The Meaning Of Life

 

As I have mentioned before, I am a seeker.  I have always wondered about the hard stuff.  Is there really a god?  Does that teacher really know what he is talking about?  How many subatomic particles are there?  Why is the human brain so complex?  Why is the universe expanding in defiance of gravity?  Why do Republicans exist?  What is the difference between eukaryotes and prokaryotes and how can prokaryotes have flagella?

Vegetarian animals have their eyes more to the side of their heads in order to see predators, who have their eyes in front to see prey.  Therefore, should humans always be carnivorous?  What about biblical prophesy?  Are these the last days?  Is existential despair the true human condition?  Is there enough time left to reverse global warming?

Do you see what I mean?  I have lots of questions and not many answers.  In my college days an art major and I were scrubbing wax off the baseboards in the student center during semester break.  I asked him about the meaning of life as artists always have a different vision about the nature of things.  His reply?  “ Everything is what it is.”  We’ll, yes, but not very satisfying.   Artists look and render what they see.  I look and wonder why?

This defect of my character has led me to seek out those people and traditions who purport to know the answers.  I was raised a nominal Methodist.  I found only felt figures on a felt board.  I did like the doxology, but hated the jello salads in the basement.

I had a profound period of existential despair after my mother’s death my junior year of high school.  Camus, the Blues, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.   Being afraid of girls was no help at all.

The winter of my senior year I was the wrestling team manager.  I wasn’t much of an athlete (another reason for existential despair) so the wrestling team was great fun.  I was able to help and even make a difference.  The scourge of wrestlers is boils.  Sliding on those mats means abrasion, and bacteria find their way into the skin.  Evil, those boils.  As  team manager,  I insured there were no  boils because I kept the mats disinfected.  No pus and blood on my watch.

There it is, the answer to despair.  Stay engaged.  I prevented boils, Camus enjoyed success with the ladies.  There is almost always a way.  Still, I sought.  On a wrestling trip to Salt Lake I bumped up against the Mormons.  I read, studied, listened, even dated a Mormon girl.  One night during an attack of angst I realized I didn’t believe in that stuff.

I then embarked on a career as an agnostic, annoying all the believers I knew by challenging their beliefs.  I continued my search with little success for quite a few years.  I think I substituted addictions for having any meaning.  If you are getting off, the need to keep it up takes over, even while knowing addiction is fruitless.  I had read Kerouac.

Then, during a dark night of the soul after a divorce, I was living in a basement apartment in Lasalle Colorado with my black dog.  I was working in the Greeley sewage disposal plant and the Maintenance Foreman was a deacon in an Assemblies Of God Church.  I went to his bible study, prayed, and got saved.  I asked Jesus in and felt this overwhelming feeling of being wrapped in love.  I got involved, had many experiences of the Holy Spirit, the addictions went away for a year, and I thought I had found the Meaning.

But, life interfered, as well as knowing all that Fundamentalist stuff made no sense.  I couldn’t stay with the holy rollers and ended up an Episcopalian.  For me, my higher power manifests as Jesus.  I couldn’t, however stay with the organized church.  Churches are instruments of power and control, contrary to what Jesus taught.  I did learn how to pray, and prayer is what grounds me.  No answers to the Big Question, however.In fact, I think I have given up on finding the Meaning.  It’s a mystery.

These days I practice Insight Meditation with all its Buddhist trappings.  The good thing about Buddhism is that it does not purport to answer those questions.  I fact, the Buddha mostly ignored all that stuff, saying the sole goal is to end suffering.  With our big brains, we look for reasons.  We think up explanations or buy into someone else’s explanation and create a world.  Almost always the core of that world is desire.  We want stuff, pleasure, a sense of belonging.

No way, dude.  It is all illusion.  Let it go and find emptiness.  That emptiness harbors the true meaning, a sense of being one with the Universe.  Well, I think so, anyway.  I haven’t even come close.  Maybe I need a Bodhi tree to meditate under.

My meditating has borne fruit.  I am finding equanimity.  I am less frustrated.  I am less angry.  I don’t feel as much despair.  I have periods of true happiness.  My addictions are losing their grip, especially if I do my part in my daily practice.  Can’t tell you about the meaning of the cosmos, but my cosmos is more peaceful.

 

Lovingkindness

We seem to be living in a world seething with hate.  It is always there, but currently it is more visible.  Our president wants adulation and to punish those who oppose him.  Everyone has a part of themselves who wants to do harm, usually because harm was done to them.  There is another way.

We are born with a need to be loved, to be fed, cuddled, protected, and allowed to grow.  A baby receiving those things responds with smiles, giggles, and joy.  The caregiver experiences joy as well.  The response to abuse is to withdraw and develop defenses for survival.  The capacity for love and joy can be lost.  We are all wounded to some degree and the result is conflict.

The response to love and nurturing is a desire to love and nurture in response.  We are born that way.  The word for it is lovingkindness.  All the anger and resentment is learned, a response to abuse.

My task is to increase lovingkindness and equanimity and allow the negativity to wither.  My techniques are Insight Meditation and Metta.  Metta is the practice of holding all living beings in prayer or lovingkindness.  “May all sentient beings be happy, may they be safe, may they be free.”  “May Mr. Trump be safe, may he be happy, may he be free and practice lovingkindness in his life.”   “May the driver who just gave me the finger be happy, safe, and free.”  I actually do this.  Not always, I still harbor old wounds, but my Metta practice is growing.

I feel better, am less angry, and don’t honk or give the other driver the finger nearly as much.  Buddha came up with this 2500 years ago, even though he didn’t drive, and those who practice lovingkindness are a powerful force for good which often goes unrecognized.  All the faith traditions encourage this in some way.  Yes, there are happy and loving people out there.

So, what about all those with anger and hate?  It’s our task to show them lovingkindness, as simple as smiling and allowing them to make that left turn.  We also deal directly with the negativity by listening and showing respect, gently offering a more caring viewpoint.  We help those in need, always with dignity and respect.  When angry, we breathe in, breathe out, pause, rinse and repeat.

I guess I am something of a Buddhist, but Jesus is still in my life, and always will.  A bit about Buddhism.  It has all the trappings of an Eastern faith tradition.  Saffron robes, chants, meditation, stupas and gilded  Buddhas, with one big difference.  Buddhism is nontheistic.  No worshipping some Big Guy.  The sole purpose is to end suffering.  Most often greed, or desire, is the root of suffering.  We can be in terrible pain but suffering is optional.

We decide we need something.  We make that up.  All we need is food, clothing, and shelter.  All the rest comes from craving, wanting to fill a hole that can’t be filled that way.  We might feel a bit better, but the desire always returned.    What to do? Let go. Meditate.  Practice lovingkindness.  Do lots of Metta.  Maybe I will get better at all that.

El Volcan De Fuego

Fuego

I no more than post about Kileaua, a shield volcano, when Fuego, a stratovolcano, lets loose.  Guatemala is part of a string of beautiful Central American countries harboring many volcanos.

 

 

 

The Cocos tectonic plate is smashing into the North American Plate just north of the Caribbean Plate.  As the Cocos dives below the North American, its rock containing lots of water goes down (subducts) and is heated by the hot magma in the mantle.

 

 

 

Pyroclastic Flow

New, lighter magma is formed which then rises and erupts.  The volcano’s lava doesn’t just flow out as in Hawaii.  Stratovolcano magma is more viscous, sticks and plugs the magma channel until pressure builds up and it blows in an explosive, destructive eruption.  The hot stuff rises into the atmosphere (ash), and also flows down the mountain as a  pyroclastic flow of superheated rock and ash, the killer.  Pinatubo in the Philippines, Pompeii, Etna, Mt. St.Helens,

Rainier, Lassen, Hood, and El Volcan de Fuego (Fuego=Fire).  The volcanos ring most continents and island arcs.

Kileaua has been erupting for a month with just a few injuries, and Fuego has probably killed hundreds in one day.  Don’t live too close to a stratovolcano.

Unexpected Happiness

Most people assume happiness comes from material things, especially in our consumer culture.  Not so, folks.  Happiness comes not from craving but from compassion and loving kindness.  I am an expert on craving.  Currently, my main craving is for ice cream.  I think about ice cream, I long for it.  I score!  I eat ice cream and have a fleeting feel good.  Then it starts all over.  I am suffering desiring the temporary fix that creamy, sweet, fatty stuff provides.

There are two main results.  I feel that discontent of no ice cream, eat ice cream, feel contented for an hour or so, than resume craving.  I am also getting fat.

There is another way.  Do good and feel good.  The good feeling doesn’t go away.  We are wired to help one another.  It comes from feeling compassion for someone who is suffering.  We then act out of loving kindness. The person suffering feels better and so do we.  They are feelings that don’t go away.

Many philosophers and economists say we operate on the pleasure principle.  Most of them assume pleasure results from satisfying craving.   The marketers exploit the craving and tell us happiness comes from the right beer, or car, or toothpaste.  In fact, they are exploiting suffering.

For the first part of my life I operated on that false pleasure principle.  I wanted stuff, temporary sensual gratification, alcohol, and ice cream.  I was something of a melancholy, trying to fill a void in my soul.  I then met the love of my life.  I was happy with her and looked forward to sharing satisfying cravings with her.  Food, stuff (lots of stuff), the mountains, the desert, canoeing, road trips, all those fleeting pleasures.

It turned out the love of my life is sick.  She has lupus, and can’t do many of the things I thought were the main goals of my life.  We can’t do road trips, she can’t be in the sun very long, she doesn’t have much energy, and she hurts.  All those fantasies exploded.

One of the benefits for me in meeting the love of my life is my commitment to her.   For better or for worse.  I cook.  I clean.  I do the heavy work of gardening, including maintaining that blasted sprinkling system.  I do Jin Shin Jyutsu(Japanese acupressure) three times a week I do shopping.  I lift, carry, move, assemble, and help in any way I can.  I scratch her back, we snuggle, we talk, laugh, and get cranky with one another.

Her family members have more trouble than they deserve.  I drove to Minneapolis to help her brother when his leg was broken by an errant automobile.  He has no support system there, so I went and helped out.  Her parents got old and infirm.  We visited Florida and North Carolina to help out.  We had lots of trips to Florida.  Her dad moved here when he could no longer handle the tasks of daily living.  Her mother moved to Boise to be with Carol’s sister and we visited there.  I also act as support for Carol’s two children, especially her son.

Blue Earth

All that seems like drudgery, inconvenience, and suffering.  Not so.  It is fulfilling.  I like to help, even if it means hundreds of miles of corn and soybeans on the way to Minneapolis.  Have you ever seen the blue earth clay west of Mankato (means blue earth) or the Nebraska sand hills?  Have you gotten lost on foot in downtown Minneapolis?  If not, you have really missed out.  The whole thing feels good.  Well, there is some inconvenience as well, but it is mostly happiness.   May you find happiness in helping others.

Pele

 

Kilauea

Pele is the Hawaiian Volcano Goddess.  Like many goddesses, she is both creator and destroyer.  She built the entire island chain, is now busy making the Big Island bigger, and is working on a new one that is just a seamount today.  It’s interesting most everyone in Hawaii believes in her and are resigned to her moods.

She is really in a mood now, both building and destroying.  If you haven’t been following the eruption, go to the USGS website or Facebook feed and watch.  We have a unique opportunity to watch new land being created.  Broadly there are two main types of volcanos – shield volcanos like Kilauea, and stratovolcanos like the ones on our west coast.  Mt. St. Helens is the latest example of what stratovolcanos can do if they have a mind to.

There are some minor ones, but those are the big two.  Their difference stems from the magma rising from the interface of the crust and the mantle.  Two types of magma create volcanos.  Stratovolcanos have felsic magma, derived from the lighter crust beneath continents.  The most common felsic rock is granite.  Shield volcanos are made of basalt, a mafic rock making the ocean floor.

Mt. Rainier

Stratovolcanos tend to form those big conical mountains people like to view or climb.  All the Cascades are stratovolcanos, Mt. Rainier being the most famous.  Felsic magma is less viscous and as it rises from the magma chamber the gasses are trapped until the pressure exceeds the pressure of the overlying rock.  Then it blows.  When Mt. Hood blows, goodbye to Eugene.  When Rainier blows, goodbye Seattle and Tacoma.

Mafic magma is more dense and less viscous and tends to flow out and spread with less violence if you can call a 300 foot high plume of 2000 degree lava less violent.  All that black lava spreading over the land is violent, it’s just not as explosive.  It’s gas bubbles that cause explosions.  As magma rises, there is less pressure, allowing gas bubbles to expand and some water becomes gas.  If the bubbles can move through cracks and voids in the magma it rises to the surface without big explosions.  If the magma is more homogeneous, the gas stays in place until its pressure exceeds the weight of the overlying magma and things go boom.

Shield Volcano

We are on a big ball of stuff.  The core tends to be iron, but there are radioactive elements there and when they decay, they give off heat.  So, we are living on a ball of really hot stuff, made of layers with different density.  Felsic rock continents are less dense than the mafic stuff under them.  They float on mafic magma much like an iceberg in the sea.  Most of the continent’s mass sits down in the mafic magma.  You can’t call deep magma liquid, it is more plastic, but it moves.  Hotter stuff rises through the cooler stuff above and sometimes makes it all the way.

It can rise into the mid ocean ridges, ooze out and spread.  A tectonic plate is forming.  As it moves away from the ridge, it runs into the lighter continent and heads back down, but not without making a mess on the continent.  There is the origin of stratovolcanos.  Mountain ranges and volcanos are mostly on the coasts.

Pacific Ocean Island Chain. Progress of the Hotspot

There are other place where magma surfaces called hot spots.  A plume of magma rises from the deep, belching and vomiting as it gets to the surface.  Hawaii, Iceland, and Yellowstone are hot spots.  The Hawaiian hot spot is out there in the Pacific where mafic magma lives, so shield volcanos form.  Lava flowing created the islands.  Yellowstone is in felsic rock country on a continent so periodically it blows up.  Really blows up, laying waste to hundreds of square miles.  If it happens, Denver is toast.

Tectonic plates move over the hot spots, leaving a chain of Hawaiian islands.  The Yellowstone hot spot has left a trail across Idaho.  Much of that track is composed of mafic magma that found its way up as the continent travelled west.  Lots of basalt there, forming the Snake River Gorge.

Don’t expect all this planetary action to slow down anytime soon.  There are still radioactive elements decaying and the rock doesn’t cool off very fast.  We have to resign ourselves to living on a big stirred up rock that will shove things around and pump magma out on the ground.  Thus, we must give Pele her due.  She is our neighbor and will do what she will.

Democracy vs Autocracy

Leaders pose during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017. Front left to right; China’s President Xi Jinping, Vietnam’s President Tran Dai Quang, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo, back left to right; Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump. (Jorge Silva/Pool Photo via AP)

As our American democracy comes under threat, I want to look at worldwide democracy versus autocracy.  Both models can be traced throughout human history.  The first recorded democracy was Athens around 500 BCE.  All citizens voted on each issue.  Citizens were men, no slaves or women allowed.  About 30% of the population voted.  Other Greek city-states also adopted the system and it lasted until Alexander took over.

Many primitive cultures were and are democratic.  Everyone has a say, and strong leaders were called on only in times of crisis.  Problem is, once a guy gets a taste of power, he wants to hold on to his power and maybe expand his reach.  Crisis becomes the rationale for retaining single man rule.  Note I use male pronouns, women in leadership positions were and are rare.

Men have a tendency to want to be in charge.  One strong personality can marshal support by offering a share of the plunder of war or land in the kingdom.  He whips the opposition (there is always opposition) and consolidates his rule.  Succession can be difficult, so rulers tried to create family dynasties.  This often met with some success, but not without turmoil inside and outside the dynasty.  They all eventually fail, with as many reasons as there are dynasties.

The dynasties tend to be bad neighbors, so warfare ensues, reinforcing the justification for autocracy out of self-defense.  Dynasties lead to imperialism, with the result of imposing autocracy on other countries.  The other countries don’t like outside rule, so as soon as they can they throw the autocrats out.

Another side effect of autocracy is corruption.  The autocratic class wants the power and wealth for themselves, thus restricting opportunity for advancement to an elite.  Everyone else wants to advance as well, so they cheat.  Black markets, smuggling, illegal cartels, organized crime, and bribery flourish.  The rulers resort to repression, exacerbating the situation.  Things get to the point where it is difficult to do most anything without bribery or other corrupt activity.  Economies like this tend to stagnate, leading to more unrest.

Racism is also a major factor.  The rulers always had pejorative names for the indigenous people, who were denied the opportunities enjoyed by the colonists.  The former Spanish and Portuguese colonies were the victims of rulers interested only in gold and souls.  It was necessary to cheat do do anything also.The French, Belgian, and Dutch colonies were exploited for resources and the rulers were just plain nasty.

Eventually the bad guys get thrown out, often replaced by another set of bad guys.  The rhetoric may be different, and lip service paid to democracy, but as all they have known is authoritarian rule, its mostly business as usual.  Some of the former British colonies did manage to become democratic, the USA, Canada, Australia, Botswana, India, and New Zealand, for example, but Uganda, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe, among others, remain under authoritarian rule.

What is needed for democracy to take hold?    Education, a tradition of opportunity to advance in the system, and most importantly, some wealth.  At the time of the American Revolution, the thirteen colonies had the highest per capita income in the world.  The other English-speaking colonies also had England’s democratic tradition.  India had Gandhi.

Democracies can also move to tyranny.  Fear tends to be the catalyst.  Many post-colonial countries started independence as democracies, but without any democratic tradition and the difficulties encountered in the transition, strongmen saw the opportunity to take over.  Many of them came from the military.  People initially accepted authoritarian rule in the hope of having stability and economic growth.

Many of the post-Soviet countries started as democracies, but strongmen soon took over.  They offered stability.  The two biggest and most dangerous retreats from democracy came in Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia.  Let’s look at them in turn.  Germany had several destabilizing conditions.  There was no well-developed democratic tradition.  Germany wasn’t unified until 1871.  There was an elected government, but the Kaiser and Bismarck called the shots.  After their defeat in The Great War, the reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles impoverished the nation.  The Weimar Republic was unable to lift the country out of a horrible depression.

Hitler, with his authoritarian approach fueled by fear generated by soaring unemployment coupled with propaganda blaming Jews rather than an onerous treaty led to his appointment as Chancellor in 1933.  Hindenburg was President, but the Nazis had strength in the Reichstag and an aging and weakened Hindenburg.

Hitler began by ignoring the treaty and began rearming the country which led to a return of economic stability.  His propaganda apparatus was effective in building a deep reservoir of support for his regime.  All his Master Race propaganda along with scapegoating Jews justified his expansionism, first in Austria then in the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland with its large German speaking population.

The non-aggression pact with Stalin and weak outside resistance led to the most destructive war in history.  The people had jobs, though.  Fear, propaganda, thuggery, and militarism set up the war.  Churchill’s refusal to cave in was what eventually led to Hitler’s defeat.  Oh, and Soviet resistance coupled with America entering the war overwhelmed the Wehrmacht.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it came after a period of growing nationalism in the subject states and a weakened Soviet government.  The Soviet State overreached in the arms race with the U.S. and the planned economy was causing unrest.  The reasons are more complex, but I have gone on too long anyway.

Latin America is another autocratic region with only a few exceptions, like Costa Rica.  The Spanish and Portuguese regimes were interested in two things: gold, and souls for the Church.  If someone wanted to significantly get ahead, it was necessary to cheat.  Indigenous people essentially had no rights.  When independence came, power shifted from Iberia to local ethnic European elites.  Things eventually get so bad the indigenous people revolt.  Usually a leftist autocracy results with a brief democratic interlude.  Even this change was often thwarted by U. S. Intervention.  The American government wanted stability and such things as human rights were ignored.

After the breakup and an attempt to build democracy, the Russian economy was horribly weakened.  There was much unemployment, and the government was attempting to wean the Russian people from their beloved vodka.  Fear and anger resulted in a return to strongman rule.  Democracy just does not take hold in a nation that had always had autocracy.

The western democracies tend to be fairly stable, but are vulnerable to bad neighbors.  There is always a right wing wanting to take over and destroy democracy.  The right gains strength when there is a source of fear.  Currently the influx of middle eastern refugees threatens to destabilize Europe.  Again, the underlying cause is racism and religious discrimination. The U.S. is currently experiencing the same phenomenon.  Racism and fear underlying the cry to Make America Great Again.  Great means white with tight control over those other people, especially ones from “shit countries”.

Hey, I have gone on way too long ranting about this stuff.  Problem for me is also fear that maybe the bad guys will really take over.

Spring

It’s Spring and the miracles are happening once again.  The grass is growing, the trees have leaves, the flowers are out, and the sprinkling system is all goofed up.

Carol started seedlings months ago and now they are going in the ground.  She asks me to put more water on the chard.  I can’t tell chard from kale.  She rolls her eyes and shows me where.

Winter is hard on sprinkler systems, especially the drip systems supposed to save water.  They get stepped on, kicked, blow apart, and just break.  I get soaked hunting down leaks and missing fittings.  I just discovered a new type of stake with sprinklers built in that may help.  We’ll see.

It’s getting harder to do all the fixing.  Sprinklers don’t work, but some of my parts aren’t in very good shape as well.  I have trouble getting up and down.  My knees hurt.  My back hurts.  I have trouble pressing tubing on fittings with my arthritic wrists.  I am getting lots of practice groaning.  Every year I have to splice the underground hoses because I chop into them with the shovel or axe.

Pulaski

Yes, the axe.  We have trees and shrubs and they have roots.  Right now I am in the process of replacing rock edging with bricks to make mowing easier.  Problem is, it is right next to a maple tree.  Did you know maples have shallow root systems?  I chop the roots with a Pulaski, a wildland firefighting tool with an axe on one side and a grubbing hoe on the other side.  It works well, but that big head is heavy.  I chop for a short time, stop to catch my breath, and chop again.  Carol has suggested I mark where the brick line is to go because my line wavers trying to miss the big roots.  What I have finished looks a lot better than rocks, however.

It’s worth it.  The yard and garden are beautiful, I get exercise, Lowe’s makes money selling me parts, and we will get lots of good stuff to eat.  The spring produce is mostly leafy greens, so I have to eat salads.  The evil woman even sneaks kale into the salads.

The Japanese Beetle War continues.  We applied milky spore to the lawn which is supposed to infect the grubs and kill them.  There is also a chemical grub product that’s only mildly poisonous.  The grubs eat the grass roots, killing it, then pupate and hatch the beetles when hot weather arrives.  The bare spots in the lawn are recovering and we may have a few less Beetles.  If only all the neighbors would do the same thing.

We also have a new rechargeable hand vacuum to suck the little demons off the leaves.  Leaves.  The creatures eat some leaves and ignore others.  They love many roses, ignore others, and love grape leaves.  They like linden tree leaves, but our tree is big and robust.  So much for our grape arbor over the patio.   We are investigating alternatives.  It’s good they don’t eat everything, or we would have to eat them.

In the meantime, beauty reigns.  The raspberry bushes are springing up, flowers are out, and the veggies are growing away.  We also are going to have peaches.  We had three frosts when the tree was blooming, but the frost mostly did a good job of thinning the fruit.

Puppies and Kittens

I was lamenting the current political situation with someone recently.  She says she spends down time looking at videos and pictures of puppies and kittens. She mostly avoids the news.  My approach is quite different.  I look at car crashes in Russia, high speed chases in     L. A., eruptions, earthquakes, forest fires, burning and collapsing buildings, and urban shootouts.

I do look at cute cat and dog stuff, but end up watching violent cat fights and cats chasing dogs.  What is wrong with me?  Yes, horrible things are being done by and to our government, but will my preoccupation with it all is not gonna do much good out there.  I have always been a news junkie, so maybe all this is unavoidable.  But, even my humor is turning black.  I like to tell old jokes, but even they are about some variety of mayhem.

Do you know about the Polynesian King who had just made a pact with a neighboring king to stop all the stealing and poaching that had been going on for years.  To celebrate, the neighboring king gave him an ornate hand carved throne.  The king had it installed in the Great hall of his thatched palace and had his old throne stored upstairs.  One day he was on his new throne and the old throne came cracking down from the thatched ceiling and killed him.  The moral is “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.”

I hadn’t thought about that joke in years, but this morning it came bubbling up out of my unconscious.  I told the story to my wife and it ruined our morning tea and chat session.  So the mess out there is creating an internal mess.  What to do?  I have only managed to get halfway through The Princess Bride, and I did Harry Potter last fall.  Is it time to reread Tolkien or should I give in and read Faust and Neitzsche?

The dark side of the Force seems to be upon me.  Yoda always told Luke to not give in to hate and rage.  My new pen and pencil holder is a Darth Vader coffee cup.  I guess I haven’t taken the message to heart.  I think I need a road trip.

Earthquakes

If you think I am obsessed with earthquakes, you are right.  I think the ground under me should stay still.  We already have enough trouble with the weather, let’s not have the earth move as well.  I am sure most people agree with me, especially those who live in earthquake prone areas.  The bulk of the population live in earthquake country because tectonic plate boundaries tend to be on sea coasts where most people live.

I don’t live in quake country.  Denver is fairly stable since the Rocky Mountains stopped rising.  There are lots of faults around and faults mean one area moves relative to another.  The mountains are lighter as they wear away and tend to pop up a little out of the thick, semi molten stuff down there.  So, motion and stress on the faults, therefore shaking.  It doesn’t happen very often.

When the Army started pumping toxic chemicals into the ground under Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the liquid lubricated some old faults and vertical cracks in the ancient rock at the bottom of the 12,000 foot well and what stress there was let go.  Denver experienced around 700 earthquakes, most of them minor but disturbing to the population near the Arsenal.  There were two quakes above magnitude five resulting in minor structural damage and broken glass near the Arsenal.

As you might expect, voices were raised.  Injection wells were used in other places with no surface consequences, so the shaking at the Arsenal came as a surprise.  There was a clear correlation between waste injection and quakes, so injection stopped. The stuff injected was pretty nasty, and other means were used to dispose of what was left after the Well was shut down.

I am not sure pumping toxic stuff into the earth is a good idea anywhere, even if it is thousands of feet down.  Toxic water can be treated, but the toxins don’t go away.  They have to go somewhere.  Sometimes they can be incinerated, sometimes buried, but they are still around.  We are doing a good job at fouling our nest, the only one we have.

Some evangelicals don’t think there is any problem because the planet’s days are numbered and we were given dominion over the land until then.  But, what if what they say are prophesies  are wrong?  These beliefs underpin some of the dismantling of environmental safeguards going on these days. I suspect the real reason is not theology, but greed.

Hair

Bald

Hair is part of my everyday consciousness, because I am mostly bald.  It started going when I was 27, plugging the shower drain every day.  I don’t have to worry about now.  I have fun with my lack of hair: men go bald because their brains push the hair out.  There are lots of other bald jokes, most of them dirty.  There is lots of humor about baldness because bald people are trying to escape from their trauma.

It is an ongoing ego blow.  Bald as an egg, chrome dome, cue ball, baldylocks, slick, it goes on.  We are a beleaguered population.  Then there is the discrimination.  It’s mostly unconscious, but people with good hair tend to get selected over the bald.  Just look at today’s  politicians. There are exceptions, but it is a distinct advantage to be telegenic these days.

For example, I once had a boss who was good looking with a nice shock of sandy hair.  When the Water Department was expanding, he was promoted to maintenance supervisor.  He did a fair job at that due to his mechanical skills.  His next promotion was to Plant Supervisor, responsible for running a big water plant with a staff of over twenty.  An affable guy, he did well in meetings and interactions as long as he didn’t have to think.  Problem was, he was only semi literate, unable to compose a coherent paragraph.  It eventually caught up with him and he was lateraled aside into a make-work job and eventually retired.  Good hair will only get you so far.

Look at our presidents.  Eisenhower was bald, but people believed he won World War II for us.  All the other recent presidents had hair.  Our current President, consistent with everything else, has a parody of good hair, wound around his head and dyed yellow.  He is so vain and out of touch with reality he thinks his hair looks good.  Oh, and it is all his.

Hair for women is even more important.  Many older women have thinning hair and go to some lengths to conceal the fact.  Women bald from chemotherapy have their hats scarves, and wigs.  Only a few have the courage to venture forth with a shiny head.  There are women who intentionally go bald.  It’s a guaranteed way to stand out in a crowd.  Also, there are some men who find bald women sexy.  They do have that stubble, however.  If a woman gets a little loopy and takes her hair off, the baldness is the lead headline and photograph.  Britney Spears earned permanent fame for shaving her head.  You have to be crazy to do that, right?

So, be sure to have some sympathy for those of us with shiny heads.  We are another beleaguered and often derided minority.  I often speak to people with really good hair if we can work out some sort of a deal on an exchange but no one has ever taken me up.  Sad.

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