This morning I was going through my usual search of internet news when I found two articles, seemingly unrelated, that point to the bleak future in store for us all. Yeah, it's been that kind of week, and I wanted to share the love.
The first is that no one is reporting UFO sightings any more. From Area 51 to England, UFO societies are shutting down for lack of members. It's possible that after 60 years of failing to convince the public that aliens have been visiting our planet, UFOlogists are giving up, except even the hard-core X-files people out there just aren't getting enough celestial pings to make their nightly vigils worth while. Maybe the aliens are waiting until Burning Man before they visit again.
The second is that the permafrost in Siberia has begun to melt big time. The ground in Siberia has been frozen solid for the last 11,000 years. In the few settlements that exist in this wasteland that's bigger than Texas and Oregon combined, toilet pipes had to be built above ground, because the permafrost was as hard as concrete. Not anymore. Scientists report finding new lakes a mile across, and peat bogs that haven't see the sun since the last Ice Age ended.
Forget about China cranking out millions of new cars every year, or the United States and Australia committing themselves to another generation of burning coal. Even if everybody in the world woke up tomorrow with Ralph Nader's brain, the permafrost melting means that the amount of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will double in the next thirty years.
The more greenhouse gases, the faster the temperature will rise. In Siberia where there's nothing but dirt and water and both trap heat, the permafrost will begin melting at an accelerated rate, liberating more methane which will raise the temperature faster. What's really depressing is that this means it's officially too late to stop global warming.
It no longer matters whether we save the rain forests. This is a point of no return. Thanks for trying Tony Blair, even if the G-8 accords, which the US, Australia, China and Korea refuse to agree to, are like trying to put out a campfire by spitting on it, but it just doesn't matter any more.
Maybe that's why the aliens have stopped coming around lately.
A species so stupid that it didn't realize they were wiping themselves out just isn't worth studying. The aliens have fifty years of images and specimens like cow parts and Elvis for the museum of failed civilizations.
The rest of us might as well be burning fucking tires on our lawns, cooking American eagles for supper and huffing freon from the air conditioner. If natural processes happened in a time scale humans could easily understand, everybody on the planet would be screaming like bitches right now, because holy shit, we're all going to die.
The folks over at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who can visualize time on this scale, are most likely scoping out cheap land in the Andes and Nepal, making friends with survivalists.
Those of us who have been following hurricane season already realize how whack things are. Everybody else will figure it out in the next five to 15 years, in a direct ratio to how much time they spend watching Fox News or listening to Rush Limbaugh.
This is like that scene in Titanic where some people wait until the boat is at water level to jump in only to be pulled down by the weight of the ship.
There isn't even a good way off this dying planet.
NASA recently announced that they were scrapping the space shuttle in favor of a return to the Mercury capsules.
This is like your grandfather trading in his 1968 Buick for a 1950 Studebaker.
Just when we could really use some alien spacecraft they stop coming around. There's never a Vogon around when you need them.
-not me. nuff said...
cry, the beloved country
if you shuffle back in the archives here till you reach june, you'll see copious notes on where i went, and what i ate, and about a million photos of everything i saw, save for the goddamn roaches because i just don't have the presence of mind to take snaps of insects which are skittering about at excesses of the speed of sound. i could go on, here, but i guess what i am leading up to is the big storm, Katrina (a category 5 hurricane, to be precise) which is even now plowing mightily over jefferson parish on its way to points north. i didn't take any pictures of it, but if you've driven over the Lake Ponchartrain causeway, you'll have an idea of what i'm talking about when i recall the seemingly endless shallow-water flats of glassy silver reflecting the sunset in shades of dove-gray and blush-pink. it's something. the city and it's environs, under the folkloric-sounding name jefferson parish, which is a nifty euphemism for 'county' i guess... are all clothed in a palpable sense of deep, purple, tropical gothic mysticism. it's not so hard to imagine half-mad voudons gleaming with sweat under fragarantly smoking bonfire shadows, or nattily attired vampires abroad in the garden district, for god's sake, when you find yourself in a place as determinedly backwards, (and beautifully so) as this...
today he writes about making weight for wrestling and i was just shattered by the determination and the clarity of purpose. (two things i'd do anything for.) towards the end i caught myself wondering if it was worth it. all that rigor and early mornings getting to know how to use this body, honing it down to it's peak, starving it and working it till it was perfected, so that he can now recall in such details the sense-memory of electric impulses jagging down every nerve fiber, or the sharpness of hunger after a week of starvation. would you be glad you'd made the most of it? relieved that you'd proved your mettle before it was stripped away? or would you wish you'd smoked up and eaten brownies and mac n cheese and taken the ease of your body.
