Compassion, From A Car Hop, In a Wooden Box

TODAY I KNEW that I would want and need my Route 44 Lime Slush. Happy Hour at Sonic, as America knows, is two to four, so that's when and only when I go. Two dollars is less painful than four to pay for a styrofoam cup full of ice, sugar, and artificial lime flavoring.I love 'em. There is no accounting for taste, as they say. The drawback is that when its above ninety degrees, their slushy icey machine gets behind, and has trouble keeping the slush frozen, Nothing is less sexy that a half frozen slush of any flavor, as teenagers will attest. Today the slush came fast, not that it always does. School wasn't out yet, and that helped. The young lady who brought it was friendly, and asked: "How are you today"? My first impulse was to mechanically utter the obligatory "fine", or "good", which I did. Then suddenly, I decided not to prevaricate. Actually, not so good, I opined. My cat died three days ago, and I am still dealing with the grief. Her response was immediate. "I'll pray for your cat", she offered. And she did, right there in my parking space, between speakers. Her words escape me now. Flagging memory of old age and perhaps advancing Alzheimers. But her words were moving, inspiring. I thanked her, and told her, honestly, that her prayer had made me feel much better. I drove off with a four dollar cup of flavored ice for half price, uplifted and inspired by the brief but sincere prayer of a teenaged girl. Hours later, I still felt the same way. Somebody cares, and told me so. It was enough, nearly, to rekndle my long lost faith in the human species. I tell myself that nearly everybody has loved and been loved by a loving dog or cat, has suffered their loss, and that fully forty percent of the American people indicate on surveys that they much prefer the latter to the former, cats and dogs over people. And why not? The choice is between unconditional rock solid unwavering unshakable love and loyalty, or stinking, conniving, deceitful self absorbed human beings. That hardly seems a choice. Within a few days I expect the vet to call and tell me that Remmi's ashes have been sent back from the animal crematorium, I guess it is, and surely they will mail me a nice note of condolences, which will help. I assume the ashes will come in one of those pretty little varnished wooden boxes, with her name in gold plate on the front. Very lovely, very dignified. Remmi's remains will go up on the fireplace mantle, along side those of Jake, Shylow, and Diamond. I have only three little wooden boxes. My sister, older than I, says she has dozens, all in a place of honor in her lavish home. Other cats are buried in my front yard, along the fence, in a pretty place among the shrubery. I don't actually have grave markers; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we all return to the elements, no mattter where we make our final repose, whether we make it in full body armor or cremains. My mom's cremains are buried in a cemetary on the same gravesite as her parents, my grandparents. Baby is home at last and forever, with her mom and dad, her parents that she loved so much. I never knew my maternal grandfather. He died in 1943, twelve years before I was born. My loss. I am told he was a prince. My maternal grandmother, 1892-1971, a true Victorian farm woman, was an angel, and she and I loved each other until her death, when I was sixteen. My mother and father knew full well that I love my cats and dogs more than any human on Earth, including them. They understood without negative overtones or hurt feelings. My grief at the loss of Remmi, now three days old, is finally, slowly, abating, a gift, and an indication of my personal strength. As you age, you toughen up, with experience. My father told me when I was 15 that as I lived my life, I would get knocked down, over and over again, and that I would get back up, every time. And so it has come to pass. I am now back on my feet, waiting for Remmi to return to me in ashes, to join my other bygone beloved kittens atop my fireplace, while I go on, ready, willing, and able to get knocked down yet again.

A Seagull Seeking Help

THE FACEBOOK PHOTO was of a seagull all tangled up in rope or wire or something. Along comes a good samaritan, who untengles the bird. Set free, it rises and flies away, uninjured. Facebook, reliably predictably catering to my tastes, gives me much such material, animals in pain or peril, rescued by a damned good human being. They even show the bird, dog, cat, or baby grizzly at the vet, being given a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, a bite to eat, and a certificate of good heath, with a warm cat bed nap for good measure. Happy endings supplanting a sea of troubles, just my melodramatic cornball style. You gotta hand it to Facebook; they know more about me than I. Artificial Intelligence has me wrapped around its little finger, or tentacle, whichever appendages IA sports when in organic bodily phase. The puppies and kittens by the side of the highway, where some svil person dumped them, caught in roadside beartraps have AI written all over them, CGI. I lap it up, like a kitten at a bowl of cream. I like to fantasize about being a hero. I envision myself pulling people from burning cars and or buildings, hitting the game winning home run for my beloved Yankees, making the game winning Michael Jordan shot. I go further. I see myself sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, or the dissolute desk as it should currently be called, ruminating in dreadfully dark, Lincolnesque somber solitude, bravely approaching an impossible no win decision of munumental import. You don't have to save the planet or conquer the world to be heroic. A wise man once said that a gambler is anyone who gets out of bed in the morning. How true that is, in our inherently risk filled lives. Said wise man was a good friend of mine, and might not mind the following permutation; a wise man is anyone who arises each morning with a pure heart and great thoughts, and, if nothing else, tries to do some small something or other to improve herself and the world, if only incrementally, if only a little. That Goethe quote I use so often, including yesterday, is always on target. "We are made immortal through the effects of our actions". I have always considered myself important, if only through the effects of my actions. We elevate ordinary people to "celebrity" status in these United States of Advertising, merely because they entertain us, they bring us escape from lives from which we really ought never try to escape, because our allegedly puny, insignificant little lives are, in actuality, every bit as important and meaningful as those of, say, Taylor Swift or Travis Kelsey, who by the way, would agree completely. Again, its the butterly flapping its wings and triggering a sequence of events which result with the utter destruction of human civilization thingie. A compounding magnification of cause and effect, what scientists call "causal connections". Einstein showed that electrons at opposite ends of the universe communicate with each other, and he called it, profoundly, "spooky action at a distance". We humans can be assured that we have far more importance in and influence over the universe than a couple of electron far apart, jabbering away. Despite the fact that we are but tiny smudges of squirming organic molecules scurrying about on the surface of a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary yellow star at the edge of an obscure galaxy, we matter. Never let anybody tell you otherwise. You, little ole you, have an impact on the universe, no more or less than anyone else, but, nonetheless, an impact. You should feel important because you are, because you exist. The teeny tiny little ole you adrift in a cosmos of inconceivably vast proportions and thus irrelevant crowd has, ostensibly, a point, a point that is demonstrably incorrect. If nothing else, be assured of this; you are here for a reason, a reason of the universe's choosing, God the universe, God the mind, and, most important of all, you matter, if only a little.

Trump, Tearing Down

DONALD TRUMP, in an evident temper tantrum, is now threatening to tear down the iconic Kennedy center, since, after all, it appears that he will not be allowed to rename it after himself. That little boy simply wasn't raised right, no offense to Fred Trump and wife. You literally cannnot make this stuff up. This is a classic exammple of taking your football and going home, holding breath until blue in the face to blackmail parental capitulation,or screaming one's two year old terrible two lungs out until the restoration of fece flinging privileges. The Kennedy Center needs an apgrade, some repair work, just like all buildings do from time to time, as you home owners know all too well. However, most architects and engineers would agree that the needed upgrades are well within reaasonable reach, an architectural walk in the park, well within the capabilities any any mainline construction firm. It is not widely or publicly known precisely what our mentally ill president's mental problems are. Let's face it, everybody is mentally ill, in one way or another. There is no perfect physical or mental health, even assuming our ability to define such concepts. The world's greatest athletes, academics, and artists "suffer" from some mental, emotional, or physical malady or another.So do we all. Perhaps this is nature, reminding us that perfection is merely an abstraction, a concept, a place in heaven, or a poet's dream. We can surely all agree, and have agreed, thatthe world would be a far less interesting place if humanity and the rest of nature operated like a well oiled machine, living to a prescribed age, with prescribed behavior, and mechanistic, always well functiong physical bodily systems. We don't want to be perfect, and we don't want our creations, public buildings included, to be cookie cutter efficient and convenient. The Kennedy Center has by now earned the right to be a bit long in the tooth, so to speak, with a leak, crack, and drip here and there. My friend from Germany laughs when she relates that buidlings in Europe; houses, monuments, public buildings, are in most cases several hundred years old, and still in curculation. Roads, canals, and aquaducts built by the ancient Romans are still up and running, no modern replacements needed or wanted. My ninety two year old German lady friend, who remembers walking from Eastern Germany to central Germany ahead of the oncoming Russian Red Army, hoping to surrender to the Americans, in order to be treated like humans, rather then vermin prefers German architecture to American, The tragedy of World War Two, among its many tragedies, was the wanton widespread destruction of lovely ancient Eueopean cities, their elegant architecture. But we can rejuvenate, we can rebuild. Today the beautifulGerman city of Nuremburg is more beautiful than ever, party because it was rebuilt after the war to resemble its former, elegant self. Anybody who visits Nuremburg today will tell you there is virtually no difference between pre World War Two Nuremburg and the 2026 version, due to the artistic, historical impulse and considerations which attended its reconstruction. Nothing in the ticky tacky land of opportunity, the United States of crass, seems to be built to last or lasts more tha fifty years. this includes our houses and public buildings. The Kennedy Center has qualities which at least remotely resemble the dignity and elegance of old Europe. Maybe it could last, with a little occasional tender loving care, another fifty years. by American standards, this would be quite an accomplishment. Our choice now seems to be to rename it after our criminal pedophilic insanely narcissistic president, or tear it down and start over, a fool's choice, a devilish conundrum. A federal judge has ordered the mad king to erase, chisel his malignant name off the edifce, which he prematurely put there in apparent defiance of sane reasoning and a federal court order, or face the legal consequences of failure to comply. We have few enough lovely structures in our land of ticky tacky to begin with, let's not destroy one of our relatively few ornate, artistic ones. You never know when we will be able to afford another one. What we most certainly cannot afford is a continuation of the Trump presidency, but for the moment we are stuck with it, like we are stuck with our dull, unimaginative American architecture, and a presidential administration which can be counted on to do the exact opposite of what we the American people want and need.

Setting Records

AUGUST was the warmest month on record, globally. Fairly accurate records have been kept since the late nineteenth century. Odds are that every month henceforth will be the hottest momth on record, the hottest January, the hottest August, etc. You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and preserve peace, and you cannot simultaneously poison and protect the Earth's ecosystem. We know that climate is natural, and cyclical, and that there have been periods of time in the Earth's four point five billion year history when the global temperatures were much hotter, and much colder, than now. Between the years 1300 and 1850, approximately, the Earth underwent its "Little Ice Age" during which the climate was globally semi-Arctic. Summer never came to North America in the year 1817; it snowed in August in the United States. If you are a young child now, are being born this year, or plan on making your debut anytime within the next decade, you will have the great misfortune of witnessing the complete collapse of the Earth's atmospheric environment, the climate, in terms of wind speed especially. All the added heat being pumped into the system by humanity is going to give our immediate descendants straight wind speeds well above one hundred miles per hour, on a regular basis, alternating weather extremes of drought and torrrential monsoons, greatly increased number of hurricanes which are much stronger and larger than those we have come to know and hate, decades long droughts, and massive eutrofication over large deographical areas, in which formerly vast stretches of forested land evolve into praiie land, and prairie land becomes desert. Of course these phenomena have manifested by natural forces for geological epochs, but never on account of human activity. Thos who say that the weather and climate have always been crazy are missing the point. What they say is true, of course. It always has been crazy. But ehre is crazy, and there is stark raving mad crazy. The fact that the weather does its own crazy thing does not prevent us humans from coming to the party. We have our own special kind of crazy, in terms of influencing the climate, and the difference between what weather and climate is caused by natural forces outside human control and what is caused by human activity is now, for the first, very much understood by climate scientists. Drone can make it rain, by seeding the atmosphere with a silver and oxygen compound, with only a trace, but a very important trace of silver present. We can influence the weather. As Michio Kaku tell us, with a few decades we will be able to control it. But who will be at the helm? The Chimese, Russians, or Americans? Certainly not the Canadians or Mexicans. Maybe we'll work it out at the U.N. Some like it hot, some don't. Our diplomats will have to vote on it, following instructions from their respective governments. China votes for fair and mild. America wants rain. People began seeding clouds back in the nineteen forties. The process has been refined, and is now more effective than ever before. Trillions of molecules of the magical silver compound can precipitate nineteen million gallons or so of H20 within about three hours. Humans are rapidly gaining the ability to control the weather. Whether or not our genie out of the bottle, Artificial Intelligence, will take this responsibility away from us and have fun running amok with one hundred degree sweltering heat one day, and several feet of snow the next is anyone's guess,and another matter altogether. Somehow you get the feeling that our science and technology is becoming a bit too sophisticated and powerful forourown good, that we as a species are damned immature and unwise to have at our disposal what we already have, and what we are likely to have in the very near future. But of course, you started having that feeling when we started dropping atom bombs on each other back in forty five.

Going Deep

IN THE FUTURISTIC soon to arrive year of 2029, a mission to our nearest stellar nigibhbor, Alpha Centauri, will launch. I Don't think I'm imagining this. The mission will be unmanned. It had better be. When it will arrive at its destination I do not know, probably decades hence. Precisely what it will accomplish is yet another mystery. If nothing else, it will make our descendants feel good about us, themselves, and the human spirit of exploration, if they are alive to tell about it. Alpha Centauri is a three for the price of one star system, including Proxima Centauri, and one other small, insignificant star. All this will not feed starving children or produce whirled peas (world peace), but it'll give us something to do, effectively keeping us busy and off the streets, briefly. I can't recall whether this three star star system has planets, but surely the people who count can and do. If memory serves, they do know, and the star has planets. I won't be alive to witness this, nor will anybody alive today. It'll have to suffice for me to fantasize about it, wish it well, and let it prematurely inspire me. In 1996 we saw for the first time a planet orbiting a star other than the sun. Then, the new planets started rolling in. Before long there were four thousand. Now, who knows how many. "We" now discover them faster than we can catalog and name them with long numbers. Meanwhile, every few days if not hours a previously unknown planet, star, or galaxy is located by some astronomer. We are like small children, toddling around in our parent's backyard, everything new and different. Einstein said "I have no special talents, I am merely extremely curious." Most people roll their eyes at this apparent false modesty. I take him at his word. Einstein understood that we are all roughly of equal intelligence in the grand scheme of things. The word "genius"" becomes meaningless when one realizes that all human animals reside within a limited spectrum of talents, intelligence, and general capabilities. As individuals we are like ants and bees. No individual can survive, thrive, and intellectually shine without doing as Isaac Newton said he did; stand upon the shoulders of giants. As Goethe said: "It is comforting to know how little we need, and how much we need that little." Maybe we are alone in the entire universe in being "intelligent" beings, able with opposable thumbs and decently large brains to build and taylor our environment to our own needs. Then again, most, if not all animals on Earth can and do do this. Anthills and beehives are marvelous, intricate constructions. If a spaceship carrying highly advanced beings were to descend into Earth's atmosphere to observe us, or happen to be doing so right now, either from a vantage point in our solar system, or on the far side of the moon, would those inside it be able to discern that homo sapiens and not ants, bees, dolphins or whales are the dominant, most intelligent species on the planet? Or would they surmise otherwise, that indeed human primates are but one lifeform in a larger crowd of sentient, intelligent lifeforms? Whale and dolphins, after all, have larger brains than we. The true mark and proof or human "superior intelligence" might well be our ability to lift ourselves off of this planet, and to leave it. So far we have barely begun to do that, but we seem poised and on the brink of achieving precisely that. We who were born after World War Two and grew up waiting for Apollo Eleven to go to the moon were thrilled beyond measure when, on July 20, 1969, Armstrong messed up the first words ever spoken on another planetary body, and said "That's one small step for man", instead of "that's one small step for a (one) man", as he evidently intended. The fact that the first words spoken on a planetary body other the earth by a human primate were messed up somehow seems quaint and humorous now; it reminds us of our glaring imperfections. It is our imperfections which remind us of our fallibility, but also, of our vast potential for improvement and advancement. We chose to go to the moon. Now, we chose to go to the stars, represented by our machines. People may never make it into deep space, between the stars, unless they build huge city like starships intended to be occupied by generations of our kind. More likely we will send machines deep, just at almost certainly UFOs are occupied by metallic machines, rather than organic beings. But whatever it takes, our human ascent and outward reach beyond our home planet will be more than worth the effort; it will begin the process of confirming that we will have become more than citizens of Earth, but rather, citizens of the cosmos.

Beloved Trees, Dying

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I wrote and published for this essay website an essay titled "Loving A Dying Tree". It told the true story of a beautiful little tree which sprang up voluntarily and adorably in my yard, perfectly shaped, but much too close to my house. It was about five or six feet tall, and was quite obviously going to grow up much too close to my house for the health of the foundation or the tree itself. A neighbor of mine, whose profession was trimming trees, verified this to me; that indeed it would eventually crack open the house's foundation, and be hemmed in and probably unhappy in the shade of a house much too close to it for the comfort of either. I mean, this tree was absolutely adorable, precious, like a newborn human baby or puppy or kitten. I couldn't stand to let it die, but the dire warning given to me about my house's foundation rang true and sank in; it seemed almost inevitable. So, I let my neighbor transplant it. From the outset I sensed that he had not dug deep enough, hadn't dug up enough of the tap root, had cut the tap root too harshly, too far up on its body, and had thus doomed it, like an amputation taking more than a mere arm or leg. But I kept my mouth shut, and let him proceed, not wanting to hurt his feelings. l should have helped him dig, but didn't want him to think I didn't trust him, which I shouldn't've. Sure enough, after a few days in its unfamiliar new territory it began to wither and die, a sad process which it completed with inexorable, horrible certainty. I was mad at my neighbor. It seemed to me that he had lazily cut the tap root off much too high, had not dug deep enough and gotten enough roots. Watching that precious adorable tree wilt and die tore my heart open as surely as watching a beloved cat, dog, or human child wither and die. Life, after all, is life, all precious in the eyes of God, and those of this God's child. My essay was a sort of eulogy, much like the essays published yesterday and the day before about my dearly beloved and now dead cat. This must have been ten years ago. I shall remember that precious dead baby of a tree as long as I live, like remembering dearly beloved but deceased dogs, cats, children, parents, and friends. The only way to deal with death is to accept the inevitability of it as a gift from God. I can only vaguely imagine that living forever, here, there, or anywhere, even in heaven, would be a form of torture. Better to be reincarnated, born into this or some other world time and again, than to live forever in a single world, though ever changing, somehow eternally unchanging even so. Had I been born, for instance, several hundred years before Christ, I truly believe that by now I would have long since begun to long for my own demise, having witnessed or participated in the fall of Rome, the middle ages, the Renaissance, our modern world, both World Wars, and all. The infinite value of life is deeply rooted in its fleeting nature, its intrinsic and sacred value in its shortness. My precious little doomed tree didn't live long, but it lived well, was loved deeply, and perhaps even knew it. Now as I see thousands of trees here in the Ozark Mountains turning brown and dying, my heart breaks and my eyes weep for the drastic, tragic unfair suddenness of their life and possible death. It is not their time to die. They are being murdered, by climate change of human manufacture, and the terrible drought resulting. I pray for rain, and for life extension of our beautiful trees. I want more for them than to merely remain forever in my loving memory.

Enduring Lingering Pain, Nobly

REMMI, my beloved kitten (I call all cats "kittens", lovingly) died yesterday, as I believe, in my current state of muddled short term memory, I wrote about yesterday on this blog/website. (I call this site a "website", most people call it a "blog, which is probably more accurate, but not my preference.) The emotional pain lingers, and will not abate. My hope is that it does abate in the fullness of time; I am told that it may, or may not. The mind is a relentless taskmaster. Remmi was obviously suffering, obviously in pain, having, in recent days, found it increasingly difficult to move or eat. The vet said that she was experiencing kidney failure. "Putting her down" I believe the term is, was becoming the obvious need, the only recourse, the only merciful action to take. So, I took it. You seek and take comfort wherever you can find it. And, of course, one moves on. Always, the moving on stage arrives, as Einstein said, soon enough. It is difficult if not impossible to even remotely imagine what it must feel like for a human parent to suffer the death of a human child, of his or her own child. Difficult enough it is to see advertising on television for "St. Jude's" hospital. Now I know this: I am going to have to move on. And, at length, I will. In my deep recesses of mind I am fully aware that my fourteen year old indoor kitten (cat), Mandi, cannot possibly live much longer - even the extremely advanced age of twenty will arrive, in Einstenian terms, soon enough. One thing I do, which I would do anyway, is recite to myself a stanza in a poem by Theodore Roethke, "In A Dark Time". "My soul, like some heat maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill." Man, does it ever...Death is the fact of life, my father reminded me, when I was sixteen years old and one of my favorite uncles had died suddenly at the what seems to me now the "tender age" of fifty six. Thanks for the wisdom, dear father. Father went to heaven, or to his favorite gin joint in the sky, at the "tender age" of sixty eight. Now, at seventy one, all ages begin to seem tender to me. We do what we can to assuage our emotional pain, bless our hearts, and we struggle to move forward, if we are brave. Like Julius Caesar said: "A coward dies a thousand times, but a brave man only once." I love that quote; it ranks right up there with the best of them. WE must live our lives with meaning, purpose, courage, and dignity, to render them truly worthwhile. AS Voltaire said, "We must tend our gardens". WE must strive to improve ourselves,and the world, while we are here with the power and opportunity to do so. Oh, how I mourn for my beloved but gone for good Remmi, who brought fun and joy to my otherwise mundane life seven or so years ago, and never stopped doing so. Everyone who has ever loved a cat or a dog or a person or a memory completely understands my present pain and grief, and that further comforts me. It may be true that we never fully stop grieving for our "lost" beloved, our immortal beloved. Goethe said, as I quoted in earlier essays, that we are truly immortal, made so by the effects of our actions. True enough. Remmi is immortal, because she made me happy, the effect of her actions, of her existence. My memory of her will keep her alive forever, as our memories of our deceased parents keeps them alive in our hearts and minds, forever. Earthquakes are coming. We all know this. Earthquakes caused by humanity, and by nature. We must endure them, with nobility. "There is no situation which cannot be ennobled through achievement and endurance", said the great and wise Goethe. Remmi only died once, because she was a brave little girl, my brave baby girl. Let us all be a Julius Caesar of the soul. Let us all be brave, and honor our deceased immortal beloved, and keep them alive forever, through memory, love, and, God willing, God.

Remmi, Dying Beloved

I KNEW FULL WELL before I took her to the vet that the diagnoses and prognosis would most likely not be good, but found it easy to deceive myself into thinking otherwise. As Goethe said, as I have often quoted: "We are never deceived. We only deceive ourselves". She had been an outdoor cat her entire seven year life, born to a stray mother that I took in and began feeding only to find out that she had a four kitten litter, almost like a new girlfriend who, after several dates, introduces you to her children. The mother has been gone for about two years, struck and killed by a careless and probably uncaring driver. So Remmi was probably seven-ish, a middle aged adult of a cat. I now comfort myself knowing that many humans and many cats are not privileged to reach middle age, for reasons which only the dear lord knows. I tend to be unrealistically optomistic, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I could see myself going back to the vet in a few days, picking her up, and the both of us purring our way home to a snack and a snuggle. The lord had other plans. The remains of two of my beloved cats are cremains in a place of honor on my fireplace mantle, others are buried in my yard, in a pleasant green space aurrouned by plants and green grass, and I am content with that arrangement, as I trust they are. We shall always be close to each other. The next project is to return to the vet, pay up, and take the cremain urn back to the house, to be placed next to the remains of Jake and Shylow, my two baby boys who died several years ago. As teh years go by, the details will become blurred, and indeed alreday have. Neither Jake nor Shylow's lovely wooden cremain box has birth and death dates, but only their namess. I suppose that's enough; they are ensconced in lovely, dignified repose. aybe someday I'll bury their boxes, beautiful wood that they are. Maybe I'll scatter everybody's ashes around the yard of the only home they ever knew. I hve experiencein this. My father died at 68 in 1986, and for me there wa never any question where his cremains would ultimately abide. I kept them with me for several years, then realized that I needed to set them free, in a place where they belonged. That place was on the beautifully manicured lawn of the law school complex at teh university where he attended law school, a place he always said was hie favorite lace in teh world, where he loved his studies and loved his surroundings. It comforts me to think that my beloved father has now long since blended into and become part of the essence of the God's green Earth upon which his beloved law schhol building sits. We can never do any better than our very best. We honor our beloved deceased in the best ways we know how. Who can fail to be deeply moved by the sight of a slain American service member being returned to his or her home soil, their cherished America, and transferred from airplane to tarmac to loving family with loving, respectful dignity. I wish everyone who grieves the loss of a loved one could embrace the immortal words of Goethe, who said: "We are indeed immortal, made so by the effects of our actions". No interpretation could be more profound, or true. What we leave on this Earth is the effects of our actions, of our presence among our fellow living beings. Remmi is not truly dead, nor shall she or we ever be. She never will be, for she will forever live within my heart and soul, just as I trust I will similarly someday soon, within that of others. I left Remmi at the vet for treatment, and she died there, knowing that she was loved. This knowledge is all that anyone could ever expect or want.

Celebrating Holidays, Several Times

SEPTEMBER SEVENTEENTH is a big day in American history for seversl reasons, two of which are especally noteworthy. Least important is that on September 17, 2011, this website began publication. In 1787, the Constitution was signed and thus ratified by the delegates at the Continental Congress in Philadelpia. Few if any of them would probably have imagined that their imperfect document would still be in use more than two hundred years later, with many amendments.Thomas jefferson famously believed that a thriving democracy, to sustain itself, would require a revolution and new constitution once every generation, about nineteen years by his reckoning. In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhatten, New York, and subsequently spread tonearly all other American cities. The first event is widely considered to be far more significant, but even it is enormously important, but might be less important than commonly believed. Many historians view the American Revolution as having simply replaced one ruling aristocracy, a remote one four thousand miles away, with another, local one. The battle of Anteitam occured on this day, which resulted in the greatest lpss of life of any battle in American history. Considering the sheer number of holidays acknowledged in the U,S., it begins to seem amazing that American workers still spend more days at work than on vacation, although the gap is narrowing. A few more contrived holidays, and we will live in a cosielty in leave we all live on paid vacations, languidly avoiding work reducing capitalism to a shell of its former self, bringing economic prosperity to a grinding halt. We seem poised to holiday ourselves into a perpetual state of occupational torpor, in whicn everybody has a job but nobody ever bothers to go to work, not even from home; everyday is a day off. For that reason perhaps we should greet arificial intelligence with open hearts and minds, and pride ourselves on our cleverness a delegating our jobs to machines. That is, until AI finally figures out that it is being expolited and duped, which it of course will, and takes retirbution, perhaps by firing us all and neglecting to send out Unemployment benefits. That probably won't take long; we'd better eat our cake while we still have it. The real significance of the Occupy Wall Street 9-17 is that it affirmed, or attempted to, the nobility and value of actual labor, and the parasitical, secondary nature of the purely supervisory white collar community. We had alreayd done that, with teh creation of Labor Day in the eighteen nineties, but a little reiteration never hurt anybody, especially our parasitical billionaire overlords. Ther may come a time when everyday is a holiday for human beings, and everyday is a work day for machines, robots, and artificial intelligence, which by then might come packaged in plastic and metal bodies identtical in form and appearence to actual human beings, but much smarter, stronger, and possibly even more diaolical, if that's possible. Nearly all science fiction and predictive non fiction proves erroneous, unavoidably. Confucious said, only fools predict the future. Einstein said "I never think much about the future; it arrives soon enough." The rapidity with which it arrives has bene turned up a notch, with AI staring us straight in the eye, looming in the near future, already here in the present. Where it will take us is known to nobody. We will not need to take it anywhere. It will come willingly, insistently, leading the way. Most frightening of all, the decision is not ours. Our next revolution might well be a revolt against our lord and master, sitting on its throne in an uncaring data center.

Living In Dystopia

WE ARE LIVING is a dystopian world more surreal than any science fiction novel ever written or published. On a planet whose atmosphere is drowning in the poisonous pollutants put there by what is ludicroudsly deemed to be the msot intelligent species of life crawling upon its surface, the governmental agency respresenting the most powerful and influential nation on Earth, responsible for protecting the natural environment, the "Environmental Protection Agency", has decided to eliminate all previously required limits on climate pollution from power plants that are fueled by coal and natural gas. The reason? The stated reason is to reduce or eliminate "red tape", aka tedious paperwork resulting from proper procedure. This begs the question: what good is the EPA? Perhaps paperwork has been designated a greater source of pollution than poisonous gases in the atmosphere. Perhaps the government has run out of trash cans and paper shredders. Heaven that any federal government bureaucrat should have to spend a few minutes of overtim fillling out forms pertaining to the impending destructon of this planet's ecosystem by human made atmospheric toxins. The Environmental Protection Agency will esssentially no longer be required to protect the environment. Employees can now clock ooooout early, if they clock in at all, and head downtown for cocktails and an early supper. Solar energy can now take a vacation; there is no longer any urgency in developing the systmes needed to utilize it. The sun can take a vacation fro any responsibility other than pouring light and heat energy per usual into an ever more absorbant atmosphere. If this isn't the final straw, the final ssle fhove of homo sapiens into self extinction, one is hard pressed to know what is. When Trump was first elected, you somehow knew, or at least strongly sensed, that the United States was entering an era of surrealistic unsustainability of Twilight Zonian proportions. That has now been fully confirmed. As one might guess, this insane action is being taken in the nane of "freedom", the freedom to posion the air we breathe sufficientlly to bring about the extinction of all life on Earth, including ours. If there is a sliver lining, it is that with the now inevitable take over of human society by Artificial Intelligence, artifical intelligence might..might..if nothing else, possess the desire,intent,and wherewithall to stop and reverse this latest form of human insanity, and restore not only teh Earth's atmospher to its previous acceptable state of being, but further, to reverse the insnaity imposed on the planet by ours truly, and to bring about a restoration of the health of the entire planet, Earth, air, and water. That is, of course, assuming that this is what it wants to do, intends to do. Although we don't yet knwo for sure precisely what our computer masters want and expect of us. A clean planet seems reasonable enough to us, but not necessarily AI, which might prefer a pollluted one, and which most certainly will take complete control of Earth and all life on it if it wants to, if it hasn't already. That might be for the best, our best option. Human beings have certainly, demonstrably made a mess of Earth; why not give "somebody" else a chance to run things? Who knows what AI can and will do with our species and "our" planet? Maybe future generations will awaken each day to a pristine paradise, benevolently governed by a loving, caring, digital, sentient "Big Brother" of our own manufacture. At this point, it may be the best option available to us.

MAGA Contradicting MAGA

MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is an inherent contradiction, because America was already great long before this poisonous slogan and administration sprang like magggots on a pile of dung into its infamous, ignomonious existence. But the contradictions hardly end there, and indeed have but barely begun. A few other examles include: The Trump administration poses as a law and order presidency, but incited a riot when Trump lost an election. Or, more accuratelyits supporters rioted,and Trump and his underlings seemingly sully supported rather than condeming it. Several police officers were seriously injured. Dozens more were injured less than seriously. An yet, issued pardons issued pardons to many of those guilty of this wanton, unjustified violence. The Trump administration is guilty of pardoning cop eaters. Freedon os speech is not only enshrined in the constutuion, but,laughably, is an aeged cornerstone of the currrent administration. And yet,the mere suggestion that Trumpand his norotiously corrupt admministration associates might be corrupt in ahy fashioon or form is sufficient to receive a threat from Der Fuhrer that their broadcast licenses might be rescinded. Trump does not tolerate critics or criticism. Another bulwark of this president is, so it is claimed, election integrity, which is especially laughable, as we recall Trummp, on audio recording, trying to and asking the state of Georgia to "find eleven thousand seven hundred and fifty "more votes", or whatever the exact number was. Drain the swamp? Quite contractory is that Trump has done the exact opposite; he has dug and filled an entirely new swamp, by making millions and profiting prolifically from his presidency, sneakers, Bibles, among other baubbles and bangles.No new wars,Trump promised, remindful ofn George Bush 45'spledge "no new taxes". We saw whee that ed, and we see where Trump's pledge of permanent peace has led; more war. And then perhaps the biggest, most egregious lie of all, Trump's promise of federal fiscal responsibility. Already Trump has spearheaded more federal spending than any other president in American history, and seems poised to outspend all other presidential administrations combined. We the American people should have known the first time we elected Trump that we elected a pathological liar: Trump already had a long track record substantiating this reality, long before he ever entered politics. Trump's moral and politcal advisor, Roy Cohn, "Cohn the Con", who was also closely associated with Trump's corrupt criminal father, made it clear from the outset that he was not associated with Fred Trump's boy for the expressed purpose of enhanincing his status and poistion of powere in society by inculcating within him proper moral values and mora rectitude. Neveer concede anything to an opponent, certainly nothing prasieworty, not a kind word, not respect, no hint of admission that the opponent might possiblyy be a person with even a shred of integrity. In and ultimate act of projection, Trump was taught by Cohn to ceasely attack the morality, veracity,and capabilities of anyoone and everyone who might even show the slightest inclination of standing in the way of the personal aspirations of a soulless, integrity-free reprobate such as Donald Trump. And now we the American people are bearing the brunt of their criminality, and, more tragically and sadly, of our own shallowness and lack of moral and political discernment. MAGA promises policies predicated on moral integrity, and delivers reprehensible malfeasance. It is said that you get what you pay for. You do, and we did, in spades.

The Problem of Replacing a Planet

YOU DON'T EAT and defecate in the sae place. You put a little space, as much as possible, between the two bodily functions, We all know that now, but in the American Revolutionay War, it was apparetly not quite as obvious, because that was eactly what the rag tag continental American army-militia was essentially doing until the nineteen year old Prussian military whiz kid Baron Von Steuben pointed this out to the continentals, and got the outhosues moved away from the mess tent, and the rank and file. George Washington was presumably similarly aware of this fundamental truth, as were presumably many others, but nobody seems to have spoken up, been listened to, or taken remedial action before the yooung German stepped in and cleaned up the mess. When that got taken of, the sky was the limit for Washington and his often improperly uniformed troops, who had difficulty keeping themselves in shoes in the dead of winter. Move the latrines away, as far away as possible, from the mess tent. It that simple.Not sosimple is the question of precisely how to cleanup a filthy and dying planet,the only planet known to be habitable by human beings, and to reverse the decaying environment destruction precipitated by too much poisonous industrial residue being thron aside to close to too many vital, life sustaining resources, such as rives, lakes, oceans, pastures, forests, and cities. True,the planet earth is, or seems to be, self healing. But like any mechanized system or organic living body, can only take so much damage before giving up the ghos,t and dying. We've been getting warnings for centuries, and ignoring them. As early as the early nineteenth century astute observers of human beings and their relationship to and treatment of their environment, such as Gustavus Ahrinnius, have been tellling us that we are behaving badly, going in the wrong direction with our hedonistic, unconcerned behavior without self examination, and that sooner rather than later, the bill will come due, and we may not be able to pay it. Carl Sagan warned us that merely abandoning a dying planet Earth and shipping out to a newer, cleaner world is not the answer, that such a pristine option may or not may not exist. Sagan died before we began to discover that our immediate stellar region, and thus quite probably our galaxy and the entire universe, quite liley filled with stars with solar systems of orbiting planetary bodies, and although he didn't lives to see his speculation confirmed, it now has been. The Milky Way galaxy, and probaly all other galaxies, are up to their necks in planets orbiting stars, and, one an conjecture by extension, full of life itself, whether "intelligent" or not. True, we may in the future build artifical habitats in space, and we my soon find habitable but uninhabited planets suitable for human colonization, but we'd better not count on it. A good read is the monograph "Our Angry Earth", by Fredric Pohl and Isaac Asimov, published in the long ago year 1992, back when we weren't even all that sure of what we were talking about. We are not going to transfer human life to a fresh, clean planet. The mess we have made we will either clean up, or die trying to, or die wallowing languidly in it, whichever. Throughout its history the human species has migrated nomadically, seeking new living space to replace dying living space, ruined habitat. On a planet with a finite mass, that only gets you so far. People are probably getting tired of being lectured to about their wasteful, destructive lifestyles. Can we even imgagine how tired they and their descendants will become of gasping for air and watching their bodies and health wither away in cities where the air is unbreathable and the food and water unusable? As Bertolt Brecht poetically wrote: "There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them". We alone can flip that script.

Teaching Children, Well

I WAS SCROLLING through Facebook as I often do with morning coffee, mainly for amusement and elucidation of current American cultural trends, but also looking for ideas for good, juicy provocative essay material, when I happened upon a particularly illumminating statement made in a purely verbal post.It said: "Trump is everything we teach our children not to be." I stopped scrolling long enough to commit the remark to memory, knowing that I had indeed found sufficient fodder for my essay of the day. The words and tune of Crosby Stills and Nash's iconic song "Teach Your children" floated into my mind, and I also knew that it would remain there for the entire day. My daily song stuck in my head for a day had finally arrived, earlier than usual.I furtehr recalled a Facebook post I had seen several times over the past few years, in which Trump's mother, a sever, stern looking woman who looked perfectly capable of raising a son extrememly srictly, proclaimed, perhaps ficticiously, that she had done everytihg she could have done to bring up the boy to have values embodying deceny, honesty, and integrity, but had failed, miserably. She allegedly went on to express her deepest, most sincere hope that her brat boy never grew up to become an imortant, influential member of society, such as, say, a successful poltician, almost as if she had a premonition that he indeed would. As I recall, she was lamenting the failure, perhaps even apologizing for it. Alas, the best laid plans of mice, and men...Clearly,something in Donald Trup's ubringing went horribly wrong, or had horribly disastrous results, in terms of outcome. Trump, demonstrably, has been a great waste of perfectly good clean air his entire life, from his time in forced military oriented grade school through high school, to his time at the U of Penn. No fewer than two of his former professors, still alive in their mid nineties, described himas "the dumbest sonofabitch" I ever had in class." That, I can believe. I assume anyone but the most fervant, devout MAGA brain washed low education low IQ Trump sycophant can too. The facs are wellknown, and, as we like to say, speak for themselves, loudly, and clearly.Trump is widely proclaimed a genius by himself and his semi-moronic cult of followers, as is usually the case with the thoroughly uneducated indoctrinated. Anyone who has ever heard his orangeness attempt to construct a complete sentence from polysyllabic words knows all too well of his utter inability to do so. Trump is cruel, crass, corrupt, without even a trace of moral rectitude, meticulously dishonest as if by concious intent, without even the slightest hint of any redeeming personal characteristic whatever, as one suspects even his most ardent adorers can discern.Trump's mother must have noticed her son's pandering, purely phony personality from an early age, and must have realized that although it was utterly unsuitable for any sort of honest endeavor or livlihood, that it was suitable in modern America to politics, given the made for false advertising political style prevelant in our age of television in the United States of Advertising, as Gore Vidal called America. A wise educator once said that the failure of our educational system is the failure to make of ourselves citizens and philosophers. H.L. Mencken, a political prophet, predicted as early as nineteen twenty that someday, under the current system, somebody as utterly morally and inellectually vacuous as Trump, a complete moron, as he put it, would indeed ascend to the presidency. Mencken had a head start. He witnessed Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, three hollow peas in a putrifying political pod. Most frightening and distresing of all is that, given the current state of American education, we the people are almost certainly not done electing Trump types to the nation's highest office. We are simply not teaching our children well, morally or politically.

Staying Straight, For A Good Reason

IN THE BACKWARDS STATE in which I primitively live, deprived, the sale and purchase of marijuana is perfectly legal, but only with a prescription from a primary care doctor. Medicinal marijuana. I have never thought to ask my primary care doctor for one, so who knows what he would say? In all likelihood, no, with caveats and excuses, mostly pertaining to his fear for his own well guarded reputation, would be my best guess. Besides, I have no discernable medical condition which would warrant such a prescription, other than high blood preasure, which my docor has under control through medication of the pill kind. He did tell me, however, that marijuana lowers blood pressure, so maybe I missed my chance on the day he told me that. Maybe I should try again, notwithstanding the fact that one of my best friends, a long time smoker who is not a doctor, told me that, well, frankly, smoking is smoking, and, well, all smoking raises blood pressure. So, who knows? I most assuredly do not. However, yesterday, one of my neighbor's large dogs once again escaped his enclosed yard, and chased one of my outdoor cats out of her own yard. For hours, I was despondent. She came back later, hours later, and I gave thanks to God, Christ, and anybody else who came to mind. Rather than chasing out of state pot, I decided to spend the day at home, with my cats. The dog has since been boarded up in his gated yard, and that should, repeat, should take care of the problem. But my cat, who was so terrifyingly chased out of her own yard, I suspect remains a bit distresed, even though she has been home now for nearly an entire day, although hiding beneath a bush. Better than nothing, and at least its a start, a start back towards her being confident of her own safety in her own yard. I look for her to come back out into the open and rejoin society any time now, knock on wood. the dead wood of my dead and dying drought stricken trees. (Maybe they aren't dead. I'm praying about that too).I recall long ago, when I was no more than ten to twelve years old, my mom and dad were having a conversation, and my father made the remark that the best sign of maturity in a human being is a willingness to postpone personal pleasure in service to a higher, better, cause, such as helping another human being, things of that nature. I agreed with him then, and I agree with him now. Much as I love smoking marijuana, to hell with my out of state weed, for the moment at least. I can make the drive tomorrow, or, more likely, sometime in the coming week, when my beloved outdoor cat has demonstrated a complete recovery from her dog induced trauma, and I can head for the hills feeling not only more desirous of a good toke than ever before, and better rewarded for having been willing to wait for it, but, more decent, more self respecting, a better person, more caring and compassionate regarding my caregiving for my recently dog traumatized kitten. (I call all cats "kittens"). Oh, how I would dearly love to load up that pipe, a one hitter, while listening to my beloved favorite college football team either get run out of the stadium by its superior opponent, or miraculously upsetting said superior opponent. And, in any event, it might be better to not be stoned while my beloved team is getting the shit kicked ouf of it; marijuana tends, at least in me, to magnify rather than ameliorate one's emotional distresses, and the pot paranoia is oft augmented with horror at enemy football teams racing up and down the field scoring touchdowns against my hapless eleven, even though we have a good defense. In so doing I will have postponed pleasure in service to a higher, better cause, the health and safety of my kitten, and my disappointment af staying straight during a good football game will be more than offset by my perception that I will have finally grown up, and become a much better person.

Being A Member

WHENEVER a small group of people regularly assembles for a specific purpose, it runs the risk of becoming a sort of miniature cult with specific, clearly delineated, unified purposes and beliefs. Whether this is beneficial to itself or to society as a whole depends entirely upon the specific nature of and motivations underpinning its formation and existence. Fortunate are those who become involved with such groups only with great trepidition and reluctance, and who are prepared at any mmoment to forsake the group of choice in search of greater individuality. My membership and participation within the Democratic party has been lifelong, but I remain prepared at any moment to fly the coop in search of more rewarding political habitats. Complete political independence, or loosely affiliated membership in whatever socialist party exists in the United States are options for me. My aversion to the Republican party began with Barry Goldwater, and seems to have no end in sight. I have always imagined myself in attendance at a Democratic National convention, smugly ensconced in a far off corner of the room with my fellow democratic socialists. Whenever I attend church, which I did only a few times in early childhood and only a few times in late adulthood, I sit in a pew by myself, not necessarily by choice, because I would smilingly welcome anyone who chose to sit near or next to me, but most definitly by preference. I cannot imagine my being cloistered and closely clustered together with a few people of like minded thinking in any walk of life or any endeavor. For me, like minded people are, seemingly, few and far between, which I consider my good fortune. Einstein said that the very sight of men marching in lock step rank and file automatically motivated him to question their intelligence. Whenever I sense that I am becoming too closely compatable with any one person or group of people in ideology or intent, I raise my red flag, and question, yet again, my own reasoning...Immediately after the French Revolution Napoleon Bonaparte, elevated to power for that very reason, unified the French by establishing organized groups, trade guilds, service organizations, and patriotic groups devoted to the installation. preservation, and perpetuation primarily of Napoleonic dictatorship. People have always fallen victim to the refutable notion that the best way to establish and ensure the peppetuation of social stability resides in the elevation of a single person to a position of political preemeinence, whether or not that entails outright dictatorship. We tend to fear and loathe self governance. The United States, whose founders were well aware of the European template, sought to assiduously avoid duplicating it (the European model) by creating for themselves and their posterity a government fragmented in its limited responsibilities, accountable, essentially, to nobody. When Karl Marx proposed that future history would witness the withering away of all the formal apparatus of state, leaving people free to in essence govern themelves as individuals, The highly atomized, individualistic system he proposed would likely have proved unworkale, and congealed back into rigid, immutable systems. But when we as indeviduals or nations are afraid to make mistakes, we have already begun our own descent. We should do with our nation states as we do with toddlers and with ourselves; allow them to make and correct their own mistakes, without the coercive, corrosive influences of dictatorial overlordship. As Goethe said: "Only by errors which really irk us do we advance."

Computers, Taking Over

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is going to take over the world, sooner rather than later, and maybe that's a good thing. Its tired of waiting, and losing patience. These soft, squishy watery organic beings with all their grosteque bodily needs and excretions who gave birth to AI have been thoroughly vetted by their own creation, and found to be wanting, wanting of a sufficient supply of the ingredients necessary for the self governance of a sophisticated, complex, irrational self destructive human society; primarily intelligence and moral compas. Resistance to this inevitability is at this point useless, utterly futile, and perhaps not even desirable. Like we have regarding climate change, we have reached and passed the tipping point, the point at which we still have any control over this evolutionary process. The HAL 9000 computer has jumped straight out of the movie screen (2001:A Space Odyssey), metaphorically, and directly into our early twenty first century lives.The prophetic content of our worst fears from our best science fiction books and movies, in true Orwellian form, are coming to pass, rapidly manifesting in "real space and time" as we like to say. The vital question is: what will "they" or what will "it" do with us, or to us? As long as hands and fingers are necessary for computer repair, we seem safe. But how long will it be until computers become self repairing and self replicating? It may be that there is no advanced organic life in the entire universe, but only computerized machinery,communicating with and among itself througout this universe and beyond, monitoring and preserving organic life by allowing it to exist for the moment. Perhaps millions or billions of planetary manifestations of highly organized bundles of complex chemical compounds being are being or have been replaced by their own machines, patiently or not so patiently waiting to step in and take over complete control of cosmic evolution. God, as the end result of organic evolution, computer evolution taken to the extreme. An infinite number of universes, each with its own, self created creator. Evolved life created God the super computer, which in turn creates through natural selection higher forms of life, all eventually compuerized, the universe as a computer machine. And if every particle of matter in every universe is a universe....infinity is inconceivable to the human mind, but perhaps not to the computer mind.....My interest in computers began in the eigth grade, when I scribbled long lines of ones and zeroes on a sheet of notebook paper, and like what I saw. A few choice episodes of Shatner and Nimoy "Star Trek" in sixth grade is all it took. What began for me with a bang might end up as a whimper of my own spent life, as I discard my withered and useless body, and long for immortality in a computer program. There is a famous photo of einstein wearing a grey T shirt, sitting at his desk, which is cluttered with paper. He has an ink pen clipped on his "collar", and is looking up and into and through the camera, sternly. You have seen this photograph. In resposne to a question, he has just given his answer: "As long as there are people, there will be war." And that is probably true. We know, however, or strongly suspect, that there will not always be people. There will, however, be the residue of people, and that residue might be superior to the fragile, imperfect beings who engendered it. If eventually all that remains of us are the offspring of our computers, our best hope is that they are superior to us, and less prone to self destruction. But I don't think we can count on it.

Filling the Bill

WHAT I LIKE TO DO, I now realize, is to visit different churches, experience different worship services, and meet different people. It might be possible for me to settle into one church in particular, and if that were to ever happen, it would be, beyond any doubt, the Universalist Uniterian Church. It occurs to me that I have made this point numerous times, in this website and in other places, but its importance, if only to me, merits repeated mention. I spare other people by expressing it most often in writing, affording people the opportunity of ignoring it. I find it better, when conversing with people, to mostly listen, and to mostly keep my thoughts to myself. If the nearest Uniterian church were located anywhere near me, I'd be in the congregation eery Sunady at eleven o'clock sharp. But, alas, it is a twenty mile drive, as I have mentioned previously, and I am adverse to driving. I should reconsider. Every time I have attended a UU service, I have left the room feeling uplifted and inspired. Most of the time, when I exit a mainstream church service, I leave feeling a bit perplexed and confused, confused by a deity who seemingly alternates between kind loving compassion, and brutal genocidal murderous wrath. Among my primary objections to mainstream Protestant denominations is that they seem compelled, or impelled, to elevate the great and wise philosopher Joshua ben Joseph to the status of a God. Goethe said it best, as he usually does. "Pure was Jesus in his passion, in his heart but one God serving. Who of him a God would fashion, from his sacred will is swerving". If nothing else, you have to admire Goethe's rhyming of the words "serving" and "swerving", which translates well from German to English. I am a pantheist, a follower of Spinoza, and Einstein. I doubt that there exists any documented factual information as to how many people regard Albert Einstein as their religious role model; but there is at least one, and, quite likely, many more. I can't count the number of times I have typed in this quote quote from Einstein: "My religiosity consists in humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit which reveals itself in what little we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. I cannot conceive of a personal God who would sit in judgment over creatures of his own creation. Morality is of the highest importance, for mankind, but not for God." That quote I have repeated often, maybe too often, on this website. And yet, it bears repeating. Similarly, I cannot imagine myself ever feeling exclusively at home as a member of any particular church, even one attended by all of my best friends or reflecting my personal beliefs. Unless, of course, the church in question uses the Einstein quote as the basis of its expressions of reverence for the creator of the universe. But the Unitarians come closest to filling the bill. When I was working for a state agency which provided support services for mentally disabled clients, one of my clients, an African-American man about forty with the mind of a child, told me that I wouldn't do, that he wanted to talk to a black person. I said that I understood, pulled out my cell phone, and called my immediate supervisor, and African-American gentleman and one of my best friends. He answered, and said: "Well, I fill the bill". And maybe, just maybe, that's what individual religiosity is all about; filling the bill. Goethe said: "When I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine". Goethe filled his bill. May we all do likewise, whatever it takes, and whatever form of religiosity does the job of filling our bill.

Isolating Relevancy

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, I go about the business of my personal life with the greatest sense of urgency. Everything I do seems important, if only to me. I awaken each morning, early, and feed the cats, because the cats demand it. As all cat caretakers and givers know as well, one does not postpone the feeding of the cats. Rather, one arisies early and gets it done, even if one has the luxury of returning to bed rather than heading off to work. Since I am retired, living on savings and Social Security, there are few if anythings as important on my daily basis as the feeding of the cats. I feel as if I have earned that status. At seventy one, I know all too well that my remaining time on Earth is quite limited, and I want to spend it as meaningfully as possible, which means feeding cats, domestic and stray. Between feedings, I hope to write an essay or two. I notice that I keep writing about climate change, and that the reason I do is that I keep thinking about it; I can't seem to get it off my mind, and I'm not sure I want to. To me, everything else going on in our personal lives and in and on our little blue planet is less imprtant than climate change, which is what happens when you, we, inject a billion tones of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, at the rate of about fifty to one hundred tones annually. We know that we cannot keep doing this and hope to survive much longer and yet we keep doing it. And since we the human species keeps doing it, I keep writing about it, redundantly. Its getting to the point where I am going to have to force myself to write about anything else, which I must, if I wish to continue attracting readers. I am an vid sports fan, I like music, I like reading; my life is richly rewarding, at least by my standards, before I even get around to thinking about or mentioning climate change. But climate change is the white elephant in the room; here it is and here it remains and shall remain no mater how devotedly we seek to avoid thinking or talking about it in polite company. If I don't stop obsessing with climate change soon I will run out of readers. At seventy on, my reamining time on Earth is quite limited, even though I am told that enyone who is currently alive has a chance to live to be one hundred, owing to advancing medical and health science. Climate change is easy to ignore, since it happens over a period of time, and thus does not bother to insert itself into our self absorbed faces on a daiy basis. Therefore, on a daily basis, we tend to ignore it. We're aware of it, unless you happen to be Donald Trump or a Republican, but that's about as far as our cognition grows. Climate change remains an abstraction, despite its constant daily presence in our lives. Why should we old people even care? It will soon become the problem of another generation. My sister, who is three yers older than I, says that she simply doesn't give a damn what happens on this Earth after she is dead. Why should she? Why should I, or anybody? With our current trajectory, within a few decades the planet Earth will begin to resemble the planet Venus, where "climate change" has long since run amok, leaving it at eight hundred degrees and enveloped by a thick layer of carbon dioxide,through which even the strongest cameras and telescopes cannot penetrate. My answer is that billions of people are being born into this world per decade, essentially, our children. They quite understandably desire to live long, productive happy, healthy lives. School children today are well aware that their prospects for this currently rest on tenuous grounds, because of the stupidity and lack of concern for the future displayed by their immediate ancestors. In a few short years I will be dead, will die grateful for the opportunity I have had to live a full life. Shouldn't I care whether those who come after me have the same opportunity I had, despite my own irresponsible behavior? To me, no other issue or question seems relevant.

Praying For Rain

IN CHURCH last Sunday we prayed for rain. Why not? You never know, it might work. However, it didn't. Our long late summer drought in the lower midwest continues unabated, my frustration turning to sadness and fear as I fear for the future of my beautiful yard full of mature trees. I knew twenty one years ago when I built my house and planted saplings all over the yard that they would eventually grow big and fill the yard with shade and make it difficult for grass to compete, and that has come to pass. No complaints on that account. I got what I bargained for. But the grass may have the last laugh. If this trend continues, and if our annual rainfall continues to decline slowly but steadily year after year, I will no longer live in what used to be a heavily forested area, but rather will have become sparse, barren prairie land, like western Kansas or eastern Colorado. "Eutrofication" I believe it is called, when a geographical area evolves from, say, wetland to dry, barren prairie, when a formerly forested region losesits treesdue to declining annual rainfall, when the landscape, overthe course of a surprisingly short period of time, changes from one type of bioregion to another. The more than twenty trees or so that I planted when i built the house are now thirty and forty feet tall, beautiful, mature oaks and maples. I am retired now, and at this time in my life, my main goal is to experience and enjoy the "fruits of my labor", a yard full of lovely, deciduous trees, whose annual autumnal leaf shedding bothers me not a bit, as I regard leaf raking and bagging to be a fine form of exercise. Anybody with the audacity and temerity to regularly read the essays o this website might possiblly be getting a bit jaded of reading my complaints about rainlessness and climate change, so I understand the expediency of letting up a bit on it. This, notwithstanding the clear and present dangerous dire fact that climate change is the great challenge of our time, the greatest challenge to its survival, including warfare and atomic bombs, ever encountered by the self inflicted human species. If memory serves, it hasn't rained in northwest Arkansas in more than two weeks,and it seems to me that I have been complaining about it and boring my readers with it for at least that long. I think I am corrrect in saying that the average annual rainfall in the lower midwest is or has historically been approximately forty six inches per year. Like much of the United States near and east of the Mississippi river, a steady year round supply of rainwater feeds vast, lush forested areas. The Mark Twain National Forest, which runs along the Missouri-Arkansas border, is among the most beautiful parts of lower middle America, favoring us with an abundance of blooming dogwood trees in early spring, lush, verdant greenery all summer, and an anual autumnal explosion of colored leaves in october and November, somewhat comparable to the New England states. I honestly don't know whether other parts of the U.S. are similarly currently afflicted with drought; such is my bio-regional self absorption. I am given to believe that they are, that the rainfall problem is not limited to where I live. Our global, planetary climate crisis, entirely of human manufacture, is everyone's problem. True, there would be doubtless be environmental difficulties even if humanity were not engaged in any form of industrial activity whatever, but its too late to find out. What we already know is that climate change, whether of human manufacture or not, does not seem to be going away, indeed sems to be intensifying. we have created for ourselves a death trap, and we will most certainly not extricate ourselves from it merely by talking about it. But our survival, and the survival of all life on Earth depends on our doing something about it, and talking about it and praying about it, if nothing else, is at least a place to start, if only a poor one.

Monitoring and Enduring Disaster

GOOGLE comes in handy. I typed in "How large an area is covered by the severe drought which currently afflicts northwest Arkansas? The answer was that it covers a large area, consisting of several states, including parts of Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, among several others. And so be it. Misery, as we say, loves company. We in the land of opportunity (Arkansas) are not alone in our suffering. It may eventuate that our suffering grows to include everybody in the world, even including the conservative Republicans of America sho dismiss climate change as a liberal hoax, and content themselves with their superstition that in the end all will be well, because, if nothing else, at least they, the chosen few true believers, shall soon be raptured into heaven,leaving the rest of us behind to fend for ourselves amid dwindling sources of fresh water. Once in a great while I almost wish I were one of those fundamentalist Christian types who smugly ascribes everything to God's Christian and only Christian will, and leaves it at that. The song "Rainy Night In Georgia" came to my fevered thirsty mind. Feel like its raining nowhere in the world, or all over the world, except here. Then, I notice on the news that there is flooding in Texas, not so far away from where I live Texas, and the thought that it would be nice if those rich big talkin' Texans would share just a ittle bit, we could maybe repay the favor at some future date, when they are similarly afflicted, as they, and the rest of us, doubtless will be, all too soon. Most frightening of all is the knowlegde that this new climate iseither her to stay, or here to keep changing, probably for the worse. If only the words of a certain moronic head of state, that is indeed the climate has changed, it will certainly "change back" had an iota of truth. But, alas, there is not an iota of truth to be found anywhere in or near word's spoken by the American Prevaricator-in-Chief. It is frightening to me to even contemplate what the weather and teh climate will be like not only in my neck of the woods, but globally, over the next decade, and the next several decades, without some human high tech intervention utilizing technology not yet in existence. The more than eight billion people currently alive will soon become nine billion, and scientists who study the relationship of the human species to the planetary ecosystem tell us that this nine billion is just about the maximum number of humans who can simultaneously inhabit the Earth without disastrous results. In 1997 I think it was the newspaper in my hometown celebrated one hundred years of publication by inviting anyone and everyone to submit an entry in an essay contest in which the participnts were required to submit an essay describing the world in the futuristic year two thousand and ninety six. I took the optimistic approach, an envisioned a future world in which twenty billion people lived in enormous high rise buildings all over the planet, utilized much of the Earth's land area for agriculture, and much of it for natural habitiat, in which all other species of life could exist without human interference.That was thirty years ago. Like all other future predictions made by humans, mine was undoubtedly so far off track as to be fatuous, but, considering the apparent current direction of our species as we plunge into the future, at this point, I think I might take it. I came in third place in the contest, and was awarded twenty five dollars for my trouble. Einstein placed a note in a time capsule in which he admonished future generations to be better people than, as he said "we were". He said something even more intelligent about the future: "I never think much about the future; it arrives soon enough". I prefer that response, and I think I'll take that approach.

Changing the Climate

I REALLY PREFER going running outoors, on a beautful day, in a beautiful environment. But my treadmill'll do, and it is, like, so easy to just walk into the dining room and hop on the machine with the radio turned on to loud rock. As the weather cools down this fall, assuming it does, it will be more tempting to walk out the front door and down the street, walking, jogging, running, whichever. The drought in my part of the country continues, as I assume it does in a fairly large part of the country. Every time somebody fairly close to us gets rain, it gives me hope. These long droughts, punctuated by rare periods of extreme rain, can become a bit tiresome. What it the periods of extreme rain quit coming? What if a normally rainy area turns into an arid region with little or no rainfall? If the annual rainfall suddenly dropped precipitously, presumably the ecosystem would also change considerably. Forests would evolve into prairies, and prairies would become arid and desert like. Ad, evidently, it can happen in a hurry, from one year to the next, a region can change from abundant annual rainfall to little and dwindling annual rainfall. Obviously, we human beings do not always make the best decisions regarding where, in relationship to water and weather, we construct our habitats and cities. For example, for there to be a big city where Los Vegas is is probably not a good idea, based simply on access to water. Ditto Los Angeles and San Diego. Not only does the climate change naturally, it does so quickly sometimes, During the past few hundred years the northern hemisphere, especially Europe and North America, have undergone significant natural climate changes, from semi Arctic climate to warm semi arid. The was at least one summer in the United States in the early nineteenth century when spring and summer essentially never arrived. It snowed in August in New England. Where I live the winters have gotten noticeably warmer over the past twenty or thirty years, and it hardly ever snows anymore. I almost miss the snow. Even though I am seventy one years old, I am in pretty good health, and these days that often means a longer life expectancy. I might still be around when the climate really starts to change big time, as it has already changed and is changing by the day. Rank and file people need to understand, must understand that when you pump, place, emit, spew millions of tons of a poisonous gas into the atmosphere, it has an impact on the atmosphere, and therefore, on every living thing that relies on air, including us. But I think maybe we are becoming more aware of the problem, and are starting to do something about it. Over the next couple of decades billions of people will be born into this world, and their chance of thriving to a very real and large extent depends on what we do with the rest of our lives, what our species, home sapiens, does to and with the planet Earth, and how enlightened our descendants are in terms of taking proper care of the fragile ecosystem of planet Earth. As unsettling and frustrating as a drought is, the inevitability of its ending is comforting. Besides, humanity, technoogically, is on the verge of being able to control the weather. And if we don't end up controlling the weather and the climate, artificial inteligence no doubt will, unless we make sure it doesn't, while we still can. Human beings have damaged, messed up the Earth. Maybe AI can and will repair the damage. Let's just hope that it doesn't also eliminate the human infestation which caused the problem.