What kind of waggle can I use to start this piece? I've done absolutely nothing today to stress myself, and I've done little to stress others. I played a little with the pages, put up a few gazillion Christmas lights outside the house (although this is primarily my wife's project), peeled some more laundry lint (my dirty little secret), and took the two younger boys to the stadium parking lot for some more driving practice. On the way home we stopped to look for owl pellets and to check the bull barns at KSU ("artificial insemination unit" is the proper designation, I think). Generally, it was a day of jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirts -- a day for kicking stones as you stroll down the road without a care.

Perhaps I should end it there.

But I can't, because the owl pellets and their potential for metaphysical, metaphorical alchemy interest me. I will, however, keep this short. We didn't find any, by the way -- owl pellets, that is. The weather north of here might have remained too warm for too long for the owls to have migrated down here. But that's beside the current point, which might become clear below. Maybe not.

An owl regurgitates the indigestible portions of its meals. The indigestible bits might include fragments of hide, hair, horn, teeth, nails and bone of its daily prey. The owl takes that which it requires to nourish itself, and then periodically upchucks these remains of its meals in a tight, hairy wad that is nearly the size of a hen's egg. The boys and I have taken apart owl pellets that have contained bones of small rodents -- bones no thicker than .5 mm pencil leads. More often than not, the clean, white bones are broken, having been crushed by beak or claw in the struggle to escape or by smothering pressure within the owl's mouth or throat; sometimes, however, the bones and joints remain sufficiently intact that the joint can be articulated.

But that too is beside the point, isn't it. The object of my curiosity is, I think, to understand why I think of a journal entry (or indeed any kind of reflective writing -- a poem, for instance) when I think of a lowly owl pellet. Where's Annie Dillard when you need her?

That's where this needs to go.

This is turning into an extended waggle, I see.

I'll work on it, "it" being both the metaphor (one that could become a useful metaphysical conceit) and the entry that only appears to lead nowhere.