The birds are descending on the Bodega Bay of my mind.

The crows are gathering. It is like a reenactment of the film "The Birds."

Weather in the Northwest is wet, and rarely do we get much snow except at higher elevations. Rain is the norm, and lots of it. The weather forecasters are now saying the snow flurries that have inundated Seattle this past week will soon give way to rain showers. It's a good thing, the crows gathering in my neighborhood have recently begun looking at me as if I were their next meal. The crows, and the seagulls, swoop over shoppers in the parking lot of the Fred Meyer grocery store near me. They took a loaf of Wonder Bread, and a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey, from an elderly lady, and carried off a shopping cart laden with bird seed and Campbell's soup. They sit around smoking cigarettes, perched on the monkey bars at the elementary school, like Black Ops soldiers with time on their hands. One crow doesn't intimidate me but two-hundred of them leering at me with beady black eyes gives me the willies. It looked like a conspiracy of crows. I had flashbacks to the feature film, "The Birds," (1963 - directed by Alfred Hitchcock). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplpQt424Ls&feature=related

I was expecting to see crows as I ran yesterday for the first time in several weeks. Snow had prevented most cars from ascending the hills and children, freed from school, were having the time of their lives. The crows could have descended en masse, but maybe they were busy in the Fred Meyer parking lot, pecking a shopper until they got a box of Cheerios out of the shopper's bleeding hands. Sleds were everywhere, zipping down virgin hills. It was a snow day bacchanalia. Teenagers were skiing; the chair lifts were out but the rates were as low as they'll ever be. So I was running, feeling good, feeling young, feeling my way on the crunchy hard packed snow that lined the streets. The snow was fresh; it had not lost its purity. There is a beauty to snow when it first arrives. It purifies things, and the oozing wet carpet of brown leaves that many people refuse to remove from the sidewalks in front of their houses, is subjugated beneath the pure white beauty that fell from Heaven in the night. But then the dirty snow develops. Slush-a-rama sets in; the city wakes, the studded tires of cars churn the snow until it is a gravelly black hued brine. Then the cold comes in the night, and the slush becomes a black milieu that trips up naïve morning walkers, and scorns the playful afternoon antics of innocent children. That is the snow people hate.

My brother told me he spun out the other day. He drives a big Ford pickup that weighs as much as a full grown elephant. He was coming home from Seattle on the snow fringed I-5 Highway, which was jam packed as usual despite the conditions. He had switched off his four-wheel drive, probably thinking of his flight to Washington D.C. the following day, to attend a VA come-one-come-all event. When he took the exit that would lead him to his home in a rural area community north of Seattle, he forgot to engage the four-wheel drive. The left turn sent his truck spinning like Kristi Yamaguchi doing a triple Lutz in front of Russian judges. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KplWMCsgx2Q There were no cars coming from either direction, which is proof that God continues to watch out for my brother. I remind him of that often: that he has the favor of God. I compare him to King David who was far less pure as the driven snow. God blesses all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons we are never privy to. Like Tanya Harding, for example. Every dog has his/her day. Tanya's probable involvement in trying to injure Nancy Kerrigan's leg in 1994, with a metal pipe wielded by either her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, or one of his buddies, is forever etched in the minds of ice skating fans. In the ensuing years, Harding has been arrested for assaults while under the influence of alcohol. Drunker than a skunk on ice skates. My sympathy goes out to the truck; she has wrecked it so many times the police have lost count. Dealerships should be phoning her to give endorsements to their truck lines. But even truck dealerships steer clear of her. Harding claims to have been abducted by various masked men on multiple occasions. Essentially, Tanya went from being only the second woman to do a triple axel, to being the only woman to claim she was abducted more than three times by masked men who often forced her to smash her truck into trees or other hard surfaces. She is a second rate carnival act now. It is sad, the girl could leap ten feet in the air, on ice. I saw her on a celebrity boxing competition a few years ago. She wailed on the competition; she has a lot more practice beating up boyfriends than they do.

The cream always rises to the top. It may take a while, but in the end I think this saying is true. I look at myself this way; you really don't have much of a choice to think otherwise if you are to succeed at whatever you are doing. I remind myself of other writers and even politicians who succeeded when they seemed destined for anonymity. Like Abraham Lincoln, or example. He failed at being a soldier, and went from being a captain when he started to a private when he finished. He failed in business of law. Failed in being elected the legislature, failed to be elected senator, and vice-president. He wrote to a friend, "I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the Earth."

Failure is endemic to the human condition. We fail, there is no getting around it. We fail intellectually, spiritually, and physically; it is part of being human. It is not our failures that ruin us, it is our reluctance to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try again. I know something about this. I can recite a long history of personal failure. By the grace of God I am still breathing, and where there is a breath of life there is a breath of hope. I owe my optimism and perseverance to my parents, who instilled in me a sense of integrity and right and wrong at an early age. Here is wisdom: It isn't what the world does to you, it is how you respond to your situation, and also summed up in the adage, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." It is relevant that this was spoken by Joseph P. Kennedy, the savvy Irish patriarch of the Kennedy clan, and father of President John F. Kennedy, United States Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, naval officer Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Special Olympics co-founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith. That's a heady group of winners. The Kennedy sons, in particular, sought to change things, to right the wrong, and three of them paid the price. Edward, "Teddy" was wise not to run for the presidency. Had he run and sought to lead America in the right direction, he would have joined his brothers at Arlington National Cemetery. I was in elementary school when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. My teacher, who was as stoic a person as I've met, had tears in her eyes when she delivered the news that our beloved president had died. In the subsequent years there have been many theories and suspicions put forth about a conspiracy regarding Kennedy's assassination, as well as tell-all tales about John Kennedy's sexual hijinks. There were also numerous conspiracy documentaries about the coup d'état. Kevin Costner starred in a film about it: JFK.  Check it out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbUF8qE8zWA

The question about who pulls the strings in the world has always been of interest to me. I didn't want to know that behind the facades of government, corporations with military contracts, and Black Ops were running the show. But that's how it is, apparently. Little people like me can skirt under the radar and blog their opinions without danger. All we can do is live our lives with as much integrity as possible. Eat our meals with humility, go to our average jobs, pay our taxes and mortgages, fall in love, raise our children, paint pretty pictures, and say "I love you" to as many people as possible. God will sort out the rest. But keep an eye on the crows. When we are long gone, the crows will still be hanging around, laughing at humanity's failed attempt to survive, with their friends, the cockroaches, and the rats. And maybe Tanya Harding.