This afternoon my aunt Carla and I took my nephews to Chick-fil-A. Y’all, the place was absolutely hopping. Apparently all you need is fried chicken and a kids’ play area to be the hottest family lunch spot this side of the Mississippi. There were children running everywhere. I only have two nephews, but I was doing a head count every fifteen seconds. I kept thinking, Your sister will not be happy if you lose one of her offspring. After we ate, the boys took their socks and shoes off and played in the activity zone for a while, crawling up ladders, sliding through tunnels. There were a bunch of other kids in there, all of them basically caged in behind a glass wall, their parents on the other side taking pictures. All I could think was that it was just one big germ pit, a place for toddlers to exchange cooties and challenge their immune systems.

When all that was over, we went to the Arkansas River Valley Nature Center in Fort Smith. Today was my first time there, at least the inside part, and it really was cool. They had a ton of information about wildlife and a lot of hands-on stations for learning about the outdoors. There were displays about rock formations, fossils, birds, bats, you name it. Most of the animals were fake or stuffed, but they did have several live fish and reptiles, including four poisonous snakes. We even got to watch a real “snake feeding,” which was simply a man throwing a live mouse into a snake pit, at which point one of the snakes bit the mouse then calmly waited for it to die. Talk about a cold-blooded killer. Personally, I was excited to see the snake swallow the dead mouse, but my older nephew didn’t want to stick around. He said, “I’m not a snake and don’t need to know what a mouse tastes like.”

Well shit. For the last three hours I’ve been otherwise occupied. My sister, my brother-in-law, and I started a new puzzle last night, and it keeps pulling me away from the blog. I really haven’t felt that great today, and since I tend to worry about my health, the puzzle has been the perfect thing to distract me from 1) dramatically convincing myself that I’m dying, and 2) writing about it. It’s just allergies, Marcus. A little post-nasal drip. Anyway, I worked at the puzzle until my eyes crossed, and now I’m back to blogging. It’s almost eleven in the evening, which is the latest I’ve written in the last three weeks.

Since it’s close to bedtime, I’m looking forward to wrapping this up and crawling in bed. It’ll be the warmest I’ve been all day. Plus, I started a new Netflix series a couple nights ago, and maybe I can get an episode in before I pass out. The show is called Ozark, and so far I’m four episodes in. It’s absolutely delicious. It’s about a man who moves his family to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri in order to launder eight million dollars for the Mexican drug lord who’s threatening to kill him if he doesn’t. Talk about someone with problems. The more I watch the show, the better my life looks by comparison. I mean, I may be unemployed and running a little low on energy, but at least no one is trying to put a cap in my ass.

That I know of, that is.

I never did get to see that snake eat that mouse today. But watching the snake bite the mouse made me think of something Joseph Campbell talks about. He says that life is a monstrous, violent affair, one thing having to die so that another can live. He says that only life exists, and it has to eat itself in order to survive. This idea is represented by many ancient symbols, the most prominent being the ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own tail. I think this is Jesus meant when he said there is no death. It’s not that mice aren’t killed by snakes, that cabbages and cows aren’t killed by humans, and that humans aren’t killed by–I don’t know–allergies, sinus infections, drug lords, and whatever. Everything that enters into the physical world eventually leaves it. But life itself continues. Having no beginning and no end, it manifests itself as everything you can think of (including me and you), and–although it appears to be changing constantly–doesn’t actually change at all.