The Human Bean

Sure is a lot of talk about abortion these days. There has been all along, of course. I remember when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. I said something laudatory about it and was shocked when someone pushed back on my enthusiasm, and kind of hard, too. Well, shoot. I was nineteen and not accustomed to imagining other people had different opinions.

People still do, no surprise. I don't see a lot of point in arguing about it. Feelings run strong. And it's not just a matter of deciding when a human being arrives on the scene. That's too fine a line to tease out. Heck, there are people who believe it's a sin to try not to get pregnant, so we're all across the board here.

Right now we're rolling back abortion rights for women carrying six-week-old fetuses, at which point the items in question aren't even the size of a normal bean. A small lentil, maybe. But I'm a small person who was a small baby and I don't think size is much of a metric of worth. What is more to the point is whether the lentil is human. It's a tiny bean, but is it a human bean? Does it have more substance than a thought or a prayer?

Opinions differ. But it gets more tangled than that. I'd say a bean with human DNA probably is human. But does its humanity matter to me? Not all that much, frankly.

There's a tremendous conceit involved with the obsession over fetal human life. There's clearly a conviction at work here that not only is the human bean's humanity entirely evident at every stage, but that it is even more precious because of its presumed state of innocence. It's more important than the grownup variety of human that, since birth, has been demonstrating its sinful ways and relative worthlessness for all to see. The human bean is in a state of perfection and must be brought into the light, and when it disappoints us later we'll jail it or execute it or diss it on the social media.

I got a problem with that. I got a problem with the whole premise. I don't think human beings are all they're cracked up to be. I like a bunch of them, and I am horrified by the thought of murdering them, in an alley, or in a war, or, especially, in cold blood by the offices of the State, but I consider our species to be one among many, with some interesting attributes such as a certain kind of cleverness that destroys as often as it creates. We are admirable and we are deplorable. What I do not believe we are is chosen, or special. Or in short supply.

But we will be.

Because we clevered ourselves onto an existential precipice with our wish for dominion and our disregard for the clear consequences of our actions; and we've already been pushed over that precipice by our greed and callowness. If there is a ledger being kept on our value to the universe, which I doubt, we may finally be held to account. In the meantime, anyone with any political aspirations who is not devoted to trying to back us out of the hole we keep digging will never get my vote. I don't care what they think about abortion.

Soul, Man

There are things everyone says, so they're assumed to be true.

This is why I keep some things to myself.

Don't speak ill of the dead. Don't wish ill on the living.

That whole notion--that all human life is precious, that our souls make us something special--has never made sense. Perhaps all people are precious to God, but they're not to me. If Beethoven had a soul, it's worth more than Donald Trump's. There are people I will mourn and other people I won't miss at all.

I'm not sure what a soul is. It seems like something you invent to get out of dying. If I do have a soul, I'm quite certain my chickadee Studley does too. In any case, every one of us will die. Our souls will survive us, or they will fade back into fiction.

So I don't, mostly, wish ill on a living person. At least out loud. COVID-19 is purely awful. And I wouldn't, as the mandatory sentiment would have it, wish it on anyone.

But if I did, bingo, he would totally be the guy. I hope he recovers. And lives long enough to go to prison.

Why? Not because I enjoy imagining someone suffering. I don't. I'm at least that much of a liberal. But this man has been jaw-droppingly careless with other people's lives. People of color, immigrants, peaceful protestors, and, in the face of a pandemic, every still-breathing American. 

And now, for him, finally, the shit got real.

It got real for someone who doesn't believe anything is real and has duped half the population with his whims and fantasies and play-acting and ever-flowing fountain of bullshit. I can celebrate that. I do.

Because it's not just a pandemic. We're also well on the way to destroying our planet as a livable habitat for us and most of our fellow travelers. We know exactly how we got here, we know what to do about it--but criminally greedy souls are pretending we don't, and are blithely sacrificing their children. And yours. And Studley's children too. They are willing to risk it all, for a little bit of money. It makes no difference if half the people are willing to swallow their lies whole and ask for seconds. It doesn't make it less real. Shit needs to get real. If it takes a dead man to do it, I'm good with that.

I do not particularly believe that human life is sacred, or at least any more sacred than other life. But tonight, I was thinking about our souls and our pretense to immortality, and I put on a recording of Beethoven's Ninth, second movement. I cranked it way up. I lost my breath.

The top of my head tingled and dissolved and lifted off until it soared with the angels I don't believe in. It was as real as anything I know.

Buy Tulips!

Meet our little friend. We don't know what he's made of, but if you put him in water, he gets ten times bigger in a couple weeks. Take him out again and he shrinks down to his original size. Apparently you can do this over and over. We call him Stockmarket.

383 years ago the market for fancy tulips crashed and devastated fortunes in the Dutch Republic. It seems odd to us now that people were speculating on tulip bulbs like that. It's not like they're beanie babies. They jammed the parking meters and rolled off the bar counters. But speculate they did, until some unworthy peon planted one of the suckers and became unacceptably wealthy a year later.

Nothing has any value except what we agree to. Paper money is worthless unless someone is willing to trade you something for it. Right now you can buy a company using nothing but ones and zeroes. You don't even have to have your own ones and zeroes if someone else is willing to loan you some in case you make more with them later. And with all that non-money, you can buy back shares of the company and give it to yourself instead of investing in the company, and after a while there's no company, no product, and no employees, but you have fancy tulips right out the ass.

And you can take them and give them to the fairies that are holding up the stock market and pull the lever on the slot machine and hit the big time, and eventually you can see that the whole ill-gained lot of it goes to your shitty kid; and somebody out there will tell us the shitty kid earned it and should be left alone in case he sprinkles jobs over the economy somehow.

But then of course because the entire structure was glued together with unicorn snot, it all comes crashing down one day when someone sneezes importantly and everyone tries to get out at once. And that really screws the people who had a bit invested in the hopes they could retire some day, having been encouraged to contribute to the casino by the people who took their pensions. But it would appear to be not so vital to the 50% of the population that isn't in the market at all.

Except it is. Because now people aren't going on vacation so much and don't need their hotel rooms cleaned, and are holding off on regular haircuts, and cutting down on donuts and lattes, and what with one thing and another people are going to have to be let go.

Which proves who the real job creators are: regular people with adequate wages and enough cushion to be comfortable who like donuts and need their hair cut.

The thing about the stock market is it rarely measures anything meaningful. How can you point to an overheated market and say it means the economy is doing great when so many people are living in tents by the freeway? And when other people are so wealthy they could lose 95% of their treasure and live exactly the same?

We have a market in free-fall because of a virus that might take a divot out of the population, but it soars with the success of the energy sectors that fuel the global warming that will take us all out. But we're not worried about that. Climate change is a legacy catastrophe. We're over it.

I'm not sure this particular version of the market is worth preserving.

The View From The Driveway

It was a comment in response to a post about the urgency of forestalling climate catastrophe.

"All I know is that we have friends who have a hybrid car. They could not get up our driveway. We had to pull it up our driveway using a tow rope with our Jeep. I am not giving up my car."

Oh, sweet pea. I am sorry that is all you know. There's so much else.

All around you, people are making choices in their daily lives that must baffle you. They are paying more for items that aren't packaged in plastic. They're voting to tax themselves for greenspaces. They're checking the tags in their clothing to make sure they're not supporting slave labor. They're choosing to live where they don't need a car at all. Maybe they've found out that animal agriculture is the biggest driver of climate change and environmental devastation, and they've quit eating meat. They're doing these things because they have learned some stuff about the world, and they're unable to keep operating as they had before they learned it. It becomes a moral choice for them.

What they're not doing is changing their behavior in order to shame you. Something about your statement leads me to suspect you think your friends bought a hybrid car because they think they're better than you. But what do you do when you find out something you're doing is hurting others? Maybe it's something you didn't realize before, but once you learned better, wouldn't you change? I'm sure you would. Maybe that's what they're doing: trying to do less harm.

Of course their hybrid is still burning fossil fuel. And this is what is going to make our planet uninhabitable, in a matter of a few short lifetimes. It's a big deal. If you knew we had only ten years to get off fossil fuel altogether or risk an unlivable planet, wouldn't you embrace a solution? Maybe not--because there is so little one person can do to affect such a massive problem. It needs to be addressed on a national and world-wide level.



But here's a related massive problem: we are operating under a system of profit-driven capitalism that does not begin to account for the costs of enterprise. Shouldn't corporations be required to pay for the harms they cause? Should they be able to destroy our environment without any consequence? Should you be able to get away with poisoning your neighbor's well? We put people in prison for knocking over the corner store; why do we reward people who endanger every single life on the planet?

So nobody is going to confiscate your Jeep. You can keep your Jeep. But maybe gasoline should be $250 a gallon. Maybe that's what it would take to mitigate the harm done by the extraction and burning of buried carbon. It's not meant to be punitive--it's the cost of doing business. You might decide to make some different choices.

Seem like a lot to pay? A few decades ago someone had the idea of pegging gasoline at $5 a gallon. That was a lot at the time. People would use less, more efficient vehicles would be on the market, and the excess tax would be devoted to changing our infrastructure toward a more sustainable plan. It was a good idea. A number of things we could have done a few decades ago would have made things a lot easier now, but we didn't do them. And now we're out of time. It might even be too late.

I don't blame you or your Jeep. It's not your fault. There are real criminals involved in this scheme to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of literally everyone else. But it would be a good thing, for starters, to take a step back from your driveway and see how big the picture really is.

The Swattable Fear

There was a spider crawling along my ceiling wearing a backpack and panniers, and I took a photo of her from the floor so I could zoom in and find out who she was. If I'd been a squeamish sort I could probably have taken a picture of her through the window from the sidewalk out front. She was sturdy, is what I'm saying. A little on the hairy side, also. And she had a pretty good strut to her. My picture came out fuzzy on account of her struttiness but I got enough to determine she was a good old jumping spider. I don't know where she is now.

It occurs to me that there are a lot of people who would want to keep tabs on such a spider, at the least, if they couldn't keep a rolled-up newspaper or a can of napalm on her. There are people of my own acquaintance who would be rooted to the spot pointing until an assassin showed up drawn by the hyperventilating. If a spider like my hairy friend later turned up missing, these people would have to put their house on the market to get any sleep.

It's pretty clear I'm not one of the people so afflicted. Right at the moment--and we're in the season--there are cobwebs in the corners of all my windows. I can't bear to vacuum them up because somebody's still using them, I think, and if I'd built myself a house and someone knocked it down, I'd be upset, especially if I had to reconstruct a whole new one out of my own butt. Also, I'm lazy, and my mom's not coming over.

My poor mom. She was very tidy. She lived with a man I'm also related to who liked bringing things home to photograph. Your snakes, your lizards, what have you. Sometimes they got away. Sometimes they got away in the house. Mom was an outwardly calm person, but chronic repressed heebie-jeebies probably took a toll on her. Dad took a lot of pictures of spiders although he didn't bring them home for the purpose. Legend had it he was scared of spiders as a child and made a point of getting to know them in order to get over it. That was probably an apocryphal story but we all need heroes.

Anyway I'm not worried about my missing spider at all. I base this on finding them interesting and having not been harassed by any. There are probably a hundred big spiders in this house and I've been bitten maybe four times, ever. The bites are always on my fanny. I assume I roll over them in my sleep and you can't really blame a small critter for objecting when substantially sat upon. I certainly don't think spiders are making a point of being assholes.

What we're afraid of usually doesn't make much sense. We're afraid to fly but we'll tailgate at sixty miles an hour while checking our phones. We're afraid of anyone who isn't in our own tribe, just in case. Some of us are being instructed to be afraid of liberals now, possibly the least threatening, least organized, most hapless class of nice people on earth.

But the thought that we are looking at a mass extinction in another twenty or thirty years? And an unsurvivable climate in another fifty? Too big to grasp. Doesn't compute. If we can't solve it with a fly swatter or an AR-15 assault rifle, it might as well not exist.

Faking Summer

We got the standard load of rain at the beginning of April, right on schedule. According to plan, our reservoirs began to fill up. We get our drinking water (don't tell the Third World, but we poop in it too) not from snowmelt but from a pair of dammed-up valleys just this side of the big mountain. So those spring rains are important and everyone knows it, which means by the time it has continued well into May and June, people are looking trudgy and damp and tipping water off their hats and whining quietly, "It's not the rain I mind so much, I just wish it would warm up a little." What they mean by that is it's totally the rain they mind, and also they wish it would warm up a little, but it doesn't. Nobody puts in tomatoes until Memorial Day. Peonies bloom and are instantly flattened by hail. Kids skid around in the mud with soccer balls, and then the Rose Festival Parade happens on about the second Saturday in June, and the sun comes out the next day and sticks around until November.

A Portland child.

That's what's supposed to happen. This year, it quit raining on April 15 and you couldn't apply a postage stamp with the moisture we've had since. People smiled at first and made like they were going to try for early zinnias but mostly didn't, but then it kept not raining, and it got a little warmer, and we had day after day of sunshine, mid-seventies, with a light breeze. Peonies went ahead and bloomed in all innocence and were not struck down for the sin of pride. The days were so pleasant I found myself thinking: this sure has been a nice summer. Hope it doesn't get too hot later.

I dislike hot weather a lot. The juices that are designed to operate my personal physical plant settle into jam and strand me in a lawn chair, too morose even to ask someone to make me a gin and tonic. Even my creative juices begin to gum up in the heat. So I was feeling pretty pumped about this summer, so far.

Then I saw the weather forecast. After eight weeks of sunshine, we were due for a decent downpour, last Friday evening. It was going to rain hard Saturday. Sunday it would begin to clear up again. Of course! What happens Saturday? Why, it's the Rose Festival Parade! It was going to be wet horses, soggy princesses, and drowned tuba players all day long. Right on schedule.

And that's why it's been such a nice mild summer so far. It isn't even summer. I don't recognize springtime unless the rain is sheeting off the roof and you have to re-park your car sometimes to even up the moss. We have completely bypassed spring. Everything's all messed up.

All of which means it's about time for The Oregonian to run another smug climate-change denial piece of crap by Dr. Gordon Fulks. Dr. Fulks has a string of vintage science degrees hanging off his resume like dingleberries and can't see what's right in front of him because his own ass is in the way, but The Oregonian likes to give him a platform whenever the tooth fairy is out of town.

But Saturday, at least, we could imagine that everything is still all right. Thunderstorms, which are rare here, even made the forecast, and we trotted off to stand in a puddle and watch the parade. Lightning! What is the highest point of the parade? Why, that would be the elevated dais on the float occupied by the Rose Festival Queen, wearing a metallic tiara. This could be fun.

But the Reser's Fine Foods float caught on fire, the reservoirs aren't anywhere near full, Dr. Fulks continues to fail to die, and the feckless chump in Washington is working his fanny off to suck the last fossil fuel out of the planet and put it in the air. Don't be distracted by all the flowers: make sure there isn't a horse's ass under them.

The Enemy Of The People

Someone just told me that America's in trouble because too many of us are blinded by our mindless hatred of the president. One would assume he was referring to the fist-bumping, angry, terrorist-loving, fraudulent Muslim president who was born in Africa, but no. Whole different president. Seems like someone has set people like me up as a straw man. After all, there's no need to listen to a mindless hater.

Except that doesn't describe me or my friends. America's in big trouble, but not because of us.

This president? I don't hate him. I do think he's a loathsome, contemptible, ignorant, ill-bred, dangerous, pathetically insecure con man, circus barker, and bullshit artist, but I am a forgiving sort, and do not demand purity from my politicians, and if he did anything laudatory I would acknowledge it. But he hasn't. Across the board, in every sphere, at every level, he is making everything worse. Catastrophically worse. That, I hate.

He's the sort who might be expected to dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement by piously claiming that all lives matter--except for all the people whose lives don't matter to him at all, including our fellow citizens, other nations, tribes, faiths, and his own political opponents. We are being deliberately sliced into factions, for no purpose but to divide us and politically conquer us, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

We might wish that every Republican who rails against abortion would light up like a bulb if he has personally paid for an abortion. But let us just stipulate that for every one of them who honestly believes in the rights of embryos, there are dozens more who don't care at all, but are willing to use that lever to pry a reliable chunk of the electorate into the Republican column, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

And somewhere there might be a Republican who suspects that gun rights have gone too far, but he is willing to let that go in order to pry off another reliable chunk of the electorate into the Republican column, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

And you know what? I care about reproductive rights, and I worry about gun violence. But I would cede it all, and send women back to the coat hanger, and give every man, woman, and fetus a gun, if it meant the modern Republican party would wither and die. Because we're in a heap of trouble, and we're out of time.

It was forty years ago I was first startled to read that carbon might be our most dangerous pollutant. And now we are looking at the extinction of half the world's species in the next eighty years; we're on track to a collapse of all the world's fisheries in thirty; half our coral is dead now; we're running out of fresh water;  our ecosystems are collapsing; and those sounding the alarm are being dismissed as fearmongers and frauds. And a population easily gulled and lulled believes it. We grew up in the oil age with no sense of how special it is, how extraordinary our energy-enhanced abilities are, how unsustainable this existence is. We're a species that has muddled along for a million years and then, pretty much in my own puny lifetime, shot about sixty million years'-worth of buried carbon into the air, and that means that yes, unfortunately, as incredible as it seems, we really are living in the end times. We made them ourselves.

And the time to do something about it was at least thirty years ago, and plenty of people knew it. But the past is not retrievable, and the best we can do is start now. Instead, thanks to the feckless and ignorant occupant of the presidency, and his cynical enablers in the Republican Party, we're all in Thelma and Louise's car with the pedal to the metal. We know what must be done. We have no time left for ignorance. Or dupes. Or mercenaries. Or greed. Or any member of the one party whose only core belief is that--for them and their friends--there is no such thing as too much money.

Rats!

Smack me if I ever complain about ants again.

Coming up on forty springs we've lived in this house and none of the relevant gods has seen fit to drop rats on us, until now. We had a bit of a mouse thing going on in the early years. Taking care of that looked like it would involve cleaning up after ourselves in the kitchen, which might have interfered with our drinking. Then we became tidy people. We threw out the stove which had gone mouse-condo and got new appliances. Mice showed up just often enough to entertain the cat. She stalked the dishwasher and came up with a genuine rodent about once a year. Cute little guys. They say if you see one mouse, you have five thousand. I couldn't prove it. Seems more like we just get the one.

They say the same thing about rats. I hadn't seen any in the house. However, judging by whatever is thundering across the attic above the kitchen, and given that no one else in town has reported a capybara infestation, I'm entertaining the possibility that we have lots and lots of rats, or possibly small bison. We called pest control.

This is the kind of problem you take care of yourself when you're young, but now we're more inclined to pitch money at it. Especially when our Tyvek suits are at the cleaners.

Nice outfit. They don't use poison, which we all know (right?) can ramificate the hawk population pretty fierce. They try to determine where the rats are coming in and either plug it up or direct us to (direct someone else to) plug it up, and then they come back with traps and remove the rodents. A week later they do it again, until finally they come up empty.

The guy thought our entry-point culprits were a couple spots at the top of the roofline that looked chewed-on. This would allow entry into the second-floor attic, from which point (said he) they work their way down the walls and into the kitchen attic, which is lower. He wanted me to call a roofer.

This seemed implausible to me. So I didn't do anything.

Then I noticed poop in the kitchen. Near the sofa. I swept it up. The next day, more poop. I'm a huge proponent of denial when it comes to problems, but finally I pulled the sofa away from the wall and found many more poops, a scouting party of ants, and a neat cache of Iams Healthy Adult Cat Kibble. I read up.

Good news! Mice and rats are likely to drop a deuce fifty times a day. So the collection I had could have been a single rodent over three days, or a threesome overnight. Not so bad. I swept up, Windexed the crap out of the floor, and bought mouse traps, because I am optimistic.

Two of the traps were sprung and all the peanut butter licked off without sign of violence.

Rat behavior.

Rats don't hunt much if they don't have to. They forage. Kibble is super easy to transport and store. It's better than rooting through the Dumpster. It's convenient.

The sofa didn't smell right. I blamed my nose for a couple days and then turned the sofa over. There was a hole in the dust cover fabric. I cut the fabric off. Ten thousand turds tumbled out. I threw out the fabric, cleaned up the turds, sprayed everything in sight with everything this side of napalm, and considered myself lucky I foiled them before they could bring in the tiny TV for the Spring Break Party. Also, I put away the bowl of cat kibble every night. If Tater gets hungry, she can just go find herself a rat. And I called the roofer.

It isn't much different with climate change. It's the poop that betrays us--all that carbon we've hauled out of the earth and shot into the sky. And if we want to do anything about the poopetrators, first thing we have to take away the kibble. But we loves our kibble. We wantss our kibble. All that plastic packaging, and heat and AC at the flick of a switch, and instant transportation? It's so convenient. Mmm, kibble.

On Sucking

The cloud's silver lining is more of an ash gray at this point, but here it is: the predicted highs of 100 in Portland in Jesus Johnson September did not arrive because wildfire smoke obscured the sun. This is what counts for good news in Climate-Change-Denial Land.

At sundown, it was 87 degrees and snowing. Snowing something. Because my idea of quarantining young men between the ages of 12 and 28 has never gained traction, we now have 33,000 acres of pristine forest on fire, and counting. The Columbia River Gorge, strenuously green and laced with waterfalls, is systematically being incinerated and its ash redistributed over the Portland area. This follows a particularly hot and dry summer season which we have been advised will be our new normal. Anywhere you live, actually, you may now expect a new normal, but--our short attention spans aside--novelty is not in itself a worthy goal. The wildfire currently consuming the Gorge is a direct consequence of humanity's systematic extraction and burning of otherwise dormant carbon stores over the last couple hundred years. With punctuation provided by one or two young assholes with firecrackers.

We first heard the news while eating lunch in a diner on Mt. Hood. The waitress brought over a glass of water with a plastic straw in it. "Hold the straw," I forgot to say. Seems like straws come automatic these days, and it always surprises me. I can't think of anything I drink that needs a straw, let alone everything I drink. There's a campaign on now to get people to say "no" to straws. It probably started with the heartbreaking video of a rescue worker pulling a plastic straw out of a sea turtle's nostril. Straws, and all other plastic garbage, have a way of making it to the ocean.

Things are going to have to change around here, and straws seem like easy enough targets to start with. Because when do we ever need a straw? If we're not prone in a hospital bed with only a bendy straw between us and nutrition, when do we need one? Must we suck? So. At the very least let us campaign against straws.

I tried, when I got a glass of water at a local brewpub that prides itself on being environmentally friendly. They answered my letter promptly:

While the concern for sea life is pressing, most of Portland's garbage goes to the Columbia Ridge Landfill, which is located east of The Dalles and away from the Columbia. There would have to be some extenuating circumstances for our plastic trash to make its way into the ocean.

Extenuating circumstances! Yes. And yet those are what somehow manage to send 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic to our oceans. Sad, as they say, but that's circumstance for you.

We used to use biodegradable plastics for straws and to-go wares. Unfortunately, Portland stopped accepting these items in their composting program, and we had to take a hard look at our disposables. We ended up making the decision to stock a high post-consumer recycled content straw, because if it's all headed to the landfill we want to make sure that we're using a plastic that has lived through more than one cycle and been utilized to its full potential.

Okay. However, there is such a thing as a paper straw. And, there is such a thing as not needing a straw in the first place. I grew up without plastic straws and air conditioning and a lot of other things that we now apparently need. So did the rest of the humans that existed before about 1970, which is quite a good portion of them, all told.

A friend offered an explanation for the sudden proliferation of straws. "I think it started with lipstick," she said. "Lipstick is too hard to wash off glasses, and requires human scrubbing, which is not cost-efficient. Thus, straws are provided with each glass in case the human plans to put lipstick on it." All righty then, that makes sense. Lipstick: another plastic tube containing significant amounts of palm oil retrieved for profit from monoculture plantations for which gigantic swaths of primary forest have been razed, resulting in 80-100% loss of native species, and also containing compounds that kill fish and plankton and cause mutations in amphibians, packaged together in order that we might provocatively accentuate our pieholes, and necessitate the use of plastic straws to trim labor costs.

Dear lord, dear large theoretical sky person who cares about us and watches over the sparrow that falls, by all that is holy--and I would include here the moss and ferns and pikas and salamanders of the Columbia River Gorge--may we humans begin to define "what we need" as what we...actually...need? And, failing that, dear lord, might you allow us to suck less?

When Juices Run Clear

Maybe you heard about our heat wave here in Portland. We were in for a good three days of temperatures in the mid-hundreds, followed by a cooling-off into the merely obnoxious nineties. The forecasters had this horror in their sights over a week ago and the local news was all over it, breathlessly spewing out strategies and warnings. The first and most important bit of advice was to begin panicking early so as to save time later. After that came earnest tips such as "try to stay cool" and "stay out of the heat" and "check on the elderly," many of whom were otherwise expected to sit and rotate quietly until they were evenly browned. In spite of this, no one has yet checked up on me, but one of the benefits of being elderly is that I grew up without air conditioning and I have skills.

The first day, it got up to 106, although on account of the breeze it only felt like 102, assuming you are in a quickie mart at the time, draped over the popsicle chest. Our house has so far remained in the eighties. We have our routines of opening up the place at night and exhausting the air with window fans, and shutting everything up and pulling the drapes in the morning. Tater, as a member in good standing of this household, has her routine too. First she goes to the hottest part of the house and sits in the sun, plugging herself in like a rechargeable battery. When she has accumulated the maximum survivable amount of thermal units, she wanders methodically through every other room in the house in order to radiate heatness into it, and ultimately beaches herself on the kitchen counter, where she puddles out to platter size and slowly turns into paste.

It takes a few days of this in a row to really get this place up to pork-roast temperature, but I remain on the alert for the smell of cracklin's, at which point I will find the nearest popsicle chest and make a nuisance of myself until I'm booted out. Then I guess I'll go to the basement. The basement is always the coolest part of the house. Science has shown this is because of the cooling effect of the spiders, all of whom are massively cool.

So, not so bad. At least, not as bad as the hottest day I ever experienced. It was July 1976, and it was 115 degrees in Salt Lake City. We were passing through on a bicycle trip. Fortunately, we were going downhill at the time, so it could have been worse--and it was, the next day, when it plummeted to 110 degrees and we decided to cross the Bonneville Salt Flats with a pint of water each, because our mothers were not there to stop us. Science has shown that the Salt Flats were formed over many years as dull-witted bicyclists passed through in a state in which they were no longer capable of perspiration, and had begun to flake out into a salty powder instead. This layer plinks off and settles to the ground, eventually forming a thick, flat surface. This does take a long time but there isn't a scientist in the world who will tell you that the salt flats were built in a day, and there's no shortage of dull-witted cyclists. Because of the complete lack of lumps in the landscape, scientists further surmise that deceased bicyclists turn entirely into salt and blow away.

Anyway, good news. After suggesting we might get as high as 113 degrees, the forecasters have revised the temperatures downward somewhat because British Columbia is on fire and a fortuitous wind has blown smoke in from the north. In similarly good news, I plan to stay warm this winter by slaying a cow and climbing inside its carcass.

We remain doughty and stout of heart. Thanks to all of you for your concern; we are especially grateful for the kind words of sympathy coming out of the Phoenix area ("Grow up, bitches").

The Final Days Are Awesome

Science marching on

It's amazing how much stuff we know! In my lifetime alone--and do not be fooled by appearances, I am but an eight-year-old in a wrinkle suit--we learned that the continents are moving around. I was still in high school.

And it was barely forty years ago that I first read that our worst pollution problem might be carbon dioxide. This was startling. We'd been assuming all along that the dirty smudgy sorts of pollution were the big problems, and if we could keep the black crap from spewing out of our smokestacks, and if we picked up trash on the roadways, and saved the whales, we'd be in pretty good shape. Carbon dioxide was not on our radar.

We certainly wanted the whales saved because they are intelligent and majestic and worthy. But it's only been a few years since we learned how essential they are to the ocean ecosystem, because they forage in the deep where the nitrogen is and come up for air and poop it out as the surface, which jump-starts the whole food chain. No whale poop, no phytoplankton. Who knew? Now we know. Amazing.

Science zigs and zags but marches on, occasionally getting things wrong, and correcting them later. This is exactly as it should be. You looking for certainty, religion is your game.

I'm not sure how we got here, as amazing as our knowledge is, but now most of us are not only science-illiterate, but we don't even understand how science works. Otherwise you'd never get so many people to actually believe that 99% of the world's climate scientists are pulling our legs about global warming. What they are doing, of course, is collecting data from all over, and developing computer models using the data, and testing hypotheses, and publishing their results, which are then reviewed by their peers, who are--or should be--their stoutest critics.

Instead, a lot of people have been persuaded that they are sitting around their little labs pulling in grant money and plotting to manipulate their results so as to bring down the entire world economy that is run on oil. Ha ha! Why would they do that? I don't know. Because people made fun of them in school and now they're secretly conspiring to get everybody back? Who do they think they are? Bunch of smartypants in unattractive lab coats who think they're better than everybody. Same people who told us coffee would kills us, and then changed their minds a month later. They're scam artists.

People didn't used to reflexively dismiss the most educated among us, but now they do. Some corporate shills realized they could make bank on our insecurities to create doubt in the minds of the people. It was a calculated and deliberate effort, and now here we are, in quite a pickle, without the political will to save ourselves.

Most of us are not accustomed to looking beyond the narrow slots of our own lifetimes. Until very recently, people sought out caves for shelter and socked away fat and berries for the winter, as their ancestors had done for hundreds of thousands of years. But somehow, now, most of us think it is completely normal that even though we get winded running for the bus, we can walk into a metal tube in California and be in New York City in six hours. We think it's so normal, in fact, that we bitch about it if we spend an extra hour on the tarmac.

We simply do not comprehend what a very special time we're living in. This unprecedented luxury feels like our birthright. We don't want it taken away. And we can't imagine why anyone would want to take it away.

Right now a group of people are making a stand against a pipeline. They want to protect their water; some of them want to protect sacred sites. It's just one pipeline segment, but they have a lot of support from people like me who witness their bravery and recognize their stand as being the spearpoint in the fight against catastrophic climate change. When we make our case, we're mocked. I've never seen anyone protest the oil truck coming to their house in the middle of the winter, writes one wag on the internet. We're hypocrites, in other words.

If this is how you see us, this message is for you:

Aw hell no, Sugar! We're like everyone else. We love this stuff. I can get in my car and expend four calories with my right foot and be walking on the beach in an hour? Awesome. I can flick my index finger and make my house cold enough I need a sweater in July? Outstanding. I can drive to the store in January and buy fresh salad greens from a thousand miles away and then just toss the plastic box in the garbage? Baby, oh baby! We are living better than kings and queens, every one of us, even if we don't fully appreciate it, and all because we're digging up a finite fossil swampland and burning it up as fast as we possibly can, right now. We haven't been doing it for long, and we won't be able to do it for much longer. But right now? We get to have all this swag.

And there ain't an environmentalist with a beating heart that wouldn't want to keep that up if it were possible. And if it weren't going to seal our doom.

Look at us! We never even had the first clue about the whale poop and the plankton, but we're willing to allow half the world's species to go extinct on our watch, and cross our fingers it all works out. Maybe we still feel safe; maybe we live on high ground, and still have air conditioning. Meanwhile, we won't even take in a Syrian victim of terrorism in case she's a terrorist; but in a few years, entire populations are going to be on the move. Climate refugees, trying to survive. If we're not interested in making room, and sharing our stuff, we could start by not assuming scientists are frauds.

Bedfellows

I don't know, guys, I don't know.

The good and beautiful people of my good and beautiful city are walking around like survivors in a blast zone. Strangers embrace. The detonation has happened and now the concussion and devastation will ripple on for a long time. I find I'm not interested in food. That's never good.

We can all see each other now. The really, really bad people are lit up like flares. They're celebrating in their white robes and waving their Confederate flags and terrorizing their fellow citizens in the street. Their unwitting partners--almost half the country--are not really bad people, probably. They're just full of shit.

I don't mean that in the normal disparaging way. I mean that a systematic propaganda apparatus has been cranking away for decades now, and its architects have concocted a poisonous stew of lies and distractions, and seasoned it with honey, and people have tipped their heads back and allowed the funnel to be placed in their mouths, and all that shit got pumped in. A party devoted only to increasing the wealth of the wealthy was rebranded as the champion of the middle class. A good, smart, hard-working woman was recast as a devil. Sound science became fantasy. Demonstrable falsehoods were propagated with glee. But folks on the left as well as the right sucked on that funnel and accepted the particular load of shit that was curated just for them. Truth is the first victim, but there are so many more. When you've been pumped full of shit, you actually begin to believe certain of your compatriots threaten you, when clearly those people have much more to fear from you.

Muslim citizens do not like to be mischaracterized as terrorists, nor Hispanics as criminals, and so too, Trump voters are outraged to be called racists and xenophobes. That's not who they are! That stuff is peripheral. They had other concerns. And you know what? They're probably telling the truth.

But the ability to filter out and discard as irrelevant the flagrant racism metastasizing all around them, and the demagogue at its epicenter, the Igniter-In-Chief, does not speak well of their capacity for empathy. To them I say: these are the people you have cast your lot with. To discount them is to reveal yourselves to be comfortably cocooned and unwilling to take a step outside your own experience and imagine someone else's: your neighbor now afraid to wear her head-scarf to the grocery store. The gay man now second-guessing his usual route home in the dark. The Latina betrayed by her own facial features and subject to derision and terror. The black man assumed to be a gangster, and subject to execution. This is what's happening in America today. We marginalize and dehumanize people who frighten us. Every single time we generalize about people, we're wrong. We're wrong, and we're lazy, and we're also less safe, if that is the point of the exercise. We are all far, far less safe now.



So what do we do? Deliberately, we do not have all the options embraced by some of our political foes: most of us are not armed. That's not the way we roll. One thing we do is band together for peace. We keep our eyes and ears open, and when any of us is under attack, we stand with that person. Literally. Physically. We stand together and we give each other strength. And we reject violence.

And we mobilize. There is so much to defend: our civil rights, our health care, our environment, our standing in the world. Everything we've ever cared about is under attack. Everything that actually does make America great is to be dismantled. It has not escaped us that international terrorists will take this opportunity to goad our new president, an insecure, easily-bruised, childish bully, into the all-out holy war they have yearned for. They've got their man, now. As bad as that is, we don't need an external enemy if we're rotting from within.

And with all that, there are even worse things.  We are many years too late to undo the damage we've already done to our planet. But we must keep things from getting worse. We have to at least try. We are out of time to waste. And we can't do it by pulling out the rest of the fossil fuel and burning it up. We have an international climate change agreement signed now--baby steps, far from adequate--but even at that, our new president wants to rip it up and drill, baby, drill. He wants to shovel ever more coal into the boiler of a runaway train. He is a simple, uninformed man: he thinks he's creating jobs. He wants to give us full employment--as grave diggers. When we're done we can all jump in.

We can't let him. We need to stand, march, and holler. We need to fill the streets with our good and beautiful selves and hold each other up. Someone talked about building a wall. We need to be that wall.

The Spoils

We're Americans. We came, we conquered, we pushed into the endless West by the sweat of our brow and the fire of our rifles, and even though we ran out of endlessness long ago, we still believe we can bootstrap ourselves into our own individual clean water and roads and schools and self-defense, all 320 million of us. 'S long as we don't get sick or nothin'. No socialism for us!

But oh, capitalism. Why do we love it so, and so uncritically? It's the engine of prosperity, that's the dogma--the idea that the means of production are in private hands, that profit accrues to the victors, that everyone comes out better, that we go on growing forever and together. If only there were any evidence that it's true, and not that a whole lot of people are doing the work and a tiny fraction is accumulating the profits, and that it's not possible to grow forever! Something doesn't add up.

Used to be people did for themselves and traded for what they could, and mostly people were on the same level. Maybe not for the last few hundred years, but for a million more before that. And they managed to thrive. What's happening, now that having far more than one needs has been elevated to a virtue?

Ask my friend Julie. Julie Zickefoose is a naturalist, exquisitely educated in the splendor of this, our first and last planet. She is observant enough to behold the whole fabric, to know what will come undone when the threads are pulled. She knows what sustains us. But she has to pay for that intimacy. Because, more than those of us who allow advertising to instruct us what we should crave, she experiences every day the thumping joy of natural abundance, our true wealth. And with it, the freight of sorrow that comes with knowing what we've lost, and have yet to lose.

She's counting her losses now. She's got eighty natural Ohio acres she calls a "sanctuary," because it's the losses all around it that define it. And just down the road, she is watching a wooded wonder come crashing down, tree by tree, and she knows every creature that depends on it, bird to bat to bobcat. She'll be the one who remembers where the newt pond used to be. She is watching a tapestry being degraded to burlap. Because someone was willing to part with it for a dab of cash to put an oil well in there. Soon the birdsong will be crushed under a constant roar, and a flaming stack will steal the dark from the night.

She and many of her neighbors have not signed away their mineral rights, but a patchwork of natural poverty is blooming all around her, scored by a drumbeat of machinery. When the patches overwhelm the original fabric, the threads can't hold it together.

Lord pity the people who have the misfortune of living on top of something like the Marcellus Shale. When coal is to be mined, or copper, or diamonds, or shale oil, everything that stands between capitalism's victors and their money is called "overburden." That would include your forests, your carbon sinks, your newt ponds, your topsoil, your water, your last planet's own means of production. And all of us: we're overburden too. Coal miners are nothing if not expendable, but so is everyone else who counts on the genius of the living world to sustain us, even if we don't know it. We are to be tossed aside as the money is siphoned to the top and we will be left with less than we started with. Much less.



It's not a coincidence that extraction piracy is so often inflicted on indigenous peoples. In some parts of the world, they are sitting on the last unmolested acres, so they must be subdued. In America, the First Nations were allotted the unloved bits, the pieces with no obvious value to the conquerers, and now that it turns out there's black gold in them there barren hills, why, it's time for them to knuckle under again. In North Dakota, the Standing Rock Sioux are holding their ground against the capitalists. The oil comes from elsewhere, but the pipeline is to be routed in a way that threatens their sacred sites and their water. Life, in other words. Lest these concerns seem quaint and primitive, know this: the pipeline route has already been changed to accommodate the needs of the good white people of Bismarck.

Only a false economy considers the profit of a few to be a fair swap for a devastated, discarded landscape and a ruined atmosphere. The balance sheets are off. The costs have been hidden.

The Standing Rock Sioux understand what is sacred on this last planet, and they're standing against its destruction. Who will stand with them?

Hot Off The Press

June 4th. It's over a hundred degrees in Portland bless-my-liberal-heart Oregon. It's unprecedented, since Calendars. Hell, since trilobites, probably--but let's get real. It's not July, and it's not Dubai. It's fucked up, is what it is.

So now I would like to take this opportunity to thank our newspaper of record, The Oregonian, for taking a courageous stand against accepted climate science. Yes, I know any given individual day of weather is not predictive of a change in climate. I know that kind of thing, because I am literate in science, and I am not on the editorial board of The Oregonian. I also know, unlike the editorial board of The Oregonian, that we are, collectively, seriously screwed.

I get it. Climate science is uncomfortably accuse-y. It points a finger of blame. At us. And we can't have that. We're nice people, just trying to accumulate a little money, and we're not trying to wreck anything. So if you write a reasonable article about human-caused global warming, you'd better put in a trigger warning. For stupid people, who do not want to be reminded they're stupid. Enter The Oregonian.

This time The Oregonian is all upset because the Portland Public Schools said they wouldn't accept any curricular material that suggested climate change wasn't real, or huge, or human-caused. The Oregonian claims that's not really scientific. Real scientists don't stifle controversy. We must teach the controversy! Remember when we merged the Home Economics Department with Religious Studies when someone found that image of Jesus on a pancake?

And our best teachers and scientists are all about having an open mind. They truly want to Teach The Controversy, except when Mercury is in retrograde, which makes them feel hesitant, something the climate-change deniers could surely sympathize with; and also, they don't like to work with their heads up their asses, because it gets their spectacles all smeary.

But I get it, Oregonian. No sooner do all the climate scientists of the world come up with a thumping consensus about climate change than other folks feel compelled to be contrarian about it. It just feels right, to go against the grain. The more thousands of climate scientists line up against you, the bigger your contrarian woody is. And hey: the science of climate-change-denial is a slam dunk. They used to say eggs were bad for you, and now this. Screw Science. Am I right? Weren't we always able to sit down in a faux-leather seat and transport ourselves twenty miles to a big-box store just to pick up chips and a twelve-pack?

Damn right we were. That's why we like to hear from Dr. Gordon Fulks so very often, and fortunately The Oregonian gives him a big ol' platform several times a year. Dr. Fulks comes with an antique Ph.D and a solid grasp of thirty-year-old science. And he's easy to find, because he lives in the basement at the Cascade Policy Institute and never misses feeding time, when they throw down the antelope haunch.

Dr. Fulks says we've had global warming before. Lotsa times! It's natch'l! Such as in the old days when we had monster forest fires and gigantic flatulent termites and raging volcanoes, a time Dr. Fulks probably remembers with some fondness.

It's not like we haven't been messing with the carbon balance for thousands of years, what with our stripping of the forests, and our tilled agriculture, and any of a number of other practices that have steadily pumped carbon into the air. Of course we didn't get super efficient about it until about 150 years ago, when we started mining out the really major carbon deposits and frying them into the air as fast as we could. Holy moly, what a ride we're having! Cars and jets and rockets, faster and faster and faster!

It's all totally normal. There'd be nothing to conclude from it, if the graph for our carbon emissions didn't fit so perfectly inside the graph for catastrophic global warming. But it does. It's slick as a knife in a scabbard. Or a head up an ass.

It's snug.

It Came From Out Of The Sky

Daddy! Come look! There's water falling right out of the sky, just like Grandma said it used to do!

Get your pale little fanny right back in here. Your five minutes are up. And you can't take everything your Grandma says right to the banking app.

She said it used to do it for months on end sometimes.

That's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. Use your common sense, boy. Remember what Grandma used to say about Florida?

She said that's where the old folks used to go when they retired.

Exactly. Now think about that. Why would anyone ever go to the Sunken Peninsula? It was just an expression. Like when we told you we took Rover to live on the farm.

Rover isn't on the farm?

Rover's fine. He's fine. What I mean is your Grandma comes up with some stuff sometimes.

What about the solid water? She said sometimes the water would go solid. She said she'd roll it into a ball and smack her brother in the head with it.

That I believe.

And there's be so much solid water that they'd pile it up in the mountains.

Where it would get all dusty. Eww. Solid water! As if!

No! She said! She said there used to be a lot of it in the olden days. That they had to have solid water to stand the mastodons up on.

See, right there. Mastodons? Your grandmother doesn't know anything about mastodons. She only goes back to the Cruz administration, and there haven't been any mastodons since Noah economized on cubits. What is it they're teaching you in the Edu-Pod these days?

But Crayonce's Grandpa said the same thing. That water used to fall right out of the sky, all the time.

I know, son. The old folks used to tell me the same stuff. And rainbows stretched across the sky like giant oil slicks! And there was a beast with a single horn coming out of the middle of its head! And tomatoes and corn came right out of the dirt. And people used to eat things that floated around in the ocean. It's revolting. If Grandma saw water coming out of the sky, why isn't she rich? Get in here before you dissolve.

But it's true! There's water coming out of the sky right now! Not a bunch, but little bits of it! Come look! We could take all our jugs and set them up on the, on the--the place Grandma calls a patio. Where she says they used to sit around, of an evening.

God help us.

And maybe they would all fill up with the water that's falling out of the sky.

Son. I'll break into next week's allotment if you absolutely must have water. The good stuff. With the minerals and the marketing in it and stuff. Where does water come from? Do you even know? You kids, I swear! They drill it. They mine it. They put it into bottles and your daddy and your mommy shovel data all day long to be able to buy it. Water doesn't just fall out of the sky, son. And what if it did? Would you drink something that came out of the sky? Do you know where the sky has been? It's all smoke and coal and farts up there. Now get in here before your eczema gets eczema.

What if we drill too much and we run out?

Son. You have to have faith. The Lord will provide.

What's faith? Is it like a drill?

It's more like a leaf blower. It takes all the chaos and things we don't understand and blows it into tidy little piles that make sense. If we run out of water, and we have faith, the Lord will take care of us. There are scads of other planets.

Why can't the Lord just put more water here? I get carsick.

Faith, son, faith. It's not for us to know how it works. But it will be easy. There'll be a portal or something. It'll open up for us once we...retire to Florida. And then we'll be on our new planet. There'll be a planet for you and me and Mommy.

Grandma said you could go to hell for all she cared.

And with any luck, there'll be a planet just for Grandma.

Hot On Hood

Basically, if at some point on a hike I say "it's just up here around the bend" and Dave says "you do realize we could actually die," you know the Price and Brewster family has had a normal adventure. Dave likes to anticipate the worst so that anything short of death seems like a bargain. I don't care if we die as long as I don't have to be aware of it beforehand.

In this case, we'd come up to Mt. Hood in order to get away from the heat. It was slated to be 100 degrees in town and theoretically the idea of being 6,000 feet higher, where in a normal year we might have snow, back when we used to have normal years, sounded cooler. I think the way most people do it is they drive up to the Timberline Lodge and slug beers inside where, if it's not actually air-conditioned, it is at least a massive enough building that it maintains an even temperature. We didn't do it that way.

No. What we decided to do was see about a few little trails we hadn't been on before. It's getting harder to find those. But we discovered a little nest of them at the end of a dead-end road and we started exploring. It was hot in the shade. But the trails all interconnected, and weren't long. Which gave us plenty of options to bail out. There was a little lake with salamanders in it, a very good sign. The network of trails was like an overturned bowl of spaghetti, and we figured we'd noodle around until we'd exhausted them.

And then we came upon a sign at an intersection. One trail said: "Timberline Lodge 2.5 miles." Really? Dave looked at me. I looked at Dave. Done deal. We can do 2.5 miles on our hands without shaking out pocket change. There's beer at the Lodge. Off we went.

Well, up we went, at a dead trudge. The trail was boulder-strewn and dusty and there wasn't any shade on it anywhere. It was like a spa for scorpions. If it wasn't a hundred degrees, it was one whisker-on-a-desert-rat shy of it. We had water, but salt began to crust on my face. That's about when Dave began to talk about death. He doesn't have a good sense of direction, and it's easy for him to imagine that the trail will go on for fifteen miles and they'll have to send out trained corpse-sniffing badgers to find our papery remains.

And yet, we did paw our way to the top, and Timberline Lodge was there as advertised, and they still sold beer, and the nice waitress allowed as how we could supersize it for a buck, and sure enough a crane came in and lowered a couple massive glasses onto the table for us. And Dave had a second one just to check quality control, and we went outside, where it was still possible to bake a pizza on one's backpack, and, with almost no forethought, and for the first time in forty years, we stuck our thumbs out and got us a ride to the bottom of the mountain.

Took all of thirty seconds. Evidently we don't look very menacing anymore. "Or," I said to the nice snowboarder who picked us up, "maybe after all these years I've still got it." Actually, I don't know if I've still got it, but I admit I did stick it out a little.

"Or maybe he's still got it," the man said, hooking a thumb back toward Dave. God bless America. Everybody's a little more relaxed. It's all good, as long as someone's still got it.

Resolved: Whatever

West Virginia mountain stream.

Finally, there has been some great progress made in the US Senate to address climate change, in much the same way progress was made on the Great Wall of China when King Zheng of Qin turned to his minions and said, "you know, if we had a wall here, we could hang pictures."

Yes, the US Senate has addressed climate change ("hello, climate change"). Led by the new Republican majority, it passed a measure in which global warming was alluded to as a thing that might actually be happening after all, not that we had anything to do with it. It is a Sense Of The Senate statement, a declaration of consensus with all the impact of "we like long walks along the beach" or, in this case, "what-ever." The climate changes all the time, it was pointed out, which is why we have both galoshes and tube tops and the freedom to choose, God bless America.

W. Va. stream downhill from coal mine.

Because sober minds do not believe it makes any sense to suggest that anything mere humans can do could possibly affect something so vast as the planet's atmosphere. In fact, it's arrogant. It's an insult to God to suggest that man can repaint the heavens.

And it's certainly beyond the pale to intimate that there is any correlation between the observed current global warming trend and the fact that over three hundred million years ago plants developed bark and got absolutely huge and sucked massive amounts of carbon out of the air and pooted out oxygen and made life just fabulous for giant cockroaches and termites while vast expanses of shallow seas and swamps flooded and drained over and over again for, like, sixty million years, and ultimately buried all that solar energy that was stored in the big plants and fossilized it so that the carbon was tucked neatly underground, while the atmospheric concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide settled into percentages that were not maybe as ideal

New, improved, engineered ex-mountain stream.

from the point of view of the giant cockroaches and termites but ultimately worked out better for other folks like salamanders and dinosaurs and, golly, us too, which is really good because that's how we were able to thrive and develop big wrinkly brains and figure out where all that sixty million years' worth of sequestered carbon was hiding and begin to haul it out of the ground where it had been for the last 300,000,000 years and burn almost all of it right the fuck up in about 200 years at a geometric rate that just happens to perfectly mirror the rise in the planetary temperature and the carbon load in the atmosphere because, Junior, there is such a thing as coincidence. Coincidence. Which means completely unrelated events that happen at the same time from which there is no reasonable conclusion to be drawn.

Yes, my darling Republicans in the US Senate, absent divine whimsy, there's no explaining coincidence. Nothing to be made of two things that happen at exactly the same time and track each other as precisely as stink and roadkill, or disco pants and John Travolta. Or your agenda and the Koch Brothers'. You ignorant sluts.

The Resolution Solution

It's a new year, and people like to make resolutions, so I'll tell you about one of mine that totally worked. I'd been riding my bike to work sporadically for years but it was pretty easy to talk myself out of it on any given morning. Especially because my mornings started hours before dawn and a whole lot of the time it was as rainy as it was dark, and none of that mattered as long as I was still under the covers, so I'd stay there a little longer.

One new year, I rode my bike to work and decided I would draw a little automobile on my calendar every day I drove my car, just to see how lazy I really was. The first one was just a little tiny automobile picture, but I colored it red because that's the color cars should be, and you could see it from across the room. And that tiny little red car drawing began to rumble with implied oiled ducks, and ruined reefs, and the last breaths of slimed otters sinking beneath the sea, and tearful indigenous peoples in the tar sands sacrifice zone, and drowning island nations, and hurricanes and bear carcasses and parched soil and superbugs and methane-belching tundra and war and fire and famine and only the memory of pikas. It was horrible. The next morning, and just about every one after that, I put on my biking duds no matter what the weather because I could not bear to draw the little automobile. At the end of the year I had only four cars on my calendar.

save the pikas

So I thought that kind of thing could work for anybody. Let's take an example. A lot of us are in the bad habit of saying mean things about people on the internet. We make snarky remarks about our family or we go into great detail calling out complete strangers who we believe have wronged us in some way. Somebody gave us a look, or took a tone, and they need correction in the form of public shaming. That is naughty of us! How about if every time we thought about writing something mean about someone, we had to actually write down the mean thing where anybody could see it?

Oh wait. I see. That wouldn't work, because that's the whole problem. Evidently we do not feel bad about writing bad things. Especially where everyone can see it. Actually, we're pretty pumped about doing that very thing.

I always figure the people writing mean things are overly concerned about what other people think of them, unusually likely to assign bad motives to other people's behavior, and really on guard against someone thinking something about them that they basically think about themselves. And the fiercer they are about it, the more likely it is that they do feel bad about themselves. If you're reasonably comfortable with yourself, you're not as likely to think other people are thinking bad things about you, and you're not as likely to lash out. This is not a groundbreaking observation. In fact, it's so reliable that if you think I'm talking about you--I probably am.

please save the pikas

So here's my New Year's suggestion. Every time you write something mean on the internet, draw a little red car on your calendar. Believe me, you don't want to see that.