Midsummer Night's Dream

[rinue]

I am sitting on the balcony of an Atlanta Holiday Inn, dressed in a pillowcase and singing along with the crickets. When I was a kid, I thought the cicadas were rattlesnakes that lived in trees. I was afraid to go out at night, lest they drop on me from above.

Now I know better, or at least I think I do. The only treesnakes I fear look like humans, the unsuspected Pettigrews who hide in a moral high ground, prepared to leap on the backs of the unwary. Am I safer now, or was it better to be the fearful child?

Drinking makes me sound like a high school poet, and so I shall stop at this.