Dancing is better when there's hell to pay afterward.

It's funny, the things you never notice. Like the sunrise. If you look closely, there's a hand there. A giant hand gripping the sun, hurling it into the air. You have to stare right into the blinding-white yellow of the sun to see it, an after-image burnt into a flash-blind eye, but it's there.

And when you travel east, you can seek it. The hand connects to an arm, as hands so often do, and the arm is attached to a body. There's giants to the east. One of them tosses up the sun.

I met him this morning, that giant. He was all swollen-eyed and crooked-limbed, a strange and tragic creature.

"We gave birth to this heliocentric theory, you know," said the giant, "and to fusion and plasma and the strong force, and all of it. They were our sons and daughters and we loved them. And then they rose against us and slew us and replaced us."

They were the children of giants, those laws, those beautiful, rigorous laws of the universe. They grew unhappy under the inefficient rule of great Brobdignagian tyrants, and so they mutinied. They stormed the skies and the void and the tiny space between the nucleus and the electrons, and they drove back their titanic forefathers. Slew them. Imprisoned them. Banished them to the east.

But if you stare at the sun long enough, you can see the hand. And on some especially rude and bitter mornings, the hand makes offensive gestures.

(no subject)

On my morning walk I saw a magical talking sunflower.

"The first power every autocracy seizes," said the sunflower, "is the right to be incompetent without consequences. In a fascist society, the trains never run on schedule. People just aren't allowed to admit it."

"That's awfully gloomy talk for such a pretty flower!" I said merrily, and kept walking.

They hate it when I do that.