Riders On The Storm: A Prep Talk

 

Another storm? Nope. Pretty much the same one. Photo by Joe

Remember the early days of 2021, when I was blathering on about THE STORM, and I basically predicted January 6th? I do. The post devolved into a bunch of half-hearted new year's resolutions, and we're not going to rehash them here, but that bit about trudging on through a Category 5 shitstorm merits a wee follow-up.

I won't go into the details about the continuing and regrouping and rebuilding storm that consumes our nation and much of the world - but you should. I know - it's exhausting and it feels utterly redundant and futile and all that - but trust me when I say that the bad guys are absolutely counting on us being too exhausted with the 24/7 casserole of nonsense to keep paying attention to what they're up to. Also, if I've learned anything since about 2015, it is this: even the most "liberal" news outlets on earth are scarcely scratching the surface, when it comes to reporting on and/or explaining what is happening - and what is in the works for 2024 and beyond. 

It's time to close the shutters, it's time to go inside... Photo by Joe

I have only one recommendation for mitigating that effect. Find yourself a historian who is well-versed in politics, and let them do the work for you. My go-to over these past few years is Professor Heather Cox Richardson, and her "Letters From An American" have been invaluable - for better informing me, for framing current developments within a historical context, and for doing so without sensationalism and hyperbole. I'm sure there are many others like her - probably even some on the conservative side, with a moderate, academic bent. Find yours. It's important.

BUT FIRST...

We're on the ride, clamped into our seats. We have no choice. Like it or not, we're taking a ride. So, if we're going to be riders, let's RIDE! 

Start with a drinking game, if that's your thing... Biden falls down, or confuses Kevin Hart for The Rock - DRINK! Ex-president says something overtly, shockingly racist and/or fascist (a dog whistle to his base, but also consciously designed to distract us) - DRINK! Some US state jerrymanders its congressional districts like an inkblot test in order to guarantee one party's dominance - DRINK! Putin dies like three months ago, but is still calling the shots in modern war crime - DRINK! A Kardashian says something - DRINK! Congratulations - everybody's drunk.

Riding on... I'm not officially advocating a complete tune-out, but hey - how about trying a complete tune-out! I know I'm constantly preaching cartoons and sports and bad movies - and COSMOS - as coping mechanisms, but there are SO MANY others. Knitting looks like a good one - concentrating and yet thinking about nothing. Cross-stitch. Painting. Writing inane little backstories for SEVEN HUNDRED ludicrously-named fictitious hoboes. Dancing. Exercise. Researching the origins of the best (and worst) dirty jokes. Or DAD JOKES! Jumping in puddles. Brushing your cat's teeth. As long as you're engaged in some sort of activity, you're most likely not watching The Storm. 

As Ren shrieks at Stimpy in the "Space Madness" episode, "We're not hitchhiking anymore - we're RIDING!"

Is it gonna get worse? Of COURSE it's gonna get worse, and probably in ways we can't predict. We all know it. I'm trying to treat it like the threat of terror attack (or, more likely, getting caught up in a mass shooting at a local shopping center) - yes, we should be vigilant, but we can't ruin our lives in service of those fears. We must walk on. Storms are storms. They can be spectacularly destructive, but they end. Even that giant red spot thing on Jupiter will eventually spin itself out. 

So here's to weirding it up and riding this thing out - through 2024 and beyond. We can have fun with it, and it's in our collective best interest to try. It's my prime directive, at this point...

Improved Perspective via The Pull-back Shot

[Fade in.  Interior.  American cubicle-style accounting office.]

Sometimes, the effective execution of my relatively simple job is significantly impeded by errors in the input I receive from others.  I have to stop and waste lots of time and energy tracking down answers to simple questions that shouldn't need to be asked.  This is not unique to my job, and all you need to know about my Monday is that I had a LOT of that, today.

By now you might know that I have coping mechanisms for days like this.  Today, I tried a new one.  While waiting for my myriad answers to questions that shouldn't need to be asked, I looked up and picked out a faraway speck on the National Geographic world map - a freebie that came with one of [Maris]'s multiple 2012 panda calendars.  This part is not new.  I often try to put myself somewhere else.  As Laurie Anderson said, "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better."

As a kid, I would find myself on the first day of school, only days removed from our vacation trip, trying to picture what was happening at that moment in Rehoboth Beach.  Back then, I'm sure not a whole lot was happening in Rehoboth Beach, after Labor Day.  Once I had seen the Caribbean, I could close my eyes and see the  places I'd been - beaches, bars, restaurants, the house in which we stayed.  I knew which places would be quiet, which ones would have a band and a cruise ship crowd, and so on.  When weather.com arrived on the scene, my vision could be even more complete.

Today, the first speck upon which my gaze landed was Israel/Palestine, where the pace of killing-each-other's-children-over-bits-of-dusty-earth-and-so-much-less has recently picked up, again.  I knew that while I sat there in my cloth-covered work box in Maryland, mothers and fathers over there were crying themselves to sleep over the decimation of their lives, as their midnight worked its way toward one in the morning.

Obviously, that made me sad.  I wondered if there was a rule that dictates that all expansions of perspective had to result in melancholy.  So I pictured Rehoboth, cold and quiet, but not as dead as it used to be by November.  I saw St. Thomas, with the first of the week's cruise ships tied to the docks of Charlotte Amalie, their international passengers scattered about the island, muttering at the immeasurable slowness with which the service personnel moved.  I became aware - or at least more aware than usual - of all the activity taking place elsewhere on my planet at that exact moment.  At any given second in time on earth, someone is being murdered, someone is giving birth, someone is losing a baby, someone is drunk, someone is blowing an interview, someone's getting arrested, beaten-up, fired, hired, high, sober, dressed, asked out, inspired, crushed, rewarded, passed by, late, early, startled, fed or - just now - hearing his stomach growl.  All of this and so much more, all over the world.

I pulled my imaginary camera shot back further, and all those activities melted into a din, loud at first, but growing soft and muddy as I backed away, leaving a view of a quietly humming blue-and-white sphere, set as a jewel against the black of space.  I thought, why stop there?  There's a little earth-made robot SUV on Mars - right now - and it's doing something at this very moment.  At sixty-ish million miles, my picture was a little fuzzy - I had to fill in some of the details - but I could see it.  Human-controlled activity, farther away than any human has been from this world - happening right now.

Why stop there, and why stop with human activity?  I always tried to picture who was driving my favorite blue bumper-car at Funland when I was home, who was now living in my first college dorm room, who was sitting at [Maris]'s and my table at Louie's Backyard in Key West, and so on.  What about Jupiter?  Jupiter is spinning in space as I type this.  Stuff is going on, there.  Storms are raging, thousands of years old and larger than our planet.  Somewhere, WAY out there, the Voyager spacecraft are hurtling at inhuman speeds into interstellar space, still calling home. 

I pulled back still farther.  With 200 to 400 billion suns in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe (possibly many times that figure), I have no doubt that there are, right this very second, other worlds with intelligent life. I'm sure it's unimaginably different from human life, and I have little doubt that any of it is exactly where we are, technologically, but I'll bet somewhere, somebody is close enough to be considered at least a distant cousin.  On that world, as I type this, someone's being born, getting pregnant, stealing something, learning something, fighting over what to others looks like nothing, laughing, sleeping, winning, dying etc..

My perspective was improved, but because I never know when to quit, I took my tracking shot back one last step.  Beyond the lives of beings, nations and planets lie the lives of stars.  Right now, someone's sun is exploding.  Right now, galaxies the size of our own are colliding with each other in multimillion-year spectacles of violence and death on a scale that cannot be expressed in human terms.  Right now, in the Orion nebula and millions of others like it, stars are being born.  

It's taking place very far from here, and incredibly slowly, by our standards, but stuff is happening elsewhere.  Massive stuff.  With my brain struggling to get its feeble paws around that, my spreadsheet with the missing $20 payment became so very manageable.  I, at least, did not have to give birth to any solar systems, today.

[Fade to black]