I like to believe that I am patient and forbearing, especially with nature’s fickle (capricious, unexplained, erratic, mood changing) personality. For years, Conservative, Republican leaders have forbidden government agencies and departments from using environmental language in their reports, memos and press releases. Words or phrases like, global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, greenhouse gasses, energy web, etc., they think such verbiage suggests culpability and American Exceptionalism doesn’t want to deal with with transparency. Just like Covid-19, deny it, ignore it and it will go away. The worm has turned in Washington D.C. and accurate, literally correct language is appropriate again. Nature doesn’t come begging with its hat in hand, it makes its own rules.
It is mid February. For the past two weeks, temperatures have been running 30 degrees below normal: in the midwest it is colder than (be creative, you fill in the blank). From my early-years irreverent-vernacular I recall expletives about the cold, well-digger’s ass in Montana and a witches’ tit in a brass brassier but however one wants to portray the moment, it is too cold to be making light of it. It was -3 degrees at noon, up 5 degrees from sunup, headed down again to a predicted low of -11 tonight.
The village idiot begs as if he knew something; “If this is global warming, why is it so cold?” They suckle from the tap at PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric’s propaganda office. Global warming is measured as the average temperature rise over the whole planet for the year, not about the weather at your house on a particular day. If it is unusually cold here in winter it is even more unusually hot somewhere else. Around the world an average rise of .2 F (two tenths) of a degree is huge. The V.I. doesn’t get it because he’s been programmed, “If I don’t notice it, how bad can it be?”
We live in the earth’s biosphere, the thin surface layer of seas and continents. Roughly 3 miles thick, the biosphere is, by comparison, thinner than an invisible film of water vapor, condensed on the surface of a basketball. Outside of that thin layer, there is no life; none. Add to that, the survivable temperature range for mammals (humans) is barely 100 F degrees, from below freezing depending on available shelter to a little over 100 degrees. Keep in mind, temperatures on other planets range from absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) to (+ 880 degrees F) on Venus. They make our little 100 degree window look dangerously narrow. In spite of what the V.I. and his heroes say, collectively, we (civilization) are very capable of fu@#ing it up. Repeating the lie and making it familiar can not sanctify it.
But if you make a living off of PG & E stock dividends or if you have already taken shelter under religion’s umbrella there is another option. You can submit to an all powerful, all knowing, angry, peace loving, war waging, forgiving, vengeful, punishing (male) deity that created earth on the 2nd day and mankind on day 6. According to that story the planet was created as your doormat to do with as you please. But you can never question the dogma of righteous authority. Preachers absolutely love being the middle man so keep the money coming. If you pass judgment you go to heaven (a wonderful place) but you have to die, dead, first. Nobody has come back from heaven (not lately, not from this life) to corroborate the promise but Faith (believing the unbelievable) would be sufficient to feel better about your doubts, at least until another time.
I don’t complain when nature takes the path of least resistance, gravity works and so does inertia. It is cold outside but I have shelter and wool socks. Maybe somewhere, the god of tectonic plates and continental drift, of typhoons and lightning strikes, spring flowers in high meadows and bears waking up hungry in early March; that god would be easy to please. That would be the god of Two Commandments: Fix what you break and take care of each other. The all knowing, all powerful Lord of the church is at best, it fits the old adage: If it sounds too good to be true, . . . it is absolutely, too good to be true.” I don’t believe the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow either.
When I started writing I had no idea it where we would go or how it would unfold. I put down what the voice inside my head gives me and most of the time, it works. Without this bitter cold, brilliant fall colors on a warm autumn afternoon would be just another day.
It is mid February. For the past two weeks, temperatures have been running 30 degrees below normal: in the midwest it is colder than (be creative, you fill in the blank). From my early-years irreverent-vernacular I recall expletives about the cold, well-digger’s ass in Montana and a witches’ tit in a brass brassier but however one wants to portray the moment, it is too cold to be making light of it. It was -3 degrees at noon, up 5 degrees from sunup, headed down again to a predicted low of -11 tonight.
The village idiot begs as if he knew something; “If this is global warming, why is it so cold?” They suckle from the tap at PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric’s propaganda office. Global warming is measured as the average temperature rise over the whole planet for the year, not about the weather at your house on a particular day. If it is unusually cold here in winter it is even more unusually hot somewhere else. Around the world an average rise of .2 F (two tenths) of a degree is huge. The V.I. doesn’t get it because he’s been programmed, “If I don’t notice it, how bad can it be?”
We live in the earth’s biosphere, the thin surface layer of seas and continents. Roughly 3 miles thick, the biosphere is, by comparison, thinner than an invisible film of water vapor, condensed on the surface of a basketball. Outside of that thin layer, there is no life; none. Add to that, the survivable temperature range for mammals (humans) is barely 100 F degrees, from below freezing depending on available shelter to a little over 100 degrees. Keep in mind, temperatures on other planets range from absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) to (+ 880 degrees F) on Venus. They make our little 100 degree window look dangerously narrow. In spite of what the V.I. and his heroes say, collectively, we (civilization) are very capable of fu@#ing it up. Repeating the lie and making it familiar can not sanctify it.
But if you make a living off of PG & E stock dividends or if you have already taken shelter under religion’s umbrella there is another option. You can submit to an all powerful, all knowing, angry, peace loving, war waging, forgiving, vengeful, punishing (male) deity that created earth on the 2nd day and mankind on day 6. According to that story the planet was created as your doormat to do with as you please. But you can never question the dogma of righteous authority. Preachers absolutely love being the middle man so keep the money coming. If you pass judgment you go to heaven (a wonderful place) but you have to die, dead, first. Nobody has come back from heaven (not lately, not from this life) to corroborate the promise but Faith (believing the unbelievable) would be sufficient to feel better about your doubts, at least until another time.
I don’t complain when nature takes the path of least resistance, gravity works and so does inertia. It is cold outside but I have shelter and wool socks. Maybe somewhere, the god of tectonic plates and continental drift, of typhoons and lightning strikes, spring flowers in high meadows and bears waking up hungry in early March; that god would be easy to please. That would be the god of Two Commandments: Fix what you break and take care of each other. The all knowing, all powerful Lord of the church is at best, it fits the old adage: If it sounds too good to be true, . . . it is absolutely, too good to be true.” I don’t believe the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow either.
When I started writing I had no idea it where we would go or how it would unfold. I put down what the voice inside my head gives me and most of the time, it works. Without this bitter cold, brilliant fall colors on a warm autumn afternoon would be just another day.
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