Major test...

New Year

Is it possible it has been over a year since I last posted on this? Busy working on a novel I sent off for last judgment yesterday. Besides awaiting judgment, now what?

Time to figure all this out again

Walk Notes From Zone 4 Occasional Writing From Blayney Colmore Bernard Mizeki June 19, 2012 If you have to stand on your head to make somebody happy, all you can expect is a big headache. – Eileen Beckerman the sun soon hits her height and from apogee summer so long awaited casts long light across array of incredulity Greece may have her pique provoked Angela Merkel marking her as profligate Mitt may miss his mojo mitigated by Barack begging his business bonafides Iran’s ire may be raised by members of the nuclear club cold-shouldering her application Roger Clemens may be thumbing his nose at the guardians of the gates of America’s pastime purity Lance Armstrong may wonder whether double jeopardy may make mockery of his late maturing triple tri Tiger may take time to turn back the clock to days of his ascendency – if ever a plague of drones may create contempt for Barack’s Nobel prize our economy may take eons – if ever – to support our best brag land of opportunity a pigeon on the cemetery walk last week wouldn’t fly she let us get just near enough to see she had a tag a carrier or racer consulting internet sites we brought water grain she was briefly joined by another banded bird during last week’s heavy rain Cosmos alerted me to her huddled under the barn eaves took her more water and grain went back an hour later to check dead removed her tag and searched for sites to send word the moth on the garage floor so perfect untouched but dead I brought him into the house and placed him carefully in the arrangement Lacey had created wondering what happened grateful for his delightfully distracting corpse promiscuous poppies putting pudenda plainly in shameless sight jungle here everywhere goslings growing foraging for food in Lacey’s vegetable garden Cosmos chases we holler geese retreat briefly we net the blueberries but fill the feeder for food and our viewing pleasure make it all work seamlessly together if you can if not… my mother made her mark on me always assigning a long walk as prefect prescription for … well, for everything Kai and I took her up on that

Winter

So recently we were sleeping with a fan to cool us.

Then we were nearly swept away in a flood.

Now this.

Omnipotent

Transients

Philip and James May 2, 2011

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
Lynda Barry (b. 1956)

***

Days that go off course early have a way of diverting from the intended route a few more degrees every hour
until by nightfall
you find yourself somewhere unrecognizable
no worry
listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go. – (e.e. cummings 1894-1962)

which may account for how I ended up at the
Brick & Bell cafe @7:15am
hoping to re-collect myself at a tiny table off in the
corner of the patio with
my mocha and my journal drawing deep yoga
breaths psyche searching

suddenly surrounded by nine loud
men
noisily pulling tables and chairs to convene their forum
on
how to evade cell phone charges in Europe how much
cabs cost in Rome

and without so much as a
may I
backed into my chair knocking over
my mocha
spilling it onto my jeans my journal and all its eccentricities tucked inside confirming course correction so far futile

enduring outrage at a world as yet
unwilling
to unwind under my direction requires energy

the striking 7 ft rattler that slithered across our
path on a sunny high desert hike without apology for
altering our route
the huge old canopy tree thrusting up the sidewalk creating a perfect skateboard launch until the city
chopped its roots to smooth my walk

the precipitous slope some realtor somehow slipped
by the regs about not building in canyons being
cleared by hand by two Mexican laborers to erect two
multi-million dollar houses in a hurry before
the land makes its return to the ocean
bottom

the Scarlet Tanager who flew into our front
hallway
introducing unscheduled havoc into his
day and ours
the rude seagulls that perch and poop on people’s
precious cars

the pair of gulls performing astonishing acrobatics
one chasing the other that had just
snatched something sumptuous off the beach weaving bobbing swooping low at the exact wrong instant smashing into a surfer’s car headed home after a sublime session converted to grief as the bird flopped

its end on our asphalt

impromptu brushes with our transience
impotent efforts to stay the course
buy friends earn praise counter self-condemnation
seduce us into laboring in vain to eradicate whatever
makes a mockery of our longed-for
omnipotence

Osama bin Laden

There can't be a web site in creation that hasn't waded in on the killing of bin Laden today.

While I am a part of the United States and thus am in awe of the intelligence and courage that finally brought down this man who became our nation's most recent symbol of danger and evil in the world, I don't share either the jubilation of the revelers in front of the White House last week, nor of those who made the pilgrimage to ground zero today.

My reasons are many but chief among them is our love of finding a symbol that will make a complex issue seem simple.

Bin Laden became that symbol for us in in the misnomer of the war on terror which we seem unable – despite President Obama's early efforts – to excise from our conversation.

I am no intelligence expert (and the only one I know is jubilant about this killing) but I'd be willing to bet that Osama bin Laden had long ago ceased to be of great significance in the operations of terrorists who seek to do us harm. In fairness that is partly because we drove him into deep hiding. But it is also because he has never been a central spokesman for Islam.

Whatever martyrdom that may now surround him will be largely of our creation.

And it seems only rational to assume that the assault was not only an assault on the man we have been hunting for a decade, but on the easily wounded pride of Islamic jihadis without significant connection to bin Laden. Which would suggest that this has stirred the hornet's nest anew.

Now, having identified bin Laden as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks almost from the outset (whether he was in fact or not) we were backed into a corner from which we could emerge only by last night's stealth operation.

I have long sided with Vice President Biden who wanted to fight terrorists with intelligence and small bands of special forces. Last night's operation seems to bolster the argument for that. It is no mere irony that the president made a near equation between the death of bin Laden and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians in the wars we have waged since 9/11. The wars seem to have resolved nothing, and in fact to have ramped up the rage of people in those countries higher than before we went to "save" them.

I wish we weren't so dependent on oil from that region that we can't afford to simply let it figure out its own future. I wish we hadn't become the only super power just when we did, tempting us to use the moment to try to cow any serious challenge to our hegemony for at least a generation. I wish that we hadn't become so out-of-balance rich in comparison to the rest of the world, that we became wary of any other country that seemed to challenge us, and created such envy in the less affluent countries.

I can wish a lot of things. But these things are as they are, and they require even a thoughtful president like Barack Obama to do things I'm pretty certain he could never have imagined himself doing before he felt the weight of his office.

On the day he gave the final order to carry out the mission that killed our arch enemy, he then boarded a helicopter to go see the devastation the tornadoes had wreaked in the southern states and to offer solace to those people. He flew back to Washington in time to put on his black tie and attend the White House correspondents' dinner where he did the stand-up comedy routine now required of the president on that occasion. (I thought the jokes – his and the professional comedian's – were pretty lame.)

God save the United States from ourselves.

Our Species

One of the very conservative financial opinion writers I follow (yes, I do watch that side of the street, too) had a screed this week against Earth Day and its supporters whom he regards as eco-terrorists.

His reasoning is that they (we) hate our own species and regard ourselves as alien to the planet, looking forward to our own extinction with diabolical glee.

I took the criticism to heart because I have often written of our species as a passing phenomenon in the geological history of our planet, and take heart in believing that the planet will survive us.

I say that not because I am self-loathing. I feel lucky, privileged to have been born human on this planet.

I say it first simply as a matter of fact. We are a very recent development in the history of the planet and there surely are more reasons to believe we likely won't last longer than, say, the dinosaur, than there are reasons to believe we will. The writer himself acknowledged that we are an inauspicious species on a tiny planet tucked away in a corner of what is likely only one of billions of universes, so to make a big deal of ourselves is ignorant hubris.

Now he may be right that our complex brains, consciousness, which so far as we know is unique to our species on this planet so far, will sponsor innovation that will sustain us longer than mere biological and geological history would predict.

My own sense is that tendency to interpret the fate of our globe anthropomorphically is not only a narrow parochial exercise, but also leads us to make short-sighted decisions that ignore our place imbedded alongside and dependent on all the other species and phenomena.

I don't believe the likelihood of our species having an end – just as we had a beginning – is a tragedy in the history of the earth. Any more than I consider the certainty of my own death a tragedy. It is simply the culmination of the wondrous story that began several decades ago with my birth.

No doubt many of the things people who fancy themselves green are misguided and self-defeating. The system of which we are a part is way more complex than the human brain is capable of fathoming.

I have been impatient at times with naturalists who managed to close down a lovely beach I grew up on because human activity was disturbing the habitat of the Piping Plover. I seriously doubt either that snow fence will save the bird, nor that the extinction of the bird will be any more terrible for the planet than the extinction of the millions of species that have disappeared since life first appeared here.

But the conviction (or religious belief) that the so-called free market is a more dependable mechanism for balancing the needs and demands of the various species – so-called Social Darwinism – than those who conscientiously work to responsibly conserve our mutual habitat, is nothing more than human hubris.

Have its sponsors noticed what the freeing of the global market of its restraints resulted in just a couple of years ago?

Be grateful we're not finally in charge here.

Weather

Before I moved from New England to Southern California, I not only assumed enduring winter was part of human life, but I suspect I was even a little self-righteous about those who face winter hardships having more character than those who don't.

After a decade in San Diego we retired to our 1830 farmhouse in rural Vermont.

In November.

I have joked that I said to my wife, "If I can muster the energy, I'm going to kill myself." But it was only partially a joke. Not that I really would kill myself, but that I found the cold, the drab, and especially the lack of luster to the daylight, incredibly depressing.

She was still doing work in California and in April I went with her. One afternoon I took a long swim in the ocean. When she came home I asked, "What were we thinking?"

That was 15 years ago. We found ourselves a nice little apartment near the beach, and we now come to California at the first serious sign of winter in Vermont, and don't return until some neighbor gives us the all-clear, sometime in May.

It's true that those who spend winters in New England have more character.