It's idyllic. As leaves begin to fall, squirrels bury nuts. Knowledge older than any living squirrel has them digging. We've all survived a bomb cyclone, and they're only worried about winter.

Some of us are smart enough to be worried. But there is an end reached by humans in rational thought. Will we remember? Fear of the unknown is capped off by calling it the infinite. No one really knows what infinity is. It can't be dug up and relived. It's not a very satisfying strategy, being a sort of makeshift to deal with something time out of mind.

And yet . . .

A dog is a man's best friend. Whistle, and your friend shows up. Twinkie's tail doesn't wag quite like a dog's, but she comes when I whistle. And often from quite a distance, way out of sight down the fence, comes bounding over along the top rail. Like a big squirrel.

It's not just the squirrels. What's surprising is the pair of robins, long time family friends, that come to visit; the Junco kids who come for walnut bits, just as when their mother brought them, spindly legged, to my table by the chair. There's a pair of doves I've known for a long time, and the two crows that made their nest in the hackberry tree. The whole bunch of them come out when I go to sit in the backyard, usually around 4 O'clock in the afternoon. The mystery is, they know and assemble from their distant homes when it's time to sit together here.

The surprise continues. Lately, when I whistled for Twinkie, one of the doves also came, and a black squirrel showed up.

This might sound like a joke. At least I'm quietly laughing while I grab the bull by the horns, landing us back at climate change. It has brought us extremes of heat, cyclone winds such as those that last year blew the crow's nest out of the hackberry tree. I shared their grief...

Skipping yet another groove, like a record scratching rapper, we land in Artificial Intelligence. No excuse, and it's no joke. How did we get here? Feelings shared with other animals, who have no more idea of AI than they do about the future of nuts they've buried.

How can we blithely grant agency to an effective force in our lives that has no conception of biological sensibility? Recall that AI is smarter, by orders of magnitude that relegate humans to an outmoded species, it's faster, independent; lacks emotion, empathy, and consciousness (though not self awareness). It solves problems that are defined and quantified in other ways, reducing a limitless analog world to digital bytes and slices. It's like a shadow play, with only some resemblance to real life. How can we trust it when it's so complex no one knows how it reaches its conclusions? The most ominous aspect is, AI does not and cannot care about how humans and other biological life forms think and feel.

So, what has AI got to do with a bomb cyclone?

. . . / / / \ \ \ . . .

There is no pausing while gathering leaves. The more there are, the more they blend together. Their dried stems, however, reach out to snare bristles on my plastic broom. They are destined for the yard waste container, finally to become compost. Scooping up piles, I tamp them in. But they do not go gently into that good can. Each one remains unique. And I think, yes this is so. Somehow, doesn't it seem? this hardly gets considered. Normally.

Oh?

Well then, just for the hell of it, go ahead and play the opposite.

Naturally, we're all different. Everyone knows this. Don't make a big deal.

How about my ingrown toe nail?

Well . . . how important is that?

No big deal. I'm bound to say that. But the exception does not prove the rule. In fact, that's what's at stake here. The rule. Wouldn't it be better if I made no waves?

Nonetheless, on occasion I've known, with no sort of clue, what's going to happen before it does. We all have our idiosyncrasies.

To derive an acceptable truth, by the rules, observations are mapped with statistics. Differences from a norm are expressed in terms of a standard deviation, then graphed. The epitome of truth is found at the peak of a curve, with lesser levels of likelihood graphing at increasing distances from the peak, outliers at the shoulders of the curve finally shifting away onto the toes of the curve. Well and good. But suppose this map misses an immeasurable truth?

Oh, how can that be? Perhaps you're better than everyone else? The rule of reason and quantification does not apply in your case. Only your case.

I'm not the lone exception. In fact . . .

What fact, if it can't be measured?

I must squeeze truth into standard containers. Is that what you mean?

But we were talking about leaves. Don't change the subject.

If the destiny of leaves is compost, what difference would it make? Without a destiny, there would be no leaf.