The world puts planners to shame sometimes. Anywhere I fly, mostly I shut the window blind and fall asleep, unless I just can't get there. And except for landing and taking off. There're so many interesting things going on, so many things to look at.

Jackrabbits and roadrunners, chasing away through the scrub out in the badlands. Circular fields of green surrounded by brown, that's where the irrigation arms swing free and define what farming means. Octagonal fields, weird little things when I get a close look, I suspect there's a gps and programmable harvesters involved there.

The oil patch is so obvious as to need no explanation, pad after pad scattered beneath the wings, horseheads pumping pumping or just standing still. Tanks, ponds for the brine, cows probably wondering what the hell these iron beasts are doing, they never even move.

Closer in to the world, subdivision after subdivision, some ordered and neat little postage stamp worlds, most weird little curves and patches, the developers have to get in where they fit in.

Fields and lots and things doing who knows what. Ponds that are more than obviously some chemical ponds, but what? Carved out places hidden away from the world, well hidden but for the rail lines maybe.

Always intersting questions, trying to spot new ones and go "What's that for? Who lives/works there, and what do they do? What stories do they have down there in such an interesting place?"

Like yesterday. A fresh-harvested field of something, at this time of year, sticks out like a sore thumb. Especially when it looks like some farmer got stoned, lit up the harvester, and went for a joyride... that one leaves me all kinds of questions. I've been there, August haying season is brutal. We'd keep gallon jugs of ice in the freezer, and one of the jobs of whoever wasn't on the tractor (gather round children and hear a story of the beyond, when air-conditioning on a tractor was but a dream...) was to bring those ice jugs up to the driver every hour or so, because sitting behind a diesel engine in the middle of August down here is about as close to the mouth of Hell as humans get.

End of the day, when the sun was no longer deadly and the time for getting off the red beast was close, the last pass or three, instead of ice it was an ice cold beer or three.

No more than that, because hay is a deadly serious business, for those who need it. First time you scatter a few dry rows to the winds because you had a few too many, and we'll find you some other job to get done, one that doesn't need a little more sober hand at the wheel.

And I tell you reader, even at our worst, whether heat-struck or drunker than Cooter Brown with a pocketfull of gold dust, I never quite managed what this farmer whose field I flew over yesterday did. His/her field was positively psychedelic in execution. Like the Fool resurrected. And beautiful. These were purpose cut curves, gentle swirls and curves never quite forming or overlapping, always suggesting a purpose unseen. I salute you, random farmer, for putting a smile on my face. I just hope it was on purpose and that you had a ball doing it, because it suggested someone having fun, but not interested in the silly business of crop circles. Someone out there to bring in the harvest, just in a way that let the inner kindergardner break out and reign oe'r the fifty acres for a while...