The most pleasant storm this summer, though it didn't last long, beginning with cooling spiral winds that moved the leaves against a white sky, the smell of a distant fire and a nearby TV that had some African music which seemed at first not the be a TV, then the thunder moving closer and the rains, and with the clearing, first blue sky with puffy clouds to the west and then the north as well. Cage says your Mozart CD sounds the same every time. I am overcoming two fears, that of the thunder when it gets close, and also that a tree, less than a foot from the storm observation structure, about three feet from my own feet, is climbed by a family of raccoons, a mother and four children, and though I have been known to feed 'em in the past I found it at first disquieting to have the raccoons physically above me, where a slip could hurl it through the screen and on to my lap. In both cases I've made peace with the law of averages. On the other side where my laptop is, the raccoons are now walking down another tree. Cage liked the noise the cars make on 6th Ave., Sebald: “For some time now I have been convinced this it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.”