I keep thinking about something Margaret Atwood said when I interviewed her in 2017: Every dystopia is someone’s utopia. So whose utopia is this?

Ann Friedman, Whose Utopia is This?

The congee I had for lunch today was served with sauteed cabbage and mushrooms and fresh ginger and a fried egg. It was delicious. Aside from the egg, it looked a lot like this one.

My friends on the far side of town who have not hosted a concert in their barn since the pandemic swept through 18 months ago have announced one for the end of this month, featuring these folks. Am I excited? Why yes, yes I am.

The nights have cooled off and the cicadas are still singing. My long weekend is blissfully unscheduled.

My new-ish practice: not wanting what I haven’t got.

This post is for all who are furious about the Texas abortion law and do not need another angry screed to tell them whose utopia this is.

Also, to echo (punctuate! underline!) Ann (and Andrea), stop it with the coathangers, already.

I went to the library this week and came home with Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, recommended in a recent newsletter by Austin Kleon, and written for readers with basically no scientific background whatsoever.

I do not understand physics. I read A Brief History of Time — twice! — with complete incomprehension. My one physics course at university was known internally as “physics for poets,” and still I barely managed to pass. But I’m desperate to think new thoughts, even confounding ones about the curvature of time and the idea that electrons only exist when they collide; my old thoughts have worn out their welcome, utterly and completely.

Plus I like Rovelli, who writes simply and beautifully, like the best poets. This, from his most recent book, Helgoland (also via Austin Kleon):

The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. 

Would that the search for knowledge were always accompanied by the awareness of our ignorance. We lay folk might be less inclined to assume ourselves foreign policy or public health experts if we began each search with the understanding that we know so very little about so very much indeed.

My desperation for new thoughts comes after a week of listening to the gnashing and howling over the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a war most Americans had forgotten about until suddenly we were leaving and the President insisted it would be nothing like our departure from Saigon in 1973 but the optics said otherwise, and oh, look, here come the Bush people rising like Voldemort’s death eaters to populate the news shows and rewrite history once more.

So, yes. I needed new thoughts. Like this one:

General relativity has taught us that space is not an inert box but rather something dynamic: a kind of immense, mobile snail shell in which we are contained. (…) Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, has taught us that every field of this kind is “made of quanta” and has a fine, granular structure. It immediately follows that physical space is made of these quanta.

Where are these quanta of space? Nowhere. They are not in space because they are themselves the space. Space is formed by the linking of these individual quanta. (…) Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interacting relationships.

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

I’ll be pondering that for a while.

Next up: Rovelli’s 2018 book, There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness. Because who can resist a title like that?

I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we’ll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we’re living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the “provisional life.” (“There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.”) 

Oliver Burkeman, What if You Never Sort Your Life Out?

So it’s not just me.

If only it were. Then I could hold out hope that others, somewhere, were compensating for my deficiencies.

Knowing how common this feeling is adds another layer to the grief of our time, existential now, and pervasive, this sense that we’re just not getting to it, whatever it may be.

Your mileage may vary. If so, share your secrets.

cf. Waiting.

The U.N. IPCC report on climate change was devastating. But it came on a busy news day, what with the governor of New York resigning amid scandal and the governors of Texas and Florida pretending the latest deadly surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in their states is not the result of their own gross negligence, but somehow the fault of the Democrats.

We’re not going to be led from this precipice by these people.

Nor, I fear, by the ones flying to Glasgow at the end of October. Not to nitpick, but if our situation truly is dire, why are they getting on airplanes at all?

Perhaps they’re going there to party like it’s 1999.

The sooner we let go of our overinflated sense of importance and grasp that we’re just one civilization out of many, going through the familiar arc of rise and fall, the sooner we can get to work on the possibilities that are still within reach.

John Michael Greer, The Future is a Landscape

I went to a neighborhood street fair this weekend, sat with friends near the food trucks and watched the people wander by. The din of the generators, combined with the jazz stylings of the musician on the corner made for an appealing sort of dissonance, part urban concert, part carnival midway. This is how we re-enter the world, the air fragrant with the scent of fried waffle batter, everyone’s summer shorts a little too tight at the waist, but we’re crop-topping anyway because the fashion gods have decreed it to be so.

Note: I am not crop-topping. The gods may have decreed it, but the goddesses say wear what pleases you. I am pleased by a cotton t-shirt dress.

The neighborhood where the gathering took place has been the recent recipient of some much-needed traffic-calming street design: a new landscaped median and angled street parking. Three- and four-way stop signs replaced two traffic lights, allowing the crowds of pedestrians to move with greater ease and safety, and there were, indeed, crowds. Or a crowd, singular, dense with milling humans dressed for each other at long last.

The local schools are back in session this week, which seems unjustly early, summer barely ripe on its vine. Districts dithered for weeks over masks and vaccination requirements, but most have capitulated to common sense and are requiring the former, if not the latter. Kids will get sick in those classrooms, though, that’s a given, and some may die, and some may become COVID long-haulers, but the prospect is not sufficiently dreadful, apparently, to change the minds of those who might actually be in a position to do something about it ahead of time.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Today I cleared away the tree limbs and grapevine that Jubilee and I cut down last week, which will please my neighbor, at least, the one with the big dog and the gentle requests that I please trim back this tree or that. Watching Jubilee wield that chainsaw was an inspiration, in her hard hat and face shield and chaps and gloves and boots. I aspire to be such a badass.

What possibilities are you considering these days?

There is a young-ish tree in my yard that is enveloped in grapevine, for which I must take some responsibility. I’m a neglectful yard-keeper and I let things run amok out there, though in my defense this is Indiana and the plant life here runs wildly amok no matter what one does.

At any rate, the top of the tree now bends precariously over the roof of my (also neglected) garage. And so a friend is coming over on Friday with a chain saw and we will attempt to remove the grapevine, whose main stem is as big around as a baseball bat. Yikes.

The tree around which this vine is wrapped is a “junk tree,” according to a landscaper who came to give me an estimate for removing a dozen saplings and overgrown shrubs from the back of my lot last year, where they were slowly engulfing the garage. He offered to include it in his removal estimate, but it was far enough away from the garage that I didn’t think it was necessary. Plus, I took offense at his characterization of this tree, of any tree, as “junk,” because of course I did.

It has a name, I wanted to say, but I didn’t, because I didn’t know what that name was.

Later, I tried to identify it, first using my Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Trees, but the results were inconclusive. From its compound leaf structure it could be one of several species; a flower or a seed pod or a fruit or nut would have helped with identification, but there were none of those in evidence. It’s a young tree, perhaps too young to flower or seed. Or perhaps it was too early or late in the year for either of those.

Online guides were scarcely more useful, but I’ve now narrowed it down to three species, maybe four.

It could also be none of the above.

My ignorance regarding the trees of my neighborhood can be attributed in part to the fact that I’m not from here. I’m from elsewhere. Several elsewheres. But I’ve been here long enough that you’d think I’d have absorbed some of this knowledge by sheer osmosis.

Alas, no.

I know the make, and sometimes the model, of most of the cars parked on my street. I know the names of all the streets in my neighborhood. I also know the logos of hundreds if not thousands of corporate entities. But I do not know the name of this tree that shares my back yard, its genus or species, its habits, what its seeds look like, how long its family has lived here, on this hill, in this ecosystem, whether its ancestry pre-dates the European colonization of this continent or is, like me, a more recent arrival.

Bill McKibbon, in his 1992 book The Age of Missing Information, wrote of this phenomenon, peculiar to our culture, in which we are inundated with so much information about the built world of humans but know so little of the natural world in which we’re embedded. Which makes it hard for us to understand this place in which other creatures, like the trees in my yard, “are not there for you — they’re there because the world belongs to them, too.”

It’s a subject more recently visited by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her lovely book, Braiding Sweetgrass, where she writes:

In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.

Coffee tree, I’m thinking. Maybe ash. Possibly walnut. A teacher. Not junk.

I stopped wearing a pandemic mask in mid-May. I’m wondering if that was a mistake.

The CDC and reliable public health experts advise that fully-vaccinated people do not, for the most part, need to wear masks for their own protection any longer. Being fully-vaccinated, I don’t feel personally vulnerable without mine, even as the new variants gain ground in my state, where less than 50% of the population 16 and older is vaccinated.

My concern about going mask-less is that it creates a false sense that the pandemic is behind us.

It isn’t behind us.

In his latest COVID-19 update, Dave Pollard shares some IHME projections.

In the US, estimated actual deaths, which dropped to as low as 300/day at the start of this month, are now expected to soar back above 1000/day this fall and stay at that level for an extended period. This will increase the total US death toll to 1,025,000 by October 31, a full 80,000 more than the current death toll. Almost all the projected deaths will be among the unvaccinated, and over 90% of them will be in the 28 vaccine-hesitant states where levels of vaccination continue to lag as low as 35%.

Seeing so many masked faces over the past year made us all acutely aware of our collective plight. Now that the masks are disappearing, we have no visual reminder that there is still trouble in River City, that people among us are still getting sick and dying from COVID-19, and that those numbers are likely to go up in spite of the fact that we have an effective vaccine.

Vaccine refusal is contributing to the rise in infections and deaths. This morning I read a polemic from a vax-refuser, just to get a sense of what the arguments are. I’m not linking to it, but a quick search will get you plenty of similar items, if you are inclined to seek them out.

I probably spend far too much time wondering what lies behind the baseline state of denial that undermines so many efforts to make things better for living things in general, and humans in particular. Be it living wages, ending forever wars, addressing the climate crisis, or coping with a major public health emergency, some large contingent always stands opposed, often for no discernable reason beyond ideology or the opportunity to profit from the status quo. Perhaps it’s just one more way in which the death cult of our casino economy tilts in favor of the House. Who gains when people are sick? What is the cost/benefit analysis?

I can feel myself falling into cynicism here. It’s barely a stumble anymore.

While I ponder these (largely rhetorical) questions, let’s not forget that we’re also having to combat the flawed argument that getting or not getting vaccinated against a deadly virus is somehow an individual choice unburdened by social responsibility. Such a quaint notion, that. You’re not the boss of me.

Our low vax numbers in Indiana put us in line with most of our Midwest and Middle South neighbors. It’s a pretty dismal picture. So I’m thinking of putting the mask back on, just to remind my fellow supermarket-shoppers and library-browsers that this thing ain’t over yet.

I’m working long shifts at the radio station this week, getting an overdose of NPR news and current events as two members of our on-air staff are away and I’m covering for both of them. My intention was to write something for you this evening, then watch at least a few innings of the MLB All-Star game. But those long shifts are long, and the news overdose has me anxious and rattled and in need of rest, so I’m not sure I’ll accomplish either goal.

But never mind all that. Let’s give it a go.

About that All-Star game: it’s being played in Denver, at a lovely ballpark in Lower Downtown, a classic park, completed in 1995, built in the style of the grand parks of the early 20th century, before the generic stadiums of the 60s and 70s took over.

I grew up in a rookie league town, and live down the road from another one now. For years I travelled to Arizona for spring training games. And I lived in Denver when that stadium was being built, back when baseball still meant something to me. I watched it rise from the red dirt in what was once a sketchy factory district, before we learned to call it LoDo, before the craft beer pubs arrived.

One night two friends and I drove down to get closer look at the unfinished park. We left the car a block away, squeezed past the construction fence and went inside.

Even then I was surprised at how easy it was to get in to this cathedral-in-the-making.

The turf had just been laid, extending from the infield out to the fences. We made our way down the steps and out onto the field, where we fell onto the luxuriant grass. Trespassers. Disciples.

I’m a little worried about tonight’s game. Worried that some berserker with a gun is going to let us know how unhappy he is that MLB moved the game from Atlanta to Denver after Georgia passed its voter suppression law back in April. By the time you read this it will be yesterday’s news. Let’s hope it doesn’t become another headline I’m sharing with listeners at the station tomorrow.

As I type, my orange tabby is kneading my shoulder, purring, ready for his evening let’s-hang-out time. So this will have to do. Not exactly the post I’d intended, but the one that wanted to be written.

Baseball memories are welcome in the comments.

When I first learned of the graves, understood the likelihood that there are so many more to be found, hundreds of children at each site, at each ‘boarding school,” each “residential school,” I was taken aback by the sheer numbers. It is not common, not normal, for hundreds of children to die while at “school.” It’s not normal to shovel the dead into mass graves, hidden graves, their bodies not returned to their families.

What sort of people would do this?

What sort of people hide the dead?

It’s a tell.

Always, it’s a tell.

We see aerial photographs, infrared, revealing gravesites of enslaved people near Louisiana’s chemical factories, on former plantations, unmarked cemeteries tucked alongside the season’s plantings of tobacco, the dead made visible by the technology of our time, the technology of revelation.

We should not be surprised when what it reveals is us.

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”

R.D. Laing

Word of the week: Procrustean. We made your bed. Go lie in it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my Gap Month, and how the simple process of asking a question and listening for an answer has helped me manage my tendency to worry about money.

The question is one that I pose to the world: What do you need from me today?

Usually the answer is something mundane, a quiet suggestion that takes me out of the abstraction of worry into the specificity of action. Finish that poem. Work on that painting. Eat something delicious. The world likes it when I’m doing things I like to do. Though it also tells me to clean the garage, ask for help, say no more often.

I do what I can.

This morning, though, I got something a little different.

Perhaps, said the world, you might want to step away from urgency.

Find your place in a much longer Now.

Make your way toward the timeless.

I admit, I was nonplussed.

My first thought was of the urgency of the news, of how many hours I spend scrolling news sites, staying current, following stories that lead to more stories. I thought about social media, and the false urgency of FOMO. Beyond that, there is the cultural fixation on keeping up, not falling behind, all of which contributes to a constant churn within an ever-present now.

This is the water in which we swim. Ahistorical. De-contextualized. Who does it serve? What does it serve?

Cui bono?

I turn to Wendell Berry, who wrote, “Do I wish to keep up with the times? No.”

What might it mean, to live in a longer Now? What might it mean for humans, for the living creatures we share this space with, for the world? I want to take some time to consider, because I suspect the world is pointing me toward something deeper than “stop with all the the scrolling.”

Though that’s probably a good place to start.