Curious parallel today between what is going on internally and without.  Reading Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Here we are first introduced to the Sheep Professor and Murakami's curious spirit totem the Sheep Man. Murakami describes him as a character who epitomizes something that is lost in Japan. Yet when I read his novels, I imagine the same character making his home here as well. Or maybe someone similar.

Running errands in the Saturn I came up the the overpass on 94th, I saw a person picking her way around the piles of snow thrown up by the plows.  She was dressed from collar to boots in camo silk screened for tall grass, like she was going duck hunting. On her head loosely flopped a stuffed hat with the round block ears of an ever trade marked rodent. She had the air of someone scurrying. I felt like I had glimpsed America's answer to the Sheep Man. Dressed not for warmth but for false security and denial of the self but at the same time tagged with mass marketed nostalgia. 

"I am dressed for confrontation but don't look too closely so that I might slip away.  Look at me, I am an individual, but the more you look the more I fade into my surroundings. I am told what I cherish."