Some Direction

Please pick up a copy of Plan B 2.0, by Lester Brown. I cannot read it quickly enough, and I cannot stress how important it is to be aware of the Environmental and Economic issues he illuminates. His focused writing, along with the simultaneous reading of Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler has inspired this unpolished rant:

A reader may want to know; given the environmental problems the world is facing, can we make it work? That is, can we avoid economic decline and civilizational collapse?

We have moved into this new world so rapidly that we have not yet fully grasped the meaning of what is happening. Of course, by sitting here writing this, I'm attempting to indicate to my audience that I in fact have begun to fully grasp what is happening, and that I would like my audience to begin fully grasping at it as well. Amazingly it was less than a century ago that thinkers and artists were observing that time, in fact was relative. With the advent of the railroad and subsequent thinkers like Einstein sitting in patent offices playing with clocks, people could move fast enough to confuse previous notions of what time was and wasn’t, while other people could ponder over the theoretical physics of it. And here we are now, in 2006, scarcely a century since these thoughts were exploding, and we are still (of course!) living under the comforting illusion that time is a relative, bendable, infinite. A disposable tool. Mindsets do not shift so drastically, so quickly. Not in such a divergent, non-contextual, compartmentalized, distorted reality. Postmodernism. It takes a massive tragedy to shift the general mindset, and yet, it will take a shift in mindset to avoid the most massive tragedy we could ever bring upon ourselves. Our own destruction by way of neglect. By way of powerful people making short term oriented decisions. Apocalyptic? Naaahh. Check this out:

At the outset of the 20th Century, 10% of the population lived in cities. In 2000, around 50% of the world population lived in cities. In 2025, the number of city-dwellers could reach 5 billion individuals (two thirds of them in poor countries). Megalopolises. A megalopolis is not a dinosaur. It is a city with more than 8 million people (good start to an essay right there). In 1950 only NYC and London had more than 8 million people. Today there are 22 such cities. In 2015, there may be 33, and 27 are predicted to be in the world’s least developed countries.

The transformation is quiet to some of us, but it is happening so fast!

And try this on, as a sort of teaser for why you should look at Lester Brown’s book:

“The western economic model is not going to work for China. If China’s economy continues to expand at 8% per year, by 2031…it would use 99 million barrels of oil per day –well above current world production of 84 million barrels. And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and mineral resources, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either…Closely related to China’s expanding resource consumption is the world’s fast-changing oil outlook and the new issues it generates. For example, we have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but of even more concern is the effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same commodities.”

And so…by way of subsidizing destructive habits, or not not subsidizing because we simply lack the cohesive community forum in which to spread a common message. So we still go about our daily business knowing that time speeds up when we are entertained, and slows when we are bored. Aroused, subdued, up, down, that’s how we go. – and yet, and yet…here are all these environmentalists, scientists, authors, companies, NGO’s, governments, who are pointing out that Hey! We’re on the clock, and this time it’s real. Time is real. Not because we say it’s so. Because Nature, the great equalizer, is out of balance and cannot remain so if we hope to coexist with it.

So here I am, marveling at how time appears to be relative, and money appears to be useless while stagnant, and these two things somehow being related, when, in the grander scope of things taking place around me, nature is silently but sublimely demanding our greater attention, reminding us that we can call it relative all we want but there will always be a point of no return, a respect threshold that once crossed cannot be reversed – and any time we speak of willing something to be reversed, as it was, not as it is – we are implying that inevitably the concept of time is real and stable, being tracked somehow in nature, and currently being pressed and raped as we ignore it.

Well done keeping to my promises. Rather than writing once a week, minimum, I've managed (unintentionally) to bookend the month of February.

This is an excerpt from my own mind. It is translated into the third person, to make it sound much more dramatic than it otherwise would:

He's thinking that when he walks alone through the city, and he does walk alone often, mostly to work and back from work, that he sees everything through a lens of whipping-cream-thick irony. He doesn't know this (how can we ever be certain!) but he suspects it. The awe of midtown which aroused him last year in some terrific way feels dull. Midtown, slim and tall in a black gown. Her hulking scyscrapers, the motion of everything, the appearance that everyone is dressed up to conduct important business, doesn't strike him like it did when he came up for the day from the little place with the quaint brick buildings, as he did, to ride elevators to way up high floors and sit in rooms with big windows listening to people talk fast and preparing to recite rehearsed and hopefully impressive white lies. Who taught him to think that way? Who changed his context, mid-stride?

To be continued when I don't have to run and eat Cookie Cake for Eric's birthday!!...

Blogging Again

It has been a shamefully long time since I posted my thoughts on this page.

I'm back, with a commitment to post at least once a week. That said, I have no plan. The only thought I can't shake is one that is not even mine, it belongs to Auden. He said, or maybe he sang, or perhaps for fun he chanted: "How do I know what I think till I read what I wrote?" In fact, it's possible those words are not Auden's at all. I haven't the first idea what truth is today, the phrase I quoted may not be the quotation at all and I'm too lazy to look it up (I take the elevator lately, I sleep 10 minutes later lately, I look for shortcuts and I excuse it by calling it efficiency) but I can tell you that it's how I remember it when I heard it from Kieron in Oxford and that's how it stuck so it's truth as I need it to be.

I was standing on the subway this afternoon. I was leaning against the door with rebellious disregard to the signs suggesting the dangers inherent in doing so. Actually, I was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and I don't like to read when I'm standing stiff and upright. Somehow, the risk of a fall out and onto the electric third rail in exchange for comfort seems worth it by the end of the work day. Anyway, the train suddenly decreased its velocity, and the guy standing across from me (near the front of the car) fell into an exaggerated tumble. Not only did his back knee buckle, but his entire center of gravity swung downward from his chest to his right hip. This violence sent him crashing into an ambiguous looking silver door that seemed to be guarding a small room. The door's silver latches and weathered exterior were no match for the tumbler's moderate weight. The door hurled open and light from the car, along with my fellow commuter, poured awkwardly into an empty conductor closet. The physical comedy was too much, and I burst into a fit of laughter which I attempted unsuccessfully to dillute. With all the weirdos in this city, there aren't enough people who laugh when they see something funny. Sadly, I'm the former and not the latter most of my daylight hours.

I thought the State of the Union was Ironic last night. George W. Bush telling the citizens of the United States that we are "addicted to oil" is like Eminem proclaiming that the problem with America's youth is its addiction to "rap music." It's also a bit like this commercial I saw or overheard the other day - Phillip Morris offering money or some other sort of assistance to people who want to quit smoking. It's also a bit like ten thousand spoons, when all you need is a knife. Or meeting the man of your dreams, then meeting his beautiful wife.

Physical Space and the construction of it continues to be hugely influential in my moods. This summer I felt free and capable, and this summer I was living on the top of a mountain and when the clouds didn't enclose me entirely, I could see for endless distances. There was so much depth and with depth mystery and with mystery potential and with potential possibility though they're one and the same but whatever way your stare at it my mind could wander and float and explore.

Now, I live in an apartment with windows only on the ends. It's long and narrow and the kitchen doesn't allow in any daylight. When I look out my window I see streets or alleys but my vision is always cramped by perpendiculars. My office is so small and I'm in a tiny box in a tiny cube which I became paranoid of, I recall, back in my imagination as I was floating or falling out of a raft into level 4 rapids through the jungle and I know it it was then I thought to myself what sacrfices am I willing to make? Won't I feel like I'm not alive? And yet. And yet. New York.

I know it now because it seems to have come out of me in writing. I'm paranoid and needy when I get in small spaces. To compensate for my cramped imagination I need constant praise and reinforcement and people telling me it will be OK and it WILL be ok but I can't see it when I can't see out and yes that's why I call out for help so patience it's only who I am when I'm trapped and I swear the only thing I have against boats while we're on the subject is the limited options for movement. It's a legit thing, this need for movement. It explains why I take the 4 or 5 as opposed to the 6, when scientific studies that I myself have conducted prove beyond a shade of a doubt that the 6 takes just as little time if not less on occasion to traverse the tunnels from Grand Central 42nd Street up to 86th, and yet, and yet, I take the 4 or the 5 DEVOUTLY and the reason must be because of there is less stagnance and more movement. It's going going constantly! stopping only once for a quick breath and a release and then it's back and it's moving and it's leaping! and it's gaining speed and flying through the underground quicker and quicker and faster and faster till the light comes exploding through the windows and with a sudden burst it's here! and it's gone.