but whatever happens, whether it's + 1.5 celcius in the next 50 years, whether it's + 2.0 celcius in the next 40 years, whether it's + 4.0 celcius by 2100... it's gonna happen regardless of what we do, they're saying now... what we do now will only matter another 50 years from now, what's coming down the pike in the next several fracking decades is the hangover from what was done in the latter half of the 20th century - so we have to care about our descendants of half a century later, in order to get off our asses and oops, our imaginations have shriveled up like prunes, so how can 50 years later figure into anything? when four years of school is too much to contemplate?
okay, i'm projecting, i have no claims on your imagination - i'm not bringing a child into the world and i can't believe i ever even thought it would be a good thing to do if i could psyche myself up to it, cause i owed my parents a grandchild, cause it's something substantial i could give to them that i've failed to equal in how i've lived my solitary and self-seeking life - but you could perhaps be able to think fifty years down the road, and you could perhaps be bringing a child into the world - and i don't judge anyone, how can i? not yet, anyway, i still feel like we're all friends on this planet, and it wouldn't be very friendly to bring politics and religion into the same discussions as the warm ways of those hobbyists of family building projects
so, some will take bleak weather forecasts as an invitation to attempt a forward escape if it's possible, push the pedal to the floor! the only way out is through, rape the crust even faster, we need to keep the barrels moving, to the four corners of the earth, we need to keep the lights on while our brainiacs are working on solutions, we need to keep the thermostat at a comfortable level, who can think when it's a hundred and three? they're building the ark for outer space, what about this place?
how can this have sounded like hysteria before? maybe cause it was hysteria all along, like so many other apocalyptic hysterias have swayed so many, it just has a real convincing ring just now
it's getting to the point where i really really would like to be convinced that it's a vast left-wing conspiracy of junk scientists chasing grant money
and here i am, day in, day out, being all, "what's my purpose?" what do i study? and then i'm reminded, there's this thing, about how there's these trends, resource depletion, carbon emissions, population growth - so i guess there's purpose there, in fucking DOING something about that, but - who to trust?
if i really believed this was gonna happen, would i let my writing a blog post about it be the end of it? or what about those blog posts that are so scary, that give me a writerly hysteria, would they be retiring to their bedrooms after their blog posts? no, for fuck's sake, that's not what people who really believe these things do - none of these people really believe these things, otherwise, their actions would bear it out - there would be revolutionary activity - even internal revolutionary activity, it wouldn't even have to be an extroverted fuck shit up, organize people, blow up pipelines type thing, even a more modest live by example, get off the grid type of action would ring authentic - and there are a very small pool of people who do that - the vast majority of the alarmist writers are blogging comfortably and not being any kind of example
in reality, we're all waiting for some critical mass of thick-headed blow-dried authority figures to get on board with what sort of dilemma we're actually in, and then we can be convinced that it's real, and we actually do have to get up and do something about it... until then, if it's not on the television or the radio, it's not real - cause they're our standard, the people with the news reporter voices and symmetrical faces and beige vocal inflections and heads no more or less thick than the median of humanity - if they think it's real, then at that precise moment, everybody does, and then things happen
and the scientists, well they're a power greater than myself for sure, and the number i've heard quoted is 15000 to 24, that sounds like a consensus - but they're not acting like they really believe it either - because they're not stupid, they're scientists - they know, like, i think, most of us suspect, it might be a little crazy to act as if a model of a complicated system is the god's honest truth, even if the independent readings seem to be narrowing to inescapable logical conclusions - even if that's the case, we gotta be at least partially underwater, before we start proceeding under the assumption that we'll all be underwater, or in the desert, or inside a plague of locusts, cause we can't uproot our lives and go to defcon 5 based on computer models
this really is an unprecedented dilemna in human history - being allowed a glimpse into what may be waiting, in terms of ecological destiny - but not given any divine instruction as to how to deal with it, what extremes are even necessary... having to ad-hoc it, and arguing among ourselves what we should bother to do
obama, for example, the "leader of the free world", so i guess he's my president too, being a free person, i think, although i never voted for him, nor would i have... he must have access to some pretty good scientists, some people outside the climatologist consensus, who are assuring him that this climate model thing, it's something he can put on the backburner, it's not that big a deal
why would it be, for him and his administration? it's a ride, for them, isn't it? hold on, another four more years, wheeee... and then it's over, and you go on speaking panels and lecture circuits, and you reflect back on those crazy days... those were some crazy times man... being leaders of the free world, being architects of policy... we were just doing the best we could in this muddled mixed up world - we can't always know what the best course of action to take is, sometimes you've just gotta make a decision - you can't know what it's like, in the spotlight, the pressure - every decision affects every other facet of every fucking thing - and in the end, you're alone with it - and your kodak family and your millions of dollars, and estates - doesn't sound all that lonely actually - but i bet it will be, in the fallout shelter
well, power and science don't overlap as much as we might think, or perversely like... the power elites make the rules for the wise men and the fools...
sometimes i'm ashamed of what i write, when i write in that opt-out suicidal vein - but it's a real emotion that is a reaction to trends i see, from this miraculously mundane vantage of quietly falling snow and flowing electrical energy and a full fridge of cheap food and cheap rent
MAYBE... there's more to this idea than i ever allow myself to allow... that me and people like me, not like my ex-gf, she's more evolved, are completely overshadowed with guilt and malaise over what's happening, invisibly, how the suffering on the other side of the world just isn't real ENOUGH in headlines and internet articles and even youtube videos, and how we're plainly LOOTING the FUTURE, there's no word for this unprecedented crime, it demands stronger morality and intellect than this age is producing to be able to deal with what's going on
so although i could count my blessings til i pass out, about how really, things aren't that bad, my life is pretty good, it's a wonderous age, a toothache isn't prelude to a fatal sinus infection but a simple dental extraction, i have more computing power in my pocket than the world had in the 70s for next to nothing, and besides that, i got family, and friends, i know i'm loved
there's this shadow over things
i didn't build this world - i played a riff on it - why do i think i gotta twist myself into a pretzel fussing over the maintenance of it? well, cause the builders are long dead - their heirs can fuss over the maintenance - but i can't hold them accountable, just cause of bloodlines - my great grandmother to the 33rd power was renee decartes' publisher, possibly, so i got those incriminating nature-crushing lines in me too, the dreaded dioxyribonucleic knot
looting the future, looting the fucking future... i might be wrong about a lot of things, i might be wrong that i don't know anything or that i can't make a decision - but i'm pretty sure that looting the future is something we're doing, and there's not some magic mitigating factor that will somehow make everything alright - i dunno if there's any such thing as a moral sense, but i got a gut feeling that there has to be some payment for this bender - maybe it's because i'm a drug addict in wobbly recovery, so i would see it like that, i would OVER moralize it, as opposed to someone who maybe managed to temper their forays into intoxicating substances, who wouldn't necessarily have this same GUT FEELING that life and human destiny is a black and white morality play, maybe even a greek tragedy with dramatic irony at precise appropos moments - but see i don't see no deus ex machina getting us out of this jam, so greek tragedy is not the right reference - maybe catholicism is, cause to me it's gotta equalize with some bloody s&m suffering and nails through hands, just let the philipino reenactor do it, not me, do it to julia, DO IT TO JULIA!
maybe you can never really cure catholicism, maybe i'm gonna be shackled by cathol's law to my grave - still, it doesn't have to be black and white even within the sphere of morality - and the fact that it's a gut feeling disturbs me, cause colbert would tell me i'm on the right track with that manner of gnosis
i don't know the intricacies of climate science, i could be hoodwinked by echo chambers, and confirmation bias because i was predisposed to believe large corporations and institutions are morally blind to such an extent that they would prioritize profits and mandates over collective survival - and yes, i really could be making too much of the peak oil hype, and it's quite possible i've read too much about nuclear war and about how there's still all these nukes around, it's not like that threat ever went away... and i remember, my mom, who's opinion and outlook i respect, who i feel has some wisdom, who i'd put some degree of faith in, at least over my own neurotic fancies, a person to look up to, by contrast with my over-damaged and atrophied self - i remember how we got to talking about the future, and oil, and i let spill to her my concerns about how nobody who matters has a fucking plan for what we're gonna do when that shit runs out, and she said, in more than just words, oh, they've been saying that's gonna happen since the 70s, and she was talking about more than just peak oil, and i absorbed some of that worldly skepticism of doomcryers, not because of any statistical, numerical, or analytic deconstruction of the many many arguments i come across that we're all fucked, but in the genuine-ness of her gentle rejoinder - she really wasn't all that worried, not in any unduly way anyway, neither apathetic in a suspect way that would suggest some willfully ignorant and self-serving agenda, like having an income that depended upon not understanding the trends of resource extraction, birthrate, environmental toxification, drought increase, and correlation of armed conflicts to water shortages
i remember a day in 2001 when art didn't matter - it really didn't, and irony was dead, and i felt solidarity with a neighbor country, not in a touchy feely way, but in a grim and necessary way, and everyone in town was giving blood as a gesture - i haven't felt much emotional connection to history, not even in 31 years, which is a good chunk of time to have lived through - but i've spent it disconnected, selfish, navel-gazing, drunk, delirius, staring at screens... how do you like that, exgf? i meant that sincerely though, not just self-deprecatingly - at times i can see what sort of person i am, from outside, and admit how sick it is
but for a few weeks in 2001, i was shaken out of myself for a while, and i remember that emotion - it was white people in suits dying in mass, i guess, to be crude, and how pathetic that on some deep level i identify with those people, like i group, against my will, with the beige tv accent-lacking medians who seem so full of shit, but have good jobs and money and charisma and influence and must be righter and realer than me - even if we're on opposite ends of a vast economic gulf, at lease we call it vast in the northern half of this content, although all of us, rich and poor in these parts, must look like assholes to the people in the oppressed and starving parts of the world
over here, even the 97th percentile, the ones that suddenly found themselves with shanty towns for company in the middle of homeless season when the occupy movement was hanging on longer than anywhere else in the world here in st. john's, even those pitiful people who were squeegee-ing windshields back in the '90s, have a vested interest in keeping the cell phones in shop windows - even a lot of the poor people around here have cell phones, not the really poor ones who are panhandling, they're quite miserable, thank you very much, you can see it in their faces, and you can fucking well imagine without having to look, but a lot of my fellows in the low tax bracket, we still have phones that we might hold on to at the expense of the chinese, and certainly energy for all this debauched power consumption that we'd hold on to at the expense of the arabs or arab-looking desert people
new york seemed close enough to hit home, my feeling of being a part of history was just being alive and watching tv when some terrorists shot their wad with a spectacular display of suicidal mayhem - i remember how that inspired many atheists to affirm their atheism - when you look at the holocaust and the art and literature that came out of that though, scoring points for the void after a nasty bit of vengeance like 9-11 seems cheap - but life is cheap - irony is cheap - atheism is cheap - religion is cheap - everything is cheap
like i said not that long ago, the greatest miracle... is how mundane everything seems - it's amazing that anything could ever seem mundane, with all the history that fed into this moment, all the chaotic causality streams - but it does, i'm constantly being swept back into tired, half-lidded, sore mediocrity and delusions of mundanity
how does this seem, to older folks, i wonder? this is my prime, supposedly, i'm supposed to get us all out of this mess, my generation... no, there's still too much momentum from previous generations, we expect our canadian dream too, or a scaled down version of it since the unions got busted, but there's vastly improved and cheaper information technology - we're hooked on this cheap paradigm just like the preceding people, we should have solidarity with our elders and boomer parents and snotty former punks now middle aged sell-outs, cause we're just another round of hooked, on unrealistic expectations - but why unrealistic? we've met the quota so far, haven't we? however many billion barrels a day? they're batting those figures back and forth on the 9th floor of the husky energy offices every morning when i come in to clean the boardrooms, it's another day of work, another issue with the helicopters and the rigs, ho hum, it's just husky, they're just husky, they don't run the whole show, they're just dealing with their bottom line, doing their jobs, hoping to make their own little million, millionaire inflation, the word has lost all meaning
so, now my people, (shudder), those people that graduated high school around the same time as me anyway, most of them are entering into this world - i'm just on the peripheral, cleaning things while they fulfill useful functions for corporations that keep oil flowing, i didn't apply myself in ways that would gain me entry into the socially lubricated mechanics of things the market actually values above minimum wage plus or minus fifty cents - but some of those people i'm contemporary with are getting in there now and the idea of keep it going is still plausible, it's a persistent lullaby on the radiodrone
yeah, there've been some great people, ghandi, martin luther king - we can all agree on them, right? and there could be more yet... but despite that... racism, religious zealotry, all these things - i can see how they become options, and not just insane inhuman unspeakable inconceivables - sadly, the worst of human responses are still human, as human as the best, and i could see anyone getting swept up in them - right now the differences between people are annoying, funny, fodder for disapproval... but buffered by luxury - those different people who think different than the way i think, and pray to their different gods and think the things i like are "sick" - but we can co-exist, we're civilized... but what happens when civilization falls apart? then it's civil war
i don't like this apocalypse fixation - and lord knows, there was hiroshima, there was cuba, there was this and that, and we got through it, even though there are always people saying the end is nigh - zorp is coming
but there's fractal waves of fire, images of the future, in things, in revelations - maybe mckenna had the date wrong, but he had the right idea - people, myself most of all, sink into a heavy gravy of custom, they get on autopilot, forget where they are - fall asleep - it's a tired metaphor made by so many others, but i'm forced to write my beholding of the truth of it
that revelations stuff, does it come out of nothing? when people get crazed enough to write something like that that actually endures across millenia? i'm not convinced it's an accident, not right now anyway - the miracle of mundanity... look at where the fuck i am right now - this is science fiction - the banality of evil and angelic overdose - this is insane
well, we may be in for a mass die-off before the century's out, but i wrote a good long blog post tonight, so, really, everything's fine isn't it? i feel fine, anyway, mostly - perhaps there's a shadow in the peripherals, but i can ignore it - i mean, i should get to bed, i gotta get up at 6 and be at work at 7, to earn my paycheques to pay my rent so i can have a fridge to fill with food to continue this cycle of eating and shitting and watching videos, not television, but they're television videos, the internet gives me the option to make my life less schlocky and obnoxious but i still narcotize myself with screens - it's something this decade allows and i'm going with the flow
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