Guest Post: Gordon Flanders heralds the coming of Spring

Gordon, from Anyone’s Ghost, agreed to do a guest post for me.  He has a very stream of consciousness, conversational, style of writing that I find captivating.  He blends humor, and the truth, and insight in a very powerful way and today he is here to talk about Spring:

I generally write about somewhat depressing things because I generally
find myself depressed, but whenever I come to The Matticus Kingdom I
feel a little better about life. So I thought in tribute I would write
something happy about spring.

In spring there are flowers and people smile at nothing. They wear
less clothing. They try to pretend like they’re not cold when they sit
outside drinking Mexican beer at the new patios that are turning up at
all the cool restaurants. They go to the gas station and buy propane
and hope they don’t blow up.

Spring is easy to miss sometimes. Especially in a place like
Washington, DC where it only lasts a week. You walk outside to all the
dead trees and you don’t think a thing about it, you walk a little
while and look up and all the sudden there’s green everywhere and
you’ve missed it and soon enough it will all be gone again. Just
another year in the life.

This spring I’m in Boston and I’m trying to notice. It’s really
fascinating to watch the changes in the plants. How they hibernate
through the winter, or even die, so that they look like they’ll be
dead forever, then they come back to life.

What if we only lived a year? Like if we were just dropped on the
Earth fully functional and then taken back after a year. The seasons
would really freak us out. I guess in some places there aren’t any
changes in the seasons, or at least not dramatic ones. Like San Diego
or the tropics. I wonder what subtle differences there are between
people who live in places without seasons versus people who experience
the changes.

I just had a thought but I forgot what. There is a squirrel outside
eating and darting around. Oh. I remember I was going to say that it’s
crazy to think that the seasons change only because the distance
between the Earth and the Sun changes. I wonder what Kepler thought
was the cause of the seasons. He was always trying to prove that the
orbit of the planets was perfectly spherical. I wonder if the Earth
will heat up so much in the next hundred years that there will be no
spring or fall anywhere. Just extremes, like in DC.

Ah but for now it doesn’t matter, because anyway what is time but some
vast tumultuous ocean that washes over us in such a way that we can’t
really tell if we’ve been alive forever or not. For now, whatever that
means, it is spring, or at least seems that way, and it’s pretty
outside and sort of warm and if this blasted wind would stop blowing I
could really enjoy my bike ride to work.

……….

How was that?  Brilliant, right?  He pulled you in and before you knew it you were laughing and thinking some very deep thoughts.  That’s what he does!  And for more of that I’d recommend checking out these (fair warning, because he writes with unedited emotion, letting the words bounce and lead and follow and shape the outcome, these are not PG):
http://gordonflanders.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/sinnerman-the-post-where-i-write-a-whole-essay/
http://gordonflanders.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/breathe/
http://gordonflanders.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/three-hours-of-buzzfeed/