In The Land of Mordor, Where Shadows Lie

"We're Not In Lake Wobegon Anymore"

...says Garrison Keillor, and he's right. Like the Shire of old, even the sleepy town of Lake Wobegone is no longer safe from the spreading influence of the great shadow growing in the east, recently returned to the accursed Land of Mordor... Oh wait, did I say Mordor? I meant Washington D.C., of course. I'm sure you understand the mixup.

The Last Rays of the Setting Sun

Sometimes I feel like I don't belong
Actually
Most of the time I feel like I don't belong

Struggle defines me
Struggle is the key to acceptance
I convince myself
Unlike those, like my room mate Greg
For whom struggle is the key to exile

He struggles to find his purpose
I struggle to find peace of mind

Those things I can't discuss
Those things I don't dare remember in the presence of
Friends?

Those things that define me more
Than anything else
That remind me who I am

Those are the things I refuse to declare
Scared of the consequences of being something soulshattering
Carefully I construct an invisible shell that shows
What I want it to, nothing more

Leaving only tiny pinholes for those with knowledge and
Reason to discover

But opening the pinhole takes some suspension of disbelief
Because the image projected on the other side
Is something not even you would guess

And the moral of the story is
There is not a moral to every story
Sometimes the moral is too far away
Shrouded in denial and self-destructive pity
Buried too thick in the fog of fear to be apparent

Sometimes you just don't know what to do
And sometimes you forget to care

Stained-glass window

Words are
Those funny things we use
To describe those other funny things
We never really get to wrap our minds around

So we wrap them in words instead
As if talking in circles around something or
Writing it inside a box
Could somehow help a person get closer to
The Thing Itself

But it seems to me that the talking and
The writing do quite a different thing entirely
Building walls and sometimes
If we are lucky
They have windows through which we can see the thing
But not doors

And when you put them together
It's as if everyone's words
Were all tiny pieces of scrap metal and bits
Of colored glass and concrete and mortar
And they piled up on top of eachother
Haphazardly like life
Making the strangest stained-glass window
You've ever seen

And on the other side of the window was
The Thing Itself
Blurry and distorted through all our
Rainbow-hued shards of glass
And if you looked at it through a piece of metal
Or mortar or concrete
Of course you wouldn't see it at all

In fact, if you never changed your perspective
You might even think
It didn't exist in the first place

- ch 2004.08.18

The Benefits of Ignorance

If ignorance is bliss, Father said,
shouldn't you be looking blissful?
You should check to see if you have
the right kind of ignorance. If you're
not getting the benefits that most people
get from acting stupid, then you should
go back to what you always were—
being too smart for your own good.

by Hal Sirowitz from Father Said. Soft Skull Press.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Thank you, Michael Stipe, for that timeless lyric. It always seems to be the end of the world as we know it in one sense or another. Whether the stock market is imploding like too many plutonium atoms or too many plutonium atoms are imploding themselves, we just can't seem to escape the reality of one world-crushing catastrophe after another. Who needs Survivor? Just turn on the six o'clock news! And that isn't even the half of it!!!

So here's an interesting new (but not really) catastrophe for you all to examine. One could argue it's been happening since before the industrial revolution, but only recently have some people become more fully aware of the implications. Why do we never seem to learn our lessons until it's much too late to staunch the bleeding? Some philosophers propose that nothing ever stays the same, that human beings are all children of the era in which they are self-actualized, but certainly in some meta-cultural sense we must always carry with us a blinding amount of blithe optimism that "don't worry, everything will be okay." Otherwise, shouldn't our history reflect a chronicle of carefully averted disasters instead of cataclysmic shatterings of the economic, social, and biological status quo every time we get too comfortable?

Enough introduction. Here is the one scientific article which, should you read nothing else of this nature for the entire year, deserves your undivided attention. Stephen Meyer has accurately and realistically assessed the state in which we find our planet and ourselves at this exact moment in history. It's not pretty, but it's very much a reality and I have never seen it expressed so skillfully.

End of the Wild by Stephen Meyer

Mount Hood

It's the beginning of the return of photography to plantboy. I have posted some photos of my trip this past weekend to Mt. Hood, in Oregon State. Mt. Hood is that majestic volcanic spire that citizens of Portland get to see on a daily basis (weather permitting, of course). It's also the highest point in the state of Oregon, topping out at 11,237 feet above sea level.

And what a fantastic mountain it is! My only complaint about my trip is that it didn't last long enough. My friend Nate and I arrived on Saturday afternoon and hiked from the parking lot of Timberline Lodge up to about 7,000 feet, just below the lower "barn" of the upper chair lift. The photo at the bottom of the landscapes and wildlife section, showing the movement of stars within the night sky, was taken from our campsite. Next time I will get the focus right, I promise.

We woke up around six in the morning to watch the sun rise on Mt. Jefferson and the Three Sisters to the south. As the shadows in the lower mountain valleys gradually grew slimmer and slimmer, the temperature rose from about thirty degrees, which was the nighttime low, to about seventy degrees at midday. Phenomenal. The air stayed clear until large volumes of dust began blowing up the side of the mountain from a dry river valley below, but we took advantage of the chair lift to get above the clouds of stinging particles, up where the view was even better than before.

The snowboarders blew me away. I found the advanced course by accident, just climbing around among the rocks. The guys and gals on boards and skis were pulling some stunts and tricks I'd only ever seen in video games and movies. So I took about a hundred and fifty photos of them flying off the biggest jump in the course. One guy asked me if I was a scout. I replied no, and he jokingly commented that it was too bad, he was looking for some new gear. No doubt a scout would've been able to hook him up with a nice pro deal. I watched him land some very impressive 540 degree turns and full flips off the jumps. Look to the photo of the one-foot-strapped-in snowboarder to see who I'm talking about. You might see him on a Wheaties commmercial someday soon.

I ventured far above the tree line to what must have been 8,000 feet before I headed back down. My lips are still sunburnt. Aside from some hyperactive ground squirrels and very diffuse wildflower patches, the vegetation and critters didn't play much more than a bit role in the environment. Mostly the terrain is dominated by volcanic rock and ashy, gray soil. It's very unlike Mt. Rainier, from what I remember. Most of the plants were foreign to me and the soil was especially unusual. I wonder what quirks of geology yielded Mt. Hood?

When we got back to the lowlands, the thermometers had broken ninety pretty much everywhere. We cruised back home up I-5 in a scorchingly hot little Geo metro, arriving back in Olympia about four in the afternoon. I immediately took a bath and a shower, after sweating like a pig for two straight days. Ahh. How refreshing.

Brain candy rots your neurons

I've been reading a book called Everthing You Know Is Wrong, by Lloyd Pye. I think the title should be officially changed to Everything You Will Read In This Book Is Misleading and Uninformed. I have only reached page thirty, and I have already amassed enough hard feelings toward the author that I don't think I'll be able to take anything he says seriously for the rest of the book. Of course, I suspected before I read it that this was a likely outcome, since the premise of the book is that life on this planet was seeded by extraterrestrials and continues to be tampered with to this day. I think the author will eventually propose that the planet Earth is basically a giant science experiment set up by some alien race. But that is not what pisses me off. Quite to the contrary in fact; I do not find the alien science experiment idea to be entirely implausible. Rather it is the method by which Mr. Pye has written his introductory chapter, brimming with half-baked ideas and flinging ill-conceived insults in every direction imaginable, which leaves me foaming at the mouth.

He's attempted to systematically debunk the theory of evolution, from Darwin on to the present day. Unfortunately, his understanding of evolution is unforgivably confused. He uses the fact that there are still many phenomena unexplained by the various theories of evolution to assert that all these theories are almost entirely wrong. Unfortunately, many of his observations and statements are either totally misguided or simply not true. Here's an example I found particularly infuriating:

"Yet to the great frustration of scientists everywhere, there is no discernable evidence of "upward" evolution or between the flowering plants and/or insects. With what would seem to be millions of opportunities to find any kind of transitional forms--say a houselfy becoming a firefly--scientists remain embarassingly empty-handed."

This is completely ridiculous. A housefly is about as closely related to a firefly as a mouse is to a chimpanzee. Of course there is no example of a transitional form between the two. What complete nonsense! This sort of observation does about as much to disprove the validity of Darwinism as it does to prove that California is part of China. Furthermore, i can personally list several current and fossilized examples of the transitional forms leading up to and within the flowering plants. Here's one: the Gnetophyta, a small but highly significant group of seed plants which are pretty darn "transitional" between their less evolved ancestors and the flowering plants. Another example is the Hawaiian silversword tribe, the Madiinae, recently evolved into many very unusual forms and believed to have descended from a primitive version of a current Californian alpine plant known as tarweed.

Grrr... I could go on and on but I won't. Seriously, I have no problem with scientific progress by way of the proposition of new theories and the criticism of old ones, but this deceptive drivel is completely without value. Lloyd Pye, you should be ashamed of yourself. Do us all a favor and return to the mothership before you have the opportunity to publish any more defamatory nonsense.

On the positive side, if this crapola can get published, then so can you, or me, or your grandmother's dog Precious, for that matter. Start the presses!

Who's bored? Not me!

Today I'm here at work killing time while Dreamweaver huffs and puffs and struggles to update a half-gig-sized website I'm working on... Any day now.

Life is full of mystery but at least one thing is for sure. This morning that skybound ocean of cottony fluff gifted Olympia with a bunch of rain. It wasn't wishful thinking after all (or if it was, then the wish was granted). The plants are happy and the air is going to be so much cleaner! My friend Wayne had to put the top back on his Jeep to keep it from turning into a pond on wheels, but so what! We needed that rain!

Here is something interesting, I think. Do you?

The Guide to Urban Wildlife, by Cody Hinchliff
Issue 1: Squirrel Behavior

Despite their prolific nut productionn, many of you may not recognize the hazelnut trees (Corylus cornuta, C. spp.) which grow all over the place here in the northwest, even in people's yards and gardens. However, you can be sure that the squirrels in your neighborhood are very aware of them. At this time of the year, the nuts are not quite ripe enough to begin falling off the tree, but have reached the point where they are tasty and nutritious to squirrels. So, the squirrels are harvesting them. At the very least, they are eating them and leaving a mess of broken shells and husks all over the ground beneath the trees. On several occasions now I have witnessed one of my neighborhood's squirrels exhibiting this behavior from inside the crown of a small hazelnut tree right next to my bus stop. The remarkable thing is that the squirrel has the audacity to put himself in such a dangerous position--the tree is quite short and the only way out is across the lawn. I scared him today and he had to wait until I was on the other side of the tree to escape to an apple tree a few yards away. Someday soon I will catch him on film and publish a photo here for you. Stay tuned.

Also, just a little FYI since I haven't announced it yet. This site is undergoing some changes. Right at this moment not much has changed, but comments have been activated! You can let the world know what you think about this post or any other, for that matter. Hate squirrels? Love hazelnuts? Just don't care about urban wildlife at all? Click the comments link below and tell us!

The sky is falling

Today the weather exhibited signs of imminent rain. We can only hope that does not turn out to be wishful thinking. The air in this neck of the Puget Sound is clogged and brown with industrial haze and car exhaust. And of course, when the weather is nice people spend more time outside, which means more time in the car, which means even more pollution, etc. It's a nasty combination for air quality.

My roommates are wandering up the steps outside. I can hear them: "No way!"; "Oh my gawd!" they chorus their disbelief at something which is probably fairly trivial. But of course it's important to have fun, even in the face of normality. I think maybe I am getting too bogged down by the hum-drum of life in the states again. There are no volcanoes spewing lava outside my window, and no flocks of scarlet macaws screeching down the beach. The dogs and their people gather across the street every evening. Maybe I want a dog. Maybe it's mango withdrawl.

I have been thinking about what I am doing. Not merely what sorts of small tasks I have been undertaking on a daily basis or even what kinds of long term goals I have but why I am doing any of it. I am sure that to some degree I owe this sort of questioning to the book I am reading (Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder), but I feel like the information I have assimilated from the book is really only providing me a more effective method for organizing and presenting my feelings. This is the sort of self-questioning that bubbles up slowly after years of sitting submerged below a frozen tar pit of everyday hum-drum and distractions.

So, why am I here? What am I trying to do? Why should I try to do it at all? I've been reading about Jean-Paul Sartre, and I think perhaps I will have to go more directly to the source before I will satisfy my curiosity about existentialism. Up until this point, the only feelings I've ever harbored toward existentialist thought have been more along the lines of scorn than curiousity. I see no value in the nihilistic, nothing-is-real-therefore-nothing-matters-in-the-slightest-and-you-can't-prove-otherwise sort of thought which I understood to be existentialism. Maybe the well is deeper than the first glance indicated. I'm sure it is, in fact. Everything tends to be more complex than it appears.

Maybe it's the imminence of graduation leading me to question my purpose. I don't like being purposeless, that's clear. And once I graduate, will I let the inertia of science propel me forward into who knows what sort of nitpicky labwork, or will I hunker down and settle upon a deep, long-term plan for making the world a better place? Gosh. What a naive thing to say. I wonder if I will be able to hold on to the windswept, battered speck of innocence still in my posession for long enough to turn it into something meaningful. Is there such a thing as ex-jaded?