Ants and Rants (No Pants; Well, Pants On, I Suppose, But No Important Pants

Cass Lake, MN, Chippewa Nat'l. Forest (which comes first?: the question over which a war has been fought)--Walked to and from brushing teeth with headphones on because too lazy to remove them. Passed older woman who, though she said and revealed nothing, probably imagined me one of those horrific hulking hooligan hipsterish types (it helps that I haven't shaven in long enough for the effect to seem measuredly scruffy), with no respect for the wonder of Nature (capitalized N hers, not mine) and beholden to electronics to a Quite Lamentable Degree, and isn't it a shame his parents didn't teach him better to appreciate the joys of being Away From It All (these latter capitals, of course, decidedly mine). And so in response I formulated--perhaps formulated is the wrong word, for I didn't compose it so much as let it flow to the tip of my tongue where it halted, as she was on a bike and had long since passed by, and of course she didn't actually do anything, and for all I know was far too wise to fall for all that shit about Kids These Days (caps society's), and to actually realize what I was imagining would have been in very poor taste indeed--a rant, not angry so much as bemusedly annoyed, perturbed I suppose with dashes of pretension and smugness (perhaps she was right after all) thrown in. Would you like to hear it? I should think so (regrettably, it's not in meter--that's a task for another time). This is roughly paraphrased, of course, since in the course of composing longhand the preceding few run-on sentences and Entirely Frivolous Clauses I've forgotten exactly what I thought:

So, you think that by not opening my ears to the sounds of Nature I am missing out on some integral part of the Experience? Well, let me put it to you this way: As humans we are of course animal and, so, Natural but we al possess certain aspirations of course to be more than our natural bodies, to dominate and remake Nature according to our desires, true, but also in the realms of culture and art which should be, I'm sure you will agree, much more along the lines of balance between these basic animal instincts and the Dominating Urge than they tend to actually really be. Well, I happen to be a musician (ed.: isn't everybody?), and I happen to be striving toward just that balance, and also by the way "electronics" only describe means, not ends in themselves,

Editor's Note: Here the correspondent stopped. The reason is unclear: did he run out of ideas? Did his pen run dry? Was he trampled by a Rhinoceros? We can only hope so...