I walked into the library, and took a deep breath.  I took in the room in that breath.  The warm, yellow light spilling through the windows, the smell of stone and wood and print and silent air.  There was something else, too.  A funny, cloying odor just beneath the ambient smell of the room.  As I padded my way softly to the back shelves, it grew in intensity. 

            I rounded the corner and found, as expected, both the source of the odor and my reason for coming.  The librarian looked up at me, hand on his pipe, and nodded.  I nodded back and pointed to his pipe.

            "Different today?

            He nodded again, "Black and Tan.  I think I like it, but I'm not sure just yet."

            I gave an experimental sniff and shrugged, "It's a little sweeter than the last one, I think.  I can't say I really mind, though.  Speaking of which, do you know what I was musing on the way back here?"

            The librarian slid his book back into the shelf and gestured with his pipe for me to continue.

            "When I walked in, I said to myself 'something smells funny.'  I started thinking about the phrase and though I have smelled things that made me want to eat and things that made me want to throw up I've never once smelled something that made me want to laugh."

            He nodded sagely.  "People have often said to me, 'that smells good!' or 'that smells awful!'  No one has ever come up to me in stitches and said 'that smells HILARIOUS!"

            "Moreover, when I realized something smelled funny, I started trying to analyze it and realized how limited my vocabulary was in that area.  Every other sense has its own words to describe it.  When someone asks 'what color is your car?' we don't say 'It's the color of the clouds just before it rains' we just tell them it's gray."

            The librarian took a puff of his pipe.  "We don't generally say 'this feels like a dark rock after sitting in the sun for hours,' we say 'this is warm.'

            "Exactly," I said. "We don't say, 'Ah! That sounds like the whistle at the end of a match'"

            "We say 'that sounds shrill,'" the librarian concluded.

            "Yes!  So why isn't there a word for the way freshly cut grass smells?  Or for that sterile kind of clean smell when you go into a doctor or barber's?"

            Silence. For a few moments, silence except for the occasional puff from the librarian and the kind of muffled, hollow hum that permeates the library.

            Then, "I suppose it just comes down to how useful it would be to be able to describe to someone the smell of a fresh, crisp snowfall."

            "You're right," I say, "People don't really talk about things like that."

It's a cold wind. The kind that makes your skin tighten, but not the kind that gives you goosebumps.  The kind that makes you quicken your stride, lean into it.  It carries the smell of decay, the smell of change.  The sun shines down brilliantly through that wind, and it smells so sweet.

The creek moves, same as always.  Well, maybe not the same entirely. Scores of leaves ride its surface, slow its flow.  It's almost like the water can somehow feel the weight of the fallen.  A pallbearer of summer.

The rail of the bridge I'm standing on is cold under my hand.  I muse a moment on thermodynamics.  How that cold, rusted iron is pulling, drawing that energy out of me and into itself.  It makes me wonder if, in a sense, the bridge is stronger for having held me.

Leaves, leaves, leaves.  They're all over the street, ankle deep in all but the most fastidiously kept yards.  It's as though the trees somehow communicated their intentions to one another, cried out "Now is the time!"  They stretch upwards, free of their foliage, free of all obstructions.  They say to their neighbors, "Look!  Look how much I've grown!"

            The wind blows, the leaves rustle, and I think to myself, "How strange.  How beautiful."  That the season with the warmest colors can be, itself, so cool.  Its very essence seeming to say "It's growing colder now, but there will be warmth again."

To those of you who come by for the random musings and insanity, I apologize if you've felt neglected. This is for you.

And for you, Reese's (Alan's, and apparently partially my, cat.)

So I was watching the aforementioned feline and I started thinking. There aren't a lot of varieties of people around. Anthropologically speaking, unless I remember 5th grade social studies incorrectly (a strong possiblity) there are roughly 5 varieties or general races of people, with regional variation of course. I looked at the cat, and I realized... there are a WHOLE LOT of kinds of cats.

Not breeds. I mean species. And the key thing is, they all function relatively the same way, only on a different scale. There isn't really a human comparison, mainly due to intelligence. There's also some pretty obvious and fundamential anatomical differences between ourselves and the other primates.

But back to the cats for a minute. There's a cat who has lived up the street from my parent's house for some time that really looks like a little lion. It has the puff on the end of it's tail and everything. And I have to wonder: If a lion saw that cat, would it basically see it as a really tiny lion?

Obviously not entirely. It would probably look odd, but familiar enough to make it pause and wonder a little bit. Why is that one so small? I think it might be rather akin to a person running across a pixie, or something of that nature.

The cat is, of course, much smaller and as such has much finer features as well. Would that make it prettier? One would think perhaps so, but at the same time it is too small for anything of that nature to be realistic. That said, lions eat things much larger than that. Would they view it as food?

It would be interesting, to say the least, were there as many varieties of people. I wonder what they would taste like...