There’s a book store in town which is a labyrinth of shelves which can suddenly open up into a small room filled with prints, old maps or stacks of ancient magazines. The importance of documenting the Now for the Tomorrow is something we’ve been doing since we first picked up a sharp rock. Scratched into the walls of a deep dark cave are the symbols for “Dave the Cro-Magnon was here”. We like to leave behind something of ourselves. Sometimes this is all we have left: scratches on a wall. In my case it might be photos on a wall, or sculpture in a home. Who knows how long, or if, my work will survive. I think of this because so many factors can take away something you have been working on for most of your life, like a storm knocking down a house. The scratches are wiped out in the tsunami.
We leave behind our names in official records, but often they were not backed up somehow and so when the building burned down in the wild fires, so did the records, and a generation may find their quest for information on the family tree suddenly stops cold. You never know… Death and taxes. We all know we will die someday but nobody much knows where and why. Under our great orange leader we can’t even be sure of taxes, unless we are essentially poor and then our taxes will be going up soon, very soon. Ah and then the support systems are taken away, first Medicare and Medicaid and soon school aid, infrastructure investment… IN the early years of the nation if you went along roads and highways from point A to point B, sooner or later somebody with their hand out would want money for you to continue. We didn’t have rights of ways. Paths turned to roads and roads became highways, but only when locals improved on them, and then they wanted to be paid. Toll roads were everywhere. It took a progressive republican to think about an interstate transportation system which would enable the marketplace, employ millions and bring in billions in taxes. Today it is being torn down by another republican, but an insanely broken man who cannot think of others as being alive, equal and deserving. We have 3 more years and then some under the rule of a person who cannot be stopped and who believes himself to be anointed by Divinity to rule and to remake the nation in his own image. In other words, psychotic, self-destructive and dangerous. Ya never know.
One after another huge storms slam into shorelines, knocking down homes and businesses, tearing down wires and poles, signs and billboards. We see them forming from space and we submit our numbers to our machines, which chew them up and digest them according to algorithms based on and created from the last 100 years of weather data. So long as the patterns do not change, the basic elements which form the climate do not alter, the patterns will be the same. The frog in the beaker on the stove thinks, “It feels the same, pretty much, so nothing is going to happen to me…” and the flames get higher, the water heats up and the from is suffering but maintains that, “It’s not much different than a few minutes ago, it’s going to be fine…” and here’s a real sad thing about this metaphor: certain people in positions of power would read that and wonder why we should worry about a stupid frog. But we digress.
That’s really the point, though, isn’t it? We digress. We digress from our expectations, from our forecasts, we digress from the extension of the line which was our life. This is because in large part, the universe is running on chaos. In an infinite set the only overall pattern will be inconsistent, never repeating for longer than infinity-1. An infinite regular pattern would put a belt around the round belly of the universe. So things have to move away from expectations. While it is true that human tinkering has impacted the chemistry of the atmosphere, it is also true that a huge amount of the local universe had it’s toe in the water as well. The patterns of the Sun, the pull of the Moon, the way the ocean sucks up our garbage, everything built on things we did, things trees do, and soon the air was changed, which means the planet has changed, and therefor our weather must change. Sadly, another thing which has changed is the way society looks upon thinking as opposed to acting. Over time the great apes watched and learned to strike rocks, to capture and cultivate fire, to protect the extended family, the group, and as we are still great apes we watch “Lethal Weapon”, “Fargo”, “Breaking Bad” and the rest, even down to the sit-coms where the main point of humor is to ridicule a friend, a boss or a parent, we watch and learn how society operates, even though at some level we know these images are not live theater. We are built to watch and learn from what we see, like how the first resort must be violence, the first impulse must be to lie.