Dear Diary, Thomas De Quincey once wrote of a rainy autumn Sunday in London:
…”a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.”
Well, today is not a Sunday afternoon, it is Friday morning; it is not Autumn it is the delightful transition from winter to spring; it is not raining it is… well, as grey as the skies above me may be, I am sure the sun is up there… somewhere – behind the floating dirigibles, the majestic airships and the perpetual soot. Finally, this is not the town of London, this is the city state of New Babbage and it is anything but a ‘dull spectacle,’ but apart from these trifling details, Mr. De Quincey seems to have summed up quite nicely how I feel.
What a place this New Babbage! What a place, my new home! I don’t know why I was so concerned last week with the discovery of the splice 9… zea mays somniferum. My concerns were as erroneous as De Quincey’s excited observations. Why… not more than an hour ago, in a fit of mad curiosity, I bit down on one of those black kernels. Uncooked and hard it cracked between my teeth with a bitter crunch, and yet I am perfectly fine… wonderful! In fact I have never felt more alive!
In my satchel earlier, I did discover another puzzling note on one of the torn pieces of paper. This one had the words: “aggressive genetic resequencing pollens” Nonsense… of course the only words I recognize are ‘aggressive’ and ‘pollens’ and that just sounds ridiculous. This splice 9 is most clearly of divine origins. Why tomorrow I may just plant one of the seeds to see what wonder might grow. The challenge, of course, will be to find potting soil in New Babbage. But for now, dear diary, I am feeling suddenly very dozy… so I think I may lay down for a short nap.
::whistles innocently, foot sliding a clay pot of fertile soil mixed with a bit of native New Babbage earth from his front lawn under the eaves of the man’s home in a semi-conspicuous location before walking away:: ((So eagerly watching this story unfold!))
The divine nature of the zea mays somniferum is all too clear to me now, dear diary, for when I set out this afternoon in search of a pot and soil… there, miraculously, on the doorstep of my brownstone, was a clay pot full of what smells like very fertile soil. Surely an angel has intervened!