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Michael considered fate at 16:59   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

It's true, windchimes are among the more annoying features on the landscape of home decoration, but what can you do? People will, till the end of time, find it necessary to decorate everything they own with the tchotchke trimmings of their current culture. Pink plastic lawn flamingos, arriving in the late 1950s a little over a century after their property-trespassing cousins the Garden Gnomes, hint at what I would call a negative trend in home decor.

Not offensive enough? Simply search for adult hello kitty apparel, or any number of gawdy and eye-piercing "desktop enhancements" for one's personal computer. Hang tassels from your cell phone, brand yourself with the Nike swoosh across your chest, and get dark green and blue angel wings inked onto your back. Tada! You are now a walking windchime clanging endlessly in the ears of all who pass near, alighting crows upon the corner of old men's eyes as they cringe in painful expressions not seen since the great war.

I suspect there was once a flagpole or sailboat mast, some such tower with ropes and metal fastenings, which was given to clanking and clattering when the wind blew against it in a comforting way. I suspect this soothed and spirited some soul, somewhere, and they thought that all of life was but fuel for a fiery play - that which is put on, produced, manufactured in such a way that one can act out any scene one wants, given a proper stage. And so this soul thought it only right to build a stage and on that stage step a farcical mast upon which metal fastenings were anchored with bits of string (for this mast was not required to hold a full on sail, but only the whims of a self-declared thespian).

In a fanned breeze the metal fastenings, like satirical poetry, would clang in such melodiously fulsome ways that the soul would sleep restlessly with a bastard smile lit upon it's childish lips and thus was born a weak equivalence: a limerick compared to a summer's day.