To My Old Brown Earth

Primal Pete Seeger. His last song. I just watched, for the second time, the PBS bio of Seeger, and could not help but shudder at how much the world has changed in those few years. How dark  it seems now, and how out of place this man's eternal optimism, inextinguishable hope. The stakes are far higher than ever before, and we can't just fix it with a change of ideology. Even if we were to come to complete world reconciliation, it would not stop that which we have set in terrible, heedless motion.  And I don't want to pass that hopelessness on to my grandkids, so I won't. But I will listen to this, and sink into it, and feel some peace for a while. Self-recrimination and hopelessness is no way to live.

Things fall apart: thoughts on the attack on Paris

This started out as a journal entry, then evolved from there. I have been known to delete posts that I later thought were too negative, just because I'd rather not put out that kind of energy. But today it's too much. I wonder now what it takes to go on about your business being cheerful and saying, "Yes, isn't it too bad." The feeling is, "if we feel gloomy the terrorists have won" and "everything happens for a reason" (!). This is about as helpful as saying "crying won't bring him back" and other stone-hearted, sappy bromides that are supposed to be so damn helpful. Our grief is being hijacked along with everything else. Put on a happy face. The problem is, I just can't do it any more.

November 14/15

Horrible terrorist attack in Paris yesterday. Out of the blue, seemingly. This stuff is popping up everywhere and makes me feel sick inside, like climate change. I wonder about the future, what kind of hell it might be for the grandkids, such wonderful souls. Irreplaceable. It could be a worse hell than the world has ever seen. People say things like, “oh, the human race has always kept going no matter what happens,” as if that's some kind of insurance policy against disaster.

Because something has been (more or less) true in the past does NOT mean it will be true in the future: in fact, the more time goes by, the higher the odds it will change. Example: "I’ve smoked cigarettes for 40 years and it hasn’t hurt me." That means you can go on for another 40 and be OK! It means that if it hasn’t happened YET, it will never happen, and CAN never happen, which is the stupidest piece of flawed non-logic I’ve ever seen. But I see it every single day, and people believe it, blandly, sticking a happy face on atrocity, which only leaves the door open for it to continue. It’s just a little thing called denial.

I never know how to get my head around all this, or how to feel. Things seem to be coming apart. When will it end? Nuclear war, I think. As if that threat is no longer there! Then the climate will truly collapse - it won't take more than a tiny nudge - and there will be no food. No food is already a huge one, along with where to live when everything is underwater. No food means riots and people tearing each other’s throats out to survive. Humans will revert to the pack mentality from which they sprang, devolving from apes into something somewhat less than that.

I have a purpose in my life, I am very clear about it and have no doubt of it, and that is to be love to my grandchildren. BE love, not just show love. This is nothing grand, but I don’t have to think about it either. It is as natural as breathing and has been the crown of my life after decades of wretched struggle. So many times I have wanted to end my life, but it looks as if it may be taken out of my hands.

At these times, anxious times, I look at my health and the fact that things have not been quite right for a long time. I had abdominal symptoms, quite severe ones that drove me to the doctor, something I only do under duress because I hate doctors. As usual, her attitude was dismissive, but she did delegate, as all doctors do now. I saw a gynaecologist, a urologist, a gastroenterologist, had two CT scans, two mammograms, a colonoscopy, and they supposedly found nothing. More than three years after being told my colonoscopy was completely normal (though my doctor was supposed to “go over the results” with me, an appointment which turned out to be totally useless because she said “there’s nothing to talk about”, as if this was a waste of her time), she was leafing through my chart and said, “Oh.”

Now, you never want to hear your doctor say, “Oh.”

The “oh” turned out to be the results of the colonoscopy. The polyp they found, the one they never told me about and which my doctor either didn't notice or didn't bother to mention, was not a large one, and not cancerous, but these things can turn cancerous in the future. Other things were wrong inside me that may or may not be a problem later, and which might lead to heavy bleeding or perhaps something worse than that.

My colonoscopy was not completely normal, as the technicians told me it was, but my doctor vagued me away because she didn’t really bother to look at the results.

OK, I don’t want to be one of these cranky old ladies who goes on and on about her health. For the most part I don’t talk about it at all because deep down, I don’t think I have much time left. In only a few months, without conscious effort, I have lost well over 30 pounds, and most of it dropped off me in almost alarming fashion. I was weight-obsessed from age 15 on, though I was never more than 15 or 20 pounds overweight (considered huge by the standards of the day). Thus began a siege on my body that left my metabolism permanently confused, if not completely fucked.

I ruined my body, in a sense, meaning there was a lot of fluctuation, some of it quite dramatic, and some really stupid diets, one of which left me 15 pounds underweight. I’ve never had so many compliments on my appearance in my life (oh, wait – there was that manic episode, the one that nearly killed me, when I supposedly looked 10 years younger! And certainly, if you look ten years younger, you no longer need to keep taking those stupid pills.)

So now my weight plummets, just from cutting out junk food. It’s still going down. I feel a vague nausea and my appetite is definitely down. So, do I go back to that doctor and say, “I’ve lost weight”, especially when she warned me I needed to lose weight and was verging on obesity? She'd probably say, "You look marvelous," and tell me there's nothing wrong.

This is why I don't want to go. Do I invite that familiar leaning forward and peering at me with puckered brow, then suddenly sitting up straight and saying in a decisive voice, “Nope. Can’t find anything”?

No.

Sometimes I think (to try to connect these thoughts together) that all of this is a death-march, that we just have to sing our marching songs as we go our merry way. I mainly want to stay around to help with the grandkids, if they survive. I am not yet sure of the nature of the disaster. Climate change experts are saying it could happen more catastrophically than anyone expects. It could all come apart, suddenly give way, as it seems to be already. Right now denial holds it all tenuously together, so that every extreme flood, every sinkhole swallowing up houses, every freak snowstorm or raging forest fire after a baffling drought is considered a separate event.

I get a queasy feeling from it all. When the food runs out. When the terrorists come HERE, not to France, not even to the United States but here. Don’t think about it, your health is bad enough. Die now? Might be a good idea, but it would upset my family, I think. 

I am too much of a coward to face the kind of world that is coming. So if “something” wants to carry me off, maybe it’s a lot more benevolent than it seems on the surface. What will be will be, but we always assume the people who mean the most to us will be spared. And that is the greatest uncertainty of all.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The most terrifying video I've ever seen

Back when this first came out, in 1968, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. It was just some kind of nonsensical sci-fi vision of something we knew would never happen.

And it's all coming true.

Summer in Siberia: or, a day at the bitch

We didn't do the green thing back then

(This is the sort of pass-it-around thing I don't usually like, but the more of it you read the more light bulbs come on.)

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days." The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.

We walked upstairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then. We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Day of the Ice Heave (or: the Earth Strikes Back)

This is raw footage, shot in portrait rather than landscape (which I thought went out of style 5 or 10 years ago), but I include it in its entirety because it is way more dramatic than anything that was shown on the news.

This is an ice heave, a bizarre weather phenomenon in which an ice sheet on a lake is bulldozed by winds with such force that it becomes alive. It moves with frightening speed, making a deafening sound like a shattering chandelier, with an even more bizarre "sh-sh-sh-sh-sh" sound that reminds me of the locust-like cameras flashing in The Right Stuff. This is a glacier forming not in thousands of years but in a couple of hours, and comparably moving at light speed.

This video goes on pretty long and includes some confused, shrill commentary, but I still like it better than the snippets shown on the news. It's more immediate and captures the confused reactions of people who do not know what the hell is going on (including the woman who keeps yelling at her kid, "Keep away from that!"). The tinkly fingers of the edge of the eerily accelerated glacier sneak forward like spider's legs, and the ice sheet moves with so much relentless force that it shatters windows and pushes in walls.

Nature is striking back. There is no doubt about it now. We've become completely accustomed to stories about wildfire, flood, insane amounts of snow and parching drought: what is happening to the weather now? We all walk around with question marks hanging over our stupid heads, when we bloody well know the answer.

What we've done, all that we've done through industrial pollution, millions upon millions of cars, and other forms of casual rape, is to destroy the world's millenia-long balance of climate permanently. Whatever we do now is too little, too late. We have barely begun to awaken to a nightmare which can't and won't go away: we can't fix it now and still refuse to take responsibility for it. 

This will only escalate, and soon: the ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, species are going extinct, and green space is being ruthlessly ripped out to build soulless condos not suitable for a robot to inhabit, let alone human beings. Nowhere is that better illustrated than around here, where the horror of narrow, ugly attached "homes" assaults the eyes. With unusual candour, these have been named "saltbox" homes, but to me they look more like crackerboxes made of particle-board, cement and wire. These "homes" have no yard, front or back, and only the odd sickly sapling bolstered on both sides with sticks. I can only imagine how a family would ricochet off those narrow, cramped walls. A bed would take up the entire room.

What does it mean? Can you guess?

We've run out of space.

How have we come to live like this?  Rip out the green space, pile all our discards into the landfill and forget about it, and I won't even get into the massive, ever-growing, floating horror called the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch (and I have news: they've found another one in the Atlantic) made of discarded computers and other throw-away plastic debris. We look at these things, think "too bad", then quickly push the delete button in our minds and carry on. 

My husband is a scientist, and he refuses to see that any of this is related to climate change or global warming. He just says "everything goes in cycles", meaning that very soon, perhaps next year, everything will return to calm, pastoral beauty with gentle rains and benevolent sun.

Don't count on it. It's not going to happen any time soon. Or ever.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Top Ten News Stories of 2013!

 

 

(BLOGGER'S NOTE. You thought 2012 was awful? Wait until you read these stories from 2013! How come I know all this stuff in advance? The pace of modern living is so goldern fast these days, we've already caught up with ourselves and gone BOINNGGGG into the future. It's as if the new year never happened at all. JOIN THE FUN!)

1. A GECKO IS ELECTED PRESIDENT

You know that cute little Geico gecko in the TV ads who goes around saying funny things in an Australian accent? He is elected President of the World in 2013 by the unanimous vote of everyone who has a Twitter account.  In the words of the Huffington Post: "Never has a reptile exhibited this calibre of leadership ability melded with such profound humanity." (Only later is it discovered that he is computer-generated and in fact does not exist.)

2. LINDSAY LOHAN GOES TO JAIL AND DIES

In a much-anticipated climax to her long career of self-destructive flailing, Lindsay Lohan slugs a producer, fails to show up for her court date, slams her car into someone she doesn't like, gets in a bar fight and bites someone, stars in some lame-o movie about Jackie Kennedy, fails to show up for another court date, slugs someone else, and. . . on December 31, 2013, the authorities break into her sumptuous Malibu beach house and haul her off to jail on multiple charges, after which she is immediately released on bail and dies from a chihuahua bite. Though it is determined that the chihuahua is an attack dog trained by her mother, her death is listed in the media under Public Improvements.

 

3. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMPLETELY DISINTEGRATES

This results from the relentless forces of tweets and twats, not to mention texts that mean nothing (I don't CARE what you did this afternoon when it rained out), constant Smartphone calls that mean nothing, and the compressed, misspelled quasi-language of social media worming its way into Webster's Dictionary as an acceptable new language called Twitspeak.

 

4. EVERYONE ON THE PLANET IS DRAGGED INTO A SCANDAL FOR POSTING NUDE PHOTOS ON THEIR FACEBOOK PAGE

 

(or Twitter or whatever)

5. PUBLIC ATTENTION SPAN SHRINKS FROM THREE SECONDS TO

 

 

6. HORRIFIC WEATHER DISASTERS ARE BLAMED ON "NORMAL CLIMATE FLUCTUATIONS"

. . . as New York City sinks six hundred feet under the sea, California disappears, and late-night comics (grateful for some fresh, relevant material) spew out endless jokes about it from their new studios in Newton, Kansas, Entertainment Capitol of the World.

7. THE KARDASHIANS TURN INTO LIFE-SIZED STATUES MADE OF BOLOGNA

 

8. THAT GREAT BIG MASS OF DISCARDED PLASTIC FLOATING IN THE OCEAN INCREASES FROM TWENTY MILES WIDE TO FIFTY MILES WIDE

 

 

In 2013, environmental experts are quick to reassure the public that this new man-made continent will begin to disintegrate by the year 5019. In the meantime, a theme park is being contemplated.

9. TREES BEGIN TO SPONTANEOUSLY IGNITE DUE TO CONCENTRATED FUMES IN THE OXYGEN SUPPLY

More fodder for the late-night comedians.

10. A NEW REALITY SHOW DEBUTS IN 2013, STARRING A VAST LUMP OF PUNGENT ORGANIC MATERIAL

This is called Here Comes Funny Poo Poo.

And I could go on and on, but I can hear a little voice in my head saying, "Heyyyyyyyyyyy, that's depressing!" So I'll stop.