me, “Well, we’re going to Kuipers.”
There was no hidden meaning in that. Not on the surface, anyway. People were driving country roads to Kuiper’s because they were responding to some set of autumnal instincts that even they could probably not explain. Purchasing pumpkins, honey and apples, mostly. It’s what we humans do in October.
That is not all that different from the sparrows I watched in the fields feeding on weed seeds and crickets. That’s what birds do in October on their south.
But you know me, I always look for the deeper meaning in everything. So I looked up the word ‘cryptic’ just now, and here is how it is defined:
And should farmers think they are all separate or above the seeming confused eating habits of the civilized world, the hard truth remains that they are just as tied to the markets sucking grain out of their fields as the rest of us. And somehow they have been convinced over the years to often vote against their best interests by people who know how to mix a literal God with a mindless free market to create a Scarecrow America that they’re all supposed to worship.And if you’ve been by paupers crowned
Between the worlds of men and
Make-believe
I can be found.
The transition of ownership and management in world of farming is one of the vexing challenges for families that have passed land down from one generation to the next. “The older generation struggles to let go of the reins,” says an article in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. “To trust their kids to carry on a long and fragile tradition.”
But it got done the same way it got done when I cleaned out my father’s house earlier that same year. There were dumpsters full of stuff that we’d accumulated over decades of living in those homes.
One could say the same thing about every cyclist that pushes thin rubber tires down the road. We fancy ourselves independent of the forces that drive globalization. Who isn’t free when riding a bike? Yet we depend on the asphalt laid down by every township, and curse the cheapo districts that use that rough chip and seal stuff on roadways out in the country. So we stare ahead in hopes the road will smooth out again. In the meantime we bump along on the chip and seal that vibrates down to our very soul.
The medial collateral ligament in my left knee is a bit squishy of late. At some point in every hard run, it protrudes and the knee joint gets wishy-washy for a bit. This has been taking place on an off for a year or so. I went to the ortho that I know, and then a physical therapist to get advice on how to deal with it.
It took years to figure all this out because information about my father’s upbringing only trickled in over time. Snatches of conversation with his sisters filled in some of the blanks. But we didn’t live close to my aunts, so our visits were often pinched and brief.
Out of college the world at first didn’t seem to care so much that I ran. But then the big running boom came along and prolonged the validity of running as a way of life. So I ran full-time for a couple years trying to become something that I didn’t really have the talent to be, national class, but felt that there was one chance in life to find out how good you really could be. And I did earn the top runner category in the Chicago Area Running Association 20-24 age group, which was no small thing in those days. And over a three-year period, I won plenty of races including 12 out of 24 in a single year. I set all my running PRs and learned where my limits lie. That meant there would be nothing to prove as a runner when I was 40, or 50 or 60.
In the Age of Naked Selfies and hacked celebrity smartphones, it is hard to recall the time when nudity was dispensational, handed out like wafers at a Catholic communion ceremony. For a while, that right was owned by the likes of Playboy and the skin magazines that evolved from it. Penthouse came later. Then Hustler. There were obviously others.
Some credit for these freedoms must come from Playboy. One can argue all day about whether the freedom of nude or sexual photos is good for society or for the soul, but let’s face it, things have not really changed that much in the last 60 or even the last 2000 years.
I say the process has gone a bit further than that. As this image copped from a Pinterest site illustrates, the sight of buttocks in public is no longer such a shock. They are just buttocks. The clothing women wear now, even athletic wear, is form-fitting and leaves little to the imagination.
And that’s a problem, for sure. But as the Mike Pence issue illustrates, it’s not what a woman wears or does not wear that is the problem. It is the repressive need to control male insecurities and fears that religion affirms in men. Even the Genesis story in which Eve leads Adam to temptation is an example of chauvinistic male fears.
Athletes in endurance sports get used to the sight of the female nipple popping out from a running top or an ass cheek protruding from shorts. So, what! We bear witness to asses and crotches in all sorts of gear. A little camel toe on a gal or an outline of a dick in bike shorts just isn’t a problem as long as it isn’t a chronic and therefore distracting condition.
In the middle of the first mile of a 4.5 mile run the other morning, my body was not exactly cooperating. Everything felt sluggish and slow. In fact I was trundling along at 11:00 per mile pace. Things eventually improved, but not by much. In the meantime, I was wondering to myself, “Will I always do this?”
We live in the age of Doritos Patriotism. The entire national dialogue about what matters has been commodified. People can’t tell real food from overprocessed junk any more than they can tell the practice of free speech from jingoistic patriotism. 
Society further reflects the commodification of NFL players with its fixation on so-called Fantasy Football leagues, in which millions of ‘third-party’ owners trade upon the performance of pro athletes to compete with other “team owners” doing the same thing. The players themselves no longer matter, nor the teams. It’s all about numbers, statistics and the commodification of the NFL to raw impulses anchored in gambling. This is the junk food of the economy, the Doritos of ‘sin tax’ revenue from gambling and Internet-fueling fixes of porn. It’s all very addictive yet fills the American gut with a weird sense of guilt wrought by the bloated feeling that one can never be truly sated. Like bloated diners at a Roman vomitorium, the American populace keeps feeding itself on BaseballFootballHockeyBasketball in a never-ending bag of Sports Doritos that never empties yet never quite satisfies.
That’s why black track and field athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest while the national anthem played during the Mexico City Olympic Games back in 1968. They were directly protesting an indentured servitude of black athletes to a largely white-dominated culture that did not accord equal rights to black citizens back home. They were pointing out the hypocrisy of a nation that calls itself the bed of freedom when for many who lived there, it was profoundly false.
