Located off the beaten path and outside the seaside resort town of Punta del Este, the Museo del Mar is a gem of a museum. One would not expect that in the obscure backwaters of La Barra, down some dirt roads where the neighborhood dogs roam, lies one of the greatest natural history museums on Earth. The Mueso del Mar was the brainchild of one man (his dog is taxidermied in the museum), and is home to possibly the most extensive collections of shells – perhaps over one hundred thousand – displayed in exquisite condition under one roof. The museum is also home to many other marine-related fauna displays: taxidermied seabirds and sea lions, baby hammerhead sharks preserved in formaldehyde, whale skeletons and eardrums, elephant seal skulls, seafaring artifacts and curiosities. As you walk through the museum, a wonderful soundtrack of oldies plays from the speakers. I was there with family, otherwise I would have not only spent the entire day there, but would have returned the following day.
Across the road from the Museo del Mar is the Insectario. This separate museum looks like a long barn from the outside, but once you enter you will find thousands (38,000 to be precise) of insects displayed in hundreds of glass frames that line the sides of the room. As with shells in the Museo del Mar’s ocean exhibit, the insect room contains more insects house under one roof than any other place I have stepped foot in. Both the Insectario and the Mueso del Mar are marvelous, and I would personally make a trip down to Uruguay with the sole purpose of visiting them.
I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurs Rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
-Edward Abbey
Montevideo is packed with wonderful museums. Last week I went to the National Museum of Natural History. It’s a small museum located inside of a former prison. Despite being small, the museum is wonderful and contains exquisite displays of Uruguay’s paleontology, various ecosystems, and history of researching the natural world. On the walls of the museum are the bones of Pleistocene-era creatures (sloths, glyptodons, toxodons, saber-tooth tigers, mastodons, and terror birds). The fact that these many of these large beasts co-existed with early humans in North and South America during the Ice Age is remarkable. I often use my imagination as a time machine and dispatch myself nebulous avatar to lands of ancient civilization and prehistory, just to see how things unfolded, but it is only through art (and possibly hallucinogens) that we will have anything more visceral. The first room takes visitors on a journey through Uruguay’s prehistoric past.
The second exhibition featured displays of the numerous Uruguayan ecosystems (prairies, wetlands, forests, rivers, seas). I transcribed some of the museum labels and have posted the text below.
Atlantic-River Plate Coast, “As Important as it is Populated.” The coastal area is the point of contact between the terrestrial and the aquatic environment. The energy it receives from the wind and the waves makes it a highly dynamic transition area. This environment combines rocky points, beaches, sand dunes, gullies and lagoons, which offer a large number of different habitats for different species. It is a space where a large number of different biotic and abiotic elements interact with each other and with human beings. Its high biodiversity as well as its capacity to provide goods and services sustain commercial activities such as fishing and tourism.
Urban “Concrete Jungle” An urban ecosystem is an ecological system in a city or a densely-populated area. These are man-made systems made up of biological and physical elements, which combine natural and artificial elements. The biological components of these ecosystems are in constant interaction with the human populations and their social and economic characteristics. Cities are the habitat of several species which have adapted to the specific characteristics of the urban landscape. Urban plant species are mainly ornamental. Urban fauna consists of native species which have adapted to the urban landscape, and other species which have been introduced; some of them have adapted to such a degree that they only live in cities.
Agricultural ecosystem “Modified natural ecosystem” Agricultural ecosystems are part of the territory which have been altered by human activity. They are used to produced mainly food, by means of agricultural and cattle-rearing activities alters the natural environment, affecting the quality of the water, the air, and the soils, as well as the flows of nutrients and the structure of native communities. However, regarding the composition species in space and time, these environments are very dynamic and they can reflect a high diversity for some zoological groups.
Prairies “Natural Country” Prairies are made of dense herbaceous vegetation and scarce trees. The constant action of herbivore animals helps maintain this configuration. It is a particular environment, which results from the influence of the subtropical, temperate and rainy climate. It is made up of very diverse, complex, and dynamic assembly of plants, such as small and medium-sized germanous species, and small bushes. Given the fertility of the soils, the small number of the tree species and the plain set-off the prairie is one of the ecosystems that man has exploited and altered the most.
Native Forest, “Our Forests” Forests are basically ecosystems made up of trees, where there are also ferns, bushes, lianas, and other plants. A large percentage of the organic matter in forest resides in the tissues of these plants. In Uruguay there are different kinds of forests: gallery, parkland, sierra, quebrada, coastal, and palm forests. Our territory hosts more animal species living in forests than expected, given the small surface covered by the forests in the country. Many forests are severely degraded by the constant and selective logging activities which have taken place over the centuries.
Wetlands “Earth Kidneys” Wetlands are mainly flat lowlands which are constantly covered by water or which are covered by water during long periods of time. This has an impact on the soils and on the communities of flora and fauna. They are diversely rich environments with high biological productivity which house aquatic and terrestrial animal and vegetables species. The most characteristic vegetable formations are red beds, cattail, marshes, and bulrush beds. These environments provide ecosystem services such as hydrological system regulation and water purification. Given their irreplaceable role in providing freshwater, they are called “kidneys of the planet.” Wetlands are fragile and endangered environments, which are currently at great risk of degradation.
Territorial Sea “As Singular as it is fragile” Seventy percent of our planet is covered by oceans and seas. The marine systems are very dramatic and they are affected by the winds, which cause variations in the salinity and the temperature of the water. They are also connected by currents, and they are influenced by major phenomena such as the weather, biological productivity, and the migration of sea animals. This environment presents a highly but little known diversity, due to the fact that many biological groups which are only present in the sea. The high productivity of these marine ecosystem is key to the development of industrial and artisanal fishing worldwide.
Atlantic-River Plate Coast The coastal area is the point of contact between the terrestrial and the aquatic environment. The energy it receives from the wind and the waves makes it a highly dynamic transition area. This environment combines rocky points, beaches, sand dunes, gullies, and lagoons, which offer a large number of different habitats for different species. It is a space where a large number of biotic and abiotic elements interact with each other and with human beings. Its high biodiversity as well as its capacity to provide goods and services sustain commercial activities such as fishing and tourism.
“Whales on the Matriz Square” In 1892, while some restoration was carried out on the Matriz Church, a whale jaw thousands of years old was founded buried. Why was this bone found on firm land? About 6000 years ago, the sea covered part of the present day national territory. This is known as a “marine ingression.” The advance and retreat of the sea along thousands of years allows us to find marine animals inland.
“Our Dinosaurs” Dinosaurs, as most reptiles, incubated their eggs in nests and their fossilized remains are relatively frequent in some parts of Uruguay. The biggest and rounded eggs are attributed to herbivore dinosaurs and the smallest and oval ones to carnivore species. A coprolite is a fossil excrement and there are different remains of this kind around the globe that are attributed to dinosaurs. The one shown in this exhibit was found in Uruguay and is 70 million years old. So far scientists are not certain to what kind of animal it belonged.. maybe a dinosaur, maybe another type of land animal.
“Sailors of Many Arms” Ammonites thrived in almost all seas. This mollusk, with spiral shells, were relatives of the octopuses and squids. They also had tentacles in the head. Some ammonites would have lived up to 30 years ago and reached two meters in diameter. They because extinct some 65 million years ago. At present, only the nautilus has a protective shell and a relatively similar way of life.
“Covered by the Sea” Around this time the planet’s temperature increased. Great amounts of ice melted and the sea level rose so much that it reached Bolivia’s present territory. For this reason, marine animal fossils are found inland in the continent.
“Prairies Appear” Big climate and ecosystems changes happened all over the world. South America became a colder and dryer land. Grasslands substituted for extensive jungle areas and herbivore mammals evolved like the giant ground sloth, glyptodonts, big rodents, and predators like terror birds. These changes promoted the emergence of different plant species, which a long time later we learned to grow. Climatic changes may undermine the survival of some species and benefit others. This type of event has happened repeatedly in the history of the planet in a natural way.
“The End of an Era” Different evidence suggests that a gigantic meteorite of a diameter of over 10 kilometers crashed into Earth in the present day zone of the Gulf of Mexico. Immense tsunamis struck the coasts and an enormous dust cloud blocked the sunlight, which provoked the decrease of temperature and prevented the photosynthesis of many plans and phytoplankton. This catastrophic event released a billion times the energy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs affecting all types of life. It ended with ammonites, dinosaurs, big marine reptiles, and other groups that had dominated the planet for over 200 million years. However, different types of animals and plans managed to survive, among them, a small group of hair bearing animals: the mammals.
“The Tyrant of the Seas” With teeth the size of a human hand, the giant shark “megalodon” (big tooth) was one of the largest predators of the time. It is estimated that it reached a length of 16 meters and its gigantic jaws could be 3.5 meters tall and 2.3 meters wide. Its bite, up to 10 times stronger than present day white sharks, allowed it to hunt dolphins, whales, and even other sharks. With the extinction of the megalodon – 2 million years ago – white sharks could conquer all of the seas of the world.
“When the Birds Reigned” Terror birds were big predators of South American lowlands and could be 3 meters tall and weight up to 300 kilograms. The biggest speies were unable to fly but could run as fast as 50km per hour. Some species maybe used their strong legs to break dead animals’ bones to access the bone marrow. The arrival of numers predator mammals from North America, through the Isthmus of Panama (3 million years ago) started the decrease and later the disappearance of these fascinating birds. The claw shown corresponds to the inner finger of a terror brid. With this finger the bird could hold its prey down to the floor and kill it with its enormous beak. The closet relative to terror birds would be the seriema. It is a predator bird of our countryside and hills that also lives in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It runs and walks but rarely flies. It keeps the clow of its inner finger in an up position while running to prevent it from wearing out against the floor. Some raptor dinosaurs – like the Velociraptor – had a similar claw.
“The Biggest Rodent in the World" At present the capybara is the biggest rodent. It can weigh up to 90 kilograms and it is very common in Uruguay. However, it does not compare to the Josephoartigasia which could have weighed over a ton. It used its enormous incisors to feed as well as to defend itself from predators such as terror birds. It could bite as strong as present day tigers. The only fossils known of this animals were found in Uruguay. The name of this giant rodent pays homage to historical leader Jose Artigas.
“Ice Age Mammals” Some 20,000 years ago, our land was very cold and there were some big size mammals. Among them, there were the giant grounds sloths (of up to five tones), glyptodonts, saber-toothed tigers, mastodons, horses, and many other extraordinary animals. They disappeared about 8,000 years ago, and up until now scientists are not certain about the cause. Humans arrived about 20,000 ago in South America from the north… Did these big mammals become extinct due to the actions of the first Native Americans? Or was the extinction cause by climate change or other causes?
Colonia del Sacramento is a town (27,000 residents) on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, the vast estuary that lies between Argentina and Uruguay. The expansive waters of the estuary stretch from Montevideo to Buenos Aires and are home to river dolphins, piranhas, sea monkeys, and the golden dong. The estuary is fed by the Uruguay and Parana Rivers, and the waters are muddy, silty, and sediment rich. The Parana River is the second-longest in South America, and the Rio de la Plata is the sixth-largest river drainage basin in the world (after the Amazon, Congo, Nile, Ob, Mississippi, and Yer Mamma). Colonia del Sacramento juts out into the estuary and the old town is surrounded by water.
Colonia was originally a Portuguese fortress established in 1680. Portuguese and Spanish colonialists arrived in Uruguay in the early 1500s, and Colonia was a flashpoint between the two empirical powers for a century. After massacring the indigenous population (following the Charrua genocide in 1831, Uruguay’s native population had been eradicated entirely), and declaring independence from their metropoles on the Iberian Peninsula, the newly independent nations of Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil proceeded to massacre each other in the Uruguayan and Paraguayan wars. Within the borders of these nations, inhabitants massacred their fellow countrymen in various civil conflicts that stretched beyond the years of the external wars. The Paraguayan War (or War of the Triple Alliance: Paraguay vs. Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil) took place between 1864 – 1870, and claimed upwards of 400,000 to 450,000 lives, three-fourths of them Paraguayans (roughly 60% of the country’s population at the time). For comparison, the U.S. Civil War was fought between 1861 – 1865 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 Americans – approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population at the time.* Nowadays, national disputes in South America are not unfolding violently on the battlefield so much as they are expressed in competitive football matches. This sense of national pride is similar across the globe as citizens watch their teams compete in qualifying matches for next year’s World Cup, which is the closest alternative to global kinetic warfare that humanity has ever seen. Even elements of artificial intelligence will one day be incorporated into tournaments, as robots are expected to compete against the human champions of the 2050 World Cup.
Colonia’s historic old town is small and labyrinthine. Some cobblestone streets are lined by abandoned storefronts and homes, others by sleepy cafes, shops, art galleries, and little museums. The buildings are mostly diminutive, which adds to the dwarfish nature of the town. One gets the sense they are walking through a diorama, Hollywood set, or Potemkin village where facades have been laid the on old stone walls of colonial structures containing vine-covered courtyards enveloped by trees. (A charming part of Uruguay is the abundance of trees on the sidewalks that provide shade for the pedestrians and shelter the many birds chirping from sunrise to sunset.) The fortress is made of giant blocks of black granite thick enough to withstand cannon fire. A substantial amount of earth-moving was required to dig up those rocks, which could explain all the fossils of extinct Pleistocene animals in the museums. On display in the museums are fossils of giant sloths, glyptodons, toxodons, saber-tooth tigers, mastodons, and extinct llamas, horses, bears, wolves, and terror birds. Beginning three million years ago the Isthmus of Panama steadily surfaced from the sea, creating a land bridge linking North America and South America across which prehistoric fauna and ancient dinosaur warriors trekked in an event known as the Great American Biotic Interchange.
I’ve always been impressed by the Geologic Time Scale (GTS) and I keep a printed copy in my notepad. On occasion I pull out the GTS and try to memorize the eras, epochs, and ages of the eons. By familiarizing myself with the GTS, I was able to better contextualize the length of time required for certain changes to occur over time, better appreciate my infinitesimal status when compared to the grander scheme of things, as well as to be grateful for existing in a relatively stable point in history. (Carl Sagan would often touch on these concepts in Cosmos, which is one reason why I would listen to that series repeatedly.) Even as I attempted to grapple with the understanding of deep time (concepts illustrated by such timescale facts as Tyrannosaurs Rex lived closer to humans than it to Stegosaurus, or that Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than she did to the construction of the Great Pyramids, or that Oxford University was established before rise of the Aztecs Empire), it felt like I was leaving out another massive aspect of life on Earth. Although I was gaining an appreciation for timescales, I still fail to understand the volume and diversity of what was unfolding. I realized that I needed enhance my understanding of biological diversity, specifically the types and numbers of species on Earth, how they’re classified, as well as their evolutionary relationships. So on the other side of the GTS print-out that I carry are diagrams related to taxonomy (classification of species) and phylogeny (evolutionary relationships). It’s always been my dream to draw my own geological time scale and evolutionary tree of life. In the meantime, I’ll try to expand my knowledge of these subjects through reading and taking notes on Eons videos.
To end, last week I was lying in bed and my religious friend texted me this meme and said, “Explain this.”
This was how the exchange went.
Aaron: I’m not sure what that meme is implying… Friend: It’s asking how dinosaurs were able to mate when the tail prevents their genitalia from connecting. Aaron: Probably by moving their tails out of the way.
Because I had recently seen a meme that was a slightly related to his point, I forwarded it to him:
I laid in bed thinking about the meme my friend had sent me and the reasoning he used to presumably arrive at the conclusion that dinosaurs might be fictitious due to the inability to conceive how they mated because their tails got in the way. I wondered what type of thought process was at play that leads one to question the existence of dinosaurs based off of a meme depicting their bulky rear ends obstructing fornication. I thought to myself: if I wanted to make a case against the existence of dinosaurs, I wouldn’t begin by arguing that they never existed because it would have been physically impossible for them to hump. That requires a big lack of imagination in that dinosaurs should be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to creative mating. But it also required a huge imagination on his part to suggest that somehow the official paleontological narrative was being manipulated or misconstrued because it is incompatible with Creationism. The other thought that was simultaneously running through my mind is why not simply look to the animals alive today that face mating challenges similar to the clumsy dinosaurs depicted in the meme: crocodiles, komodo dragons, tortoises, sea turtles, elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, ostriches, the morbidly obese, etc.
*I am currently reading Anabasis, aka The March Up Country or The March of the 10,000 by Xenophon. This book was written over 2,500 years ago and is a first-hand account of the march of thousands of Greek mercenaries from Persia through Mesopotamia to Greece. The plight takes place after a series of battles were lost by the rebellious Persian commander Cyrus the Younger. As I read about battle after battle, and campaign after campaign involving tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of men, it’s becoming clearer to me that I have lowballed the extent to which human history is riddled with conflict. Growing up in a relatively peaceful time and place, one can easily fail to appreciate that war and violence was the norm.
Welcome to the planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is, as I have said, poignantly beautiful and rare. But it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware. -Carl Sagan, Cosmos
My God! I am thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives – the domestic routine (same old wife every night), the stupid and useless degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the business men, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones!
-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
The other week I went on a walk through Ocean Song, a farm and wilderness center near the coast in west Sonoma County. The lawn and gardens are well-kept and watered, and when I visited the place was like an oasis surrounded by dry chaparral hills, ranchland, valleys, and forests. (If you go there at the time of this writing then the land would be drenched because heavy rainfall from an ‘atmospheric river’ has been wonderfully relentless and will bring forth mushrooms across the soil and beckon the prodigious salmon to return to their natal rivers to spawn). There are hiking trails beyond the parameter of the garden outskirts which are parameterized by an old fence. If you enter or leave the confines you must pass through a wooden gate and, in accordance with the laminated sign, latch the gate shut to keep the deer out of the sacred garden. As I was re-entering and locking the gate I was imagining these deer as vicious killers, with one such antlered foe on his hind legs aggressively fighting to pull the gate open and yelling, “You mother fucker!” while several other deer bounded over the fence storming the garden.
The gardens are home to a number of flowering plants and trees, hummingbirds and bugs, but I was captivated by the insect pond life that was stirring around in this concrete pool under a little gazebo. Hundreds of mosquito larvae (called wrigglers) were whipping around vertically in the water, breathing through a tube on their abdomens and feeding on microscopic aquatic plants and algae (diatoms and bacteria). Strewn across the surface of the water were the husks of the pupae which had completed their metamorphosis into the imago – the mature or adult insect – shed their exoskeletons, and presumably flown away. This all started because the larvae were hatched from eggs laid by a female mosquito, which cannot do so without having a blood meal beforehand. (But this all really got started when primitive insects first appeared on Earth 350 million years ago, or possibly even longer than that in the Silurian Period. Over a million species of insects that have been identified, more than all other animals combined, and taxonomically speaking we share a common biological ancestor with them somewhere way back on the evolutionary tree.) While listening to the birds and gazing into this miniature world and the tiny creatures with their even tinier brains and thousands of ommatidia – the facets that make up their compound eyes, I remembered something that a housekeeper at work had told me the previous day: she was going to drop her daughter off at her sister’s house today so that they could watch movies at the movie theater all day. I thought to myself, did I hear that correctly? Who in their right mind would choose to be inside on a glorious day when they could be outdoors appreciating the marvels of nature?* A little bit of going outside never hurt anyone (not true), and mother nature offers the greatest forms of entertainment and education one can possibly enjoy. And while it may not be entirely free, it’s relatively affordable (there are underlying costs associated with getting to any place, and having any leisure time at all could be considered a privilege), not mention immeasurably beneficial to your health and mindset. Thousands of grey whales are going to begin their southerly migration to Mexico this month, and most people will miss seeing them because they’d prefer to go to the movies.
I work at a hospital where patients are regularly dying – wasting away on their deathbeds with plastic feeding tubes shoved down their throats, IV lines pumping fluids and drugs through their veins, EKG leads stuck all over their torsos, oxygen masks smothering their faces, while electronic monitors are incessantly beeping and blinking and overweight nurses are incessantly cackling and palavering (I’ve recently listen to staff discussing “good deals on Cyber Monday,” how “Nestle coffee makers taste like Starbucks,” the pros and cons of buying a X-Box for Christmas). The televisions in patient rooms are tuned-in to CARE (Continuous Ambient Relaxation Environment) TV which features peaceful music and calming visuals of streams, lakes, waterfalls, etc. A recent survey commissioned by LG Electronics found that the average person will watch more than 78,000 hours of TV in their lifetime. How fitting it is that many of us will die under the glowing light of one in a hygienic hospital room while the television plays clips from the great outdoors, the place where we should have been all along. This scenario of dying in a hospital (which is a decreasing trend) is less regrettable if one has lived their life to their fullest, which cannot be done if we are continuously obsessing about the procuring material possessions, consuming shit we do not need, and watching TV all the time. Yet it’s not the dying who are at fault, the truly disappointing demographic is constituted by those who are still healthy but are puttering through life with the option of transforming bad habits and extricating themselves from a pattern of wasting time but choose not to. Every day we spend not doing what we find meaningful is a day wasted. For many, the greatest accomplishment of the day is a successful bowel movement.
CARE TV
It is tempting to blame our shortcomings, neuroses, physiological aliments and maladies on society and the status quo. And while the dangerous shenanigans of baseless and inept septuagenarian politicians and businessmen leading various nations, but especially America, down paths of war and authoritarianism may lie beyond our spheres of influence, we need not exacerbate an already precarious situation by acting like imbeciles and pursuing activities that harm our health and well-being (physical, mental, and spiritual). While elected officials seem hell-bent on dragging humanity into World War III and transnational corporations skirt their responsibilities to safeguard the environment, it doesn’t help if we as citizens are habitually transfixed by Netflix shows, Marvel superhero movies, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football,** hotdog eating contests, monster truck rallies, NASCAR rallies, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump rallies, Hillary Clinton book signings, shopping malls, shopping online, Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays, the Mega Millions jackpot, the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, cruise ships, casinos, television gameshows (excludingJeopardy), tabloid talk shows (excluding Jerry Springer), cable news shows (none excluded), impeachment hearings, degenerate music videos, moronic social media and video-sharing posts, video games, virtual reality, pornography, sexbots (coming soon), gorging on factory-farmed fast food, gobbling antidepressants, fentanyl and other opioid-based drugs, smoking methamphetamines and crack cocaine, sucking down big gulps and super-sized fountain sodas, and other mindless routines atrophying and discombobulating our brains and accelerating America’s downfall into the land of fat fucks.
On December 21stthe solstice will arrive. Here in the northern hemisphere, the sun will set at its most southerly point, and after that the days will start to get longer. This means that planet Earth is completing yet another one of the billions of full-circle trips it’s taken around the Sun, a very limited number of which we are blessed to be alive for. Another series of seasons will have passed, as will have the opportunities to witness the miracles of the natural world that manifest themselves throughout the year. Due to the good fortune of being located the circumstellar habitable zone, Earth offers a mind-boggling array of incredible phenomena that many of us are privileged enough to observe, experience, and learn about. To be alive with the chance of immersing oneself in the beauty of the natural world should never be taken for granted as it is one of the greatest gifts and prizes one could have bestowed upon them, and it is a tragedy that we have created systems which prevent many members of the human family and myriad living creatures in general from realizing this godsend. Most of us do not have to travel far to see miracles unraveling before our eyes. They manifest in infinite forms and orders of magnitude. They can be as grand as total solar eclipses, meteor showers, a night sky filled with stars, a sunrise or sunset, the moon overhead, mountain ranges, rainforests, towering waterfalls, rugged coasts, open oceans, jungles and plains, deserts of sand or ice, beaches and islands and reef systems, forests and rivers and lakes, the incredible creatures that roam on or beneath the surface of earth or swim through the seas of this singular planet drifting through space. The fascinating wonders of the natural world the can be a small as snails and shells, leaves and flowers, lichen and algae, mushrooms and moss, plankton and pond life, mosquito larva, a drop of water, a central nervous system, a beating heart. And these are only the things that we have discovered and are here today. An incomphrensible amount of species and lifeforms have come and gone throughout the preceding epochs. Trillions of creatures have lived and died over the long and bumpy spectrum of life on Earth. Continents have risen and fallen and entire flourishing ecosystems have been wiped out or swallowed up by mother nature. Like the dinosaurs of prehistory, 99% of all species to have ever lived on Earth have gone extinct. This means that we and everything around us will too someday vanish. Like the mosquitoes in Ocean Song, whose life span is less than two months, we must make the best of our time here because there is no guarantee that we and everything we cherish will be here for long.*** And it is a sad fact of life that we sometimes do not realize what we have until it’s gone.
I’ll end with some pics from Big Sur, California. Where you can stand on a cliff and watch pastel clouds drifting above a boundless ocean expanse stretching across the horizon. And with an unobstructed view, you can almost see the curvature of the Earth.
*Recalling the unsolicited information that the housekeeper proffered about her sister and daughter watching movies together all day, I was reminded of another nothing-burger conversation not worth having that took place the week prior when I had finished a sea kayaking excursion. As I was walking toward my car in the parking lot and man asked me if I knew what all the boats were doing out there. I said, “Yeah, they’re fishing.” He said, “They’re actually baiting and tagging white sharks.” I said, “Great white sharks?” He said, “Yup.” “Why?” I asked. He said he didn’t know. I told him that I was just out there and I didn’t see anyone doing that and they were all fishing. I loaded up my gear and wondered how it comes to be that a grown man can go around all day thinking that the boats off the coast are out there strictly for the purpose of tagging great white sharks. I came to the conclusion that he must deduced his conjecture from television shows.
**I’m not saying that these things are bad in moderation, but, like most activities linked to instant gratification, over-consumption, sensual stimulation, hedonism, and nihilism, if you make of them an obsession or addiction, then you can kiss the real world goodbye. There’s a pseudo-race event in San Francisco called Bay to Breakers which epitomizes the stupidity of masses gathering to behave like idiots in self-absorbed decadence. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that a huge gathering of people behaving like buffoons demonstrates that there is no hope for humanity, but there is little difference of the impact and disposition the people behaving like this is one big group and those behaving like this in smaller or individualistic groups, separated or isolated from each other every weekend. It’s a matter of scaling (not to mention the purpose of the gathering). A same logic applies conversely to numerous crises facing humanity. A recent UN report called the Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty found that over seven million children worldwide are deprived of their liberties by being held in one or another form of detention (child soldiers, refugee children in detention centers in the United States, Uighur Muslim children in reeducation camps China). If these seven million children were being held in a single prison, adults worldwide would unite, raise hell to free the children, and shut down the prison. But because they’re being detained in smaller numbers dispersed across the globe, people just don’t’ care as much. The point is that we’re wasting precious time on shit that doesn’t matter, for example with our infatuation with professional sports. To make matters worse, the Warriors really dropped the ball somewhere, that stadium in San Francisco was a gigantic waste of money, the Raiders have been losing – sucks for them, not sure why the they're moving to Las Vegas where it’s going to be 130° there daily in ten years. We’re spending so much time and resources on materialistic garbage, gambling our lives away, and destroying the planet in the process. It’s a very complicated world, and it would be advantageous for our collective well-being and future if individuals spent less time entertaining ourselves and more time striving to understand it. And if you put in the energy and effort required to do your best to figure it out, there are rewards beyond your wildest imagination. Having said that, the return of the Houston Astro’s fan’s hat at the 2017 World Series parade was pretty damn cool:
***It’s likely that in the near future most urbanites will be seeing more drones in the skies than birds.
Cyrus heard them and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil." -Herodotus, The Histories Roy’s no Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife. Yet the manner of death he fears does not sound bad to me; to me it seems like a decent, clean way of taking off, surely better than the slow rot in a hospital oxygen tent with rubber tubes stuck up your bodily offices, with blood transfusions and intravenous feeding, bedsores and bedpans and bad-tempered nurses’ aides – the whole nasty routine to which most dying men, in our time, are condemned.
If you take Route 50 past Sacramento, the four-lane freeway begins to rise above the arid Central Valley – the fastest growing region of California – near the town of Folsom. Construction crews are doing their part in the great and ongoing human project to maximally terraform planet Earth by gradually developing housing tracts, strips malls, and business centers among the paved-over hills, expanding the urban wasteland in this water-starved and dusty climate. The homes are huge, requiring immense amounts of resources to build, and will require massive amounts of energy and water to maintain. The energy and water will presumably be provided by the Folsom Dam and Lake, fed by the American River and sourced from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. While I’m not quite sure how one could bring themselves to live in the Central Valley under the stable conditions and normal circumstances of the present (no offense to any readers bearing an affinity toward Sacramento and Folsom, but aside from the historic districts these places are what James Howard Kunstler would call ‘places not worth caring about;’ driving through town is like being in a cartoon with the same redundant wraparound background – plazas, gas stations, apartment complexes – revolving by block after mundane block), if the water were to ever stop flowing for more than a month then these residents, like millions of other Californians relying on the melted snowpack of the Sierras for drinking water, would have to leave or face death. Until then, Sacramento and Folsom will continue to grow. The houses on the hillsides will shelter the residents, and those people will need cars to drive on the packed freeways so they can get to work in order to make money to spend at malls and plazas which will multiply in correlation to the burgeoning suburbs in a positive feedback loop of capitalism, consumerism, and suburban sprawl - the American Dream on life support. In the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom sums up the purpose behind this push for infrastructure expansion:
Life in these areas is spent largely indoors, increasingly in front of big screen televisions that offer temporary or illusory escape from the tedium of middle class life to other lands where they can experience vicariously an adventure or dream which is no longer attainable yet perhaps once was.* Their forefathers having broken ground to embark upon an era of electronic and internet-based discovery, the contemporary generation of humans are now immersed in the exploration the world online via their smartphones, and people across the globe are trading in their outdoor time for a Netflix series, have replaced reading book for a playing video game, and would prefer to be spectators rather than participants of a sport. If the cities and suburbs of the Central Valley are thought of as a person with pathologies, then their symptoms would include obesity, attention deficient disorder, and other neuroses caused by addictions to fast food, smart phones, and television, festering ulcers and vitamin D deficiencies related to shitty diet and lack of sunlight, atherosclerosis and clogged blood vessels brought on by lack of exercise and spending too much time in traffic jams on congested freeways. Despite the abundance of material wealth inundating households, many in society seem desperately unfulfilled and lost – as though something critical (intangible, metaphysical) is missing from their lives but they just cannot put their finger on what it may be. Perhaps there is nothing missing, and that this is just the way life feels. But to those who feel trapped in a spiritual death spiral, there is no better place to begin searching for a way out and reconfiguring ones priorities than by unplugging and going outdoors. For those in Central Valley, follow the water.
From Sacramento and Folsom, Route 50 continues east through the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and after Placerville the elevation signs begin to read 4,000 feet, then 5,000 feet. Soon after entering the El Dorado National Forest, the parking lot for the Pyramid Creek trailhead can be found on the north side of the road. A short hike along Pyramid Creek will take you to the base of Horsetail Falls in Desolation Wilderness. If you hike beside Horsetail Falls, scrambling up the granite cliffs, you will eventually find yourself at 8,000 feet amongst the alpine streams and lakes and sequoia forests of Desolation Valley. The air is crisp and the water is clean and cold. The water will eventually flow into the municipal aquifers to slake the thirst and power the homes of the six million Central Valley residents who seem lightyears away from the top of the waterfall. Yet here the only animals that seem to claim the water are the ducks that peacefully float on the surface of the clear mountain ponds. Theirs is a simple and beautiful world that does not concern itself with any of the superfluous material bullshit that we endured day by insufferable day. At the top the waterfall I sat down at the bank of Avalanche Lake and wondered what it was that the ducks did all day anyway, and so I ask them. This is what they said: quack quack quack.
*None of these criticisms are exclusive to the denizens of the Central Valley or suburban inhabitants in general, for this lifestyle I’m describing can just as easily be adopted by the residents of any area – urban or rural – in any pocket of Earth so long as there are people there willing to turn their lives over to decadence, interfaces, and machines.
Sunday, February 6, 2022 at 09:47PM 
