I honestly believe that humanity is doomed to extinction. The thing is, I can’t say whether this is optimistic or pessimistic.

The basic problem is there are too goddamned many of us. We’ve proliferated beyond the point of survival, for ourselves and for everything we’ve polluted, physically and mentally.

The second problem is that we’ve evolved into a conflicted mass of warring individuals and cultures based on a wholly outdated concept of survival: “Those not like us endanger us and must be curtailed or destroyed.” This formula can’t work in a world and landscape where 8 billion of us are forced to live cheek by jowl while competing for limited and constantly diminishing resources.

If the planet as a whole is to be considered, beyond and above humanity’s narrow needs and desires, its survival depends on our extinction. Does this assume we cannot change and adapt as a species? Yes. If our history shows nothing else, it’s that social evolution has never come close to evolving toward overall survival. And at this point it would have to do so at a rate of change that’s inconceivable.

But let’s suppose (as an exercise in throwing a few breadcrumbs) that some other existing or future species could reach our level of “intelligence,” isn’t it at least possible that they could salvage the planet (assuming there was something left to salvage)?

Possible, but hugely unlikely, though I’m sure my cat could organize a better environment that our “leaders” and their skulking followers – despite Tigger’s inexhaustible appetite for mice and voles. (Not a Buddhist, I don’t cheer-lead for mice and voles.)

At this stage, what bothers me far more than the end of humanity is that, before its demise, it wants to pollute the rest of the solar system. The current drive by moneyed loonies to colonize Mars and/or Venus is horrendous: “Let us to take our ruinous impulses to the far corners of our celestial neighborhood, build them up, then recreate our destructive asininity there.” 

Fortunately, this impulse is not only vile but ridiculous. We have nothing like the technology or energy sources available to support anything this complex or involving concerted action. Plus, the desire to move fast would overwhelm the reality of the measured complexity required, eviscerating the prospect, leaving it another side-issue absurdity. (For those of you who might have read up on “Dyson spheres,” you know how ludicrous such crap can be.)

So… am I pessimist or optimist? I like (naturally) to think of myself as a realist. And as I won’t be around for the outcome, I can jaw on without having any personal stake in the directions taken. 

But hey, fellow sinking-boaters, I still like you. That’s what I share my depression with you. Ain’t I the good guy?

Why I love mis-edited headlines:

“Boyfriend Proposes to Woman Gored by Yellowstone Bison in Hospital”

Who allowed that bison into the hospital without a pass?

*   *   *   *

I’m 84. Linda just turned 80. I’ve outlived the last two generations of my family despite being a waste of a kid who missed half of first and second grade through sickness. So we’re become Official Geezers through the triumphs of modern medicine.

But what percentage of the extra years granted us is spent sitting in doctors’ offices being affronted by those fucking TV screens that you can’t turn off? I might be willing to trade that particular agony for a few extra months or years of resting, without life or thought, in the gentle loam.

*   *   *   *

Why are so many people terrified of trans kids? How empty are their paranoid lives to quake before not knowing someone’s sexual identity?

And how many trans people are there anyway? The figures I see most often run 1 to 1.5 percent of the population.

Is the current obsession because trans people (often considered shamans by indigenous cultures) now have an official title, rather than being considered backroom weirdos no one should talk about?

And why the growing fear of sex education? God, I wish I’d had some: Pushed into an all-boys Catholic high school as the son of parents who never mentioned sex at home, I was at a total loss in my adolescence.

And for Krishna’s sake, why don’t we install unisex bathrooms like much of Europe? Some trans demon is going to assault and kill our daughters in there? C’mon, everyone knows that sex crimes and murders are committed in the woods, and no one wants to abolish woods because of sex crimes. They only do that to make training grounds for cops or homes for the 1%! Let’s keep our priorities straight.

*   *   *   *

A female sea otter off the California coast has been swiping surfers’ boards and riding them. Various conservation outfits, government and private, have been trying to catch her and transfer her elsewhere, for her own protection and that of the surfers They’re not having much luck.

What bothers me is this lady otter has not been granted a name, only the tracking number 481. I hereby suggest this sad omission be rectified. Let her be called Sheshouldnt Otter.

*   *   *   *

[I’ve written about almost all of the following at one time or another, so forgive me for sewing them all together. Oh, the hell with forgiveness: Just chuck ‘em in the trash.]

I’ve had four experiences, some extended, some transitory, that I haven’t read about anywhere else. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been written about, but that, in my erratic bumbling through literature, I’ve never run across them.

1. As a kid, I had an intense hatred of being a child. I don’t mean that I was mistreated or left to rot, but that – despite my possessing almost no other understanding of human realities – I knew that I was on the bottom rung of life, the least considered, lowest, most unentitled form of humanity. I knew that nothing good was possible until (unless?) I grew up. I fantasized growing up and returning to childhood with an adult’s knowledge that would make a child’s life bearable.

2. At age 16 I happened to walk into a room and one of the people said, “We were just talking about you.” I had never before, not once, considered that anyone ever thought of me when I wasn’t right in front of them.

3. In Philly, about 5 am I think, I had the most horrendous dream of my life. Something – not someone, possibly not even an entity – was attacking the most basic level of my existence. Not my consciousness, not my sub- or un-conscious, not my will, but the basis of my existence.

I can’t tell you what was targeted, I don’t think it was anything that could be defined, in fact I don’t think it was anything, but rather my core of being. I don’t know any terms that would come close. I awoke with emptiness and terror, but a sense of relief – until I fell asleep again into the same attack. It happened at least 4, perhaps 5 times – the same “dream,” over and over, an assault on the ultimate matter of what I was.

It’s never happened again, and I sincerely hope it never does. It was beyond and below what anyone should experience.

4. [This one I included not only here, way back, but in one of my novels.]

In the second-floor bathroom of our Powelton Village, Philadelphia, house, I fell asleep in our delightful clawfoot bathtub, filled with the hottest water I could stand (as always). Later, something awoke. It was not me; it was not anyone else. 

It did not know who it was. It did not know what it was. It did not know that it was. It had no understanding of existence, of its own being, only puzzlement. It was before – before life was, before anything. 

Slowly it came to know that it was, then what sort of thing it was, then that it was me, staring at my foot next to the hot water knob.

I’ll never understand how such a thing could have been possible. It doesn’t fit with what I know of brain function, of neurology, of philosophy. It was, and is, pure astonishment. 

None of these states of mind contain, for me, the slightest hint of the spiritual. That would be closing the door to inquiry with a weary shrug.

I’m pretty much the last of my generation. I was the youngest, so that’s as it should be. Both my much elder brothers are dead, all my cousins, so far as I know. Three days ago, brother Rod’s widow, Ginny, died at age 94.
She was fading to the end, not dreadfully, but mind and body had been exiting for awhile. The funeral’s on for next Monday, Linda and my 42nd weeding anniversary. That’s OK with me, a hidden tribute.
I’m listening to Tom Waits’ “Mule Variations” while I’m writing this, and I’m crying. It’s less for Ginny than the beauty of a damned near perfect album. I’m that way with music.
Ginny wouldn’t have liked Waits (though Waits would have recognized her). She was a classical-music person, but I see them as alike in a way – both beautiful, both who they are/were without excuse or explanation.
Rod didn’t like classical music (he’d get up at 3 in the morning to sing “Danny Boy” in his upstairs room), but he loved Ginny enough to leave her off at the Academy of Music in Philly to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra while he wandered the downtown streets. And at Christmas in the early years, he’d stand beside her to sing Handel’s “Messiah” in the Powelton Episcopal church. (Rod, like me, had no religious belief or inclination, but he had an enormous loving humanity).
Ginny was a tiny woman, well under four feet, but not a small person. If there was anyone who didn’t like her I never met this emotional reprobate. When you say someone is “sweet” (especially a woman), it flashes an unfortunate mushy vision. Ginny wasn’t like that. She broadcast love without making an embarrassing mess of it, and she didn’t bother loving those who didn’t deserve it.
She was beautiful in a contained way. When Rod discovered her, I was in my early teens. You didn’t see much of women’s legs in the ‘50s, but in the summer she graced me (and everyone else) with shorts. Well.
With Rod she did all the cooking (it was the way for most back then). Rod only made chocolate milk and coffee, which he timed with extravagant attention to his watch. She cooked him kidneys and whale steaks that she would never eat but never complained, despite the smell wafted to her.
They were married for 57 years by my computation. I know of no major or extended conflict. The nearest strain came during their move from their old (1825, roughly) mill-hand house in Rose Valley to their much larger place – both house and yard – in Mendenhall (an unheralded upper middle class suburban sidetrack near Kennett Square, itself noted for mushrooms and Longwood Gardens, a Dupont estate and tourist designation).
At the time, Rod complained of Ginny never settling on any of the territories they looked at. OK, that’s because she loved the Rose Valley house and didn’t want to move. Rod wanted to grow roses without restraint. I think he wanted that more than anything else in the world (even the keeping of snakes, his first love). As they searched, he rejected any house that was not accompanied by an expanded yard that could harbor innumerable rose bushes, while Ginny rejected any house where the doors were falling off the kitchen cabinets (that never registered with Rod).
So maybe their Mendenhall house was a compromise. I have to make an aside here, and I apologize for interjecting myself too far. That house rouses the most eviscerating hatred of a structure I’ve ever reacted to… the most poorly designed, most abominably constructed house I’ve ever set foot it. I was about to go off on an architectural tear, but it’s the wrong place. Quiet!
Ginny, in the last years (13 years after Rod’s death), every evening sat in the same place, where she faced, across the room, the TV or the array of those who who had come to visit, whether on the couch to her oblique left, or the chairs and rockers dragged forward from the sliding glass doors behind her, where, when no one was there, she watched and tabulated the appearance of birds.
Rod loved birds in a way I’ve never mastered. After retiring from Sun Oil R&D, he’d sit for hours at those sliding doors and document the avians he’s seen and in what number. He and our brother Vic placed bluebird nesting boxes along trails in an arboretum near them.
About three years ago (four?), Ginny invited my daughter Morgan and Morgan’s daughter Sammy to some live with her. Morgan, an archaeologist long established in Hawaii, had become disenchanted with the “awayness” of Hawaii and now had a job that could be consummated online, so she accepted. And supported Ginny in those last, declining years.
Ginny resisted the reality of decline, which put a burden on Morgan and Sam (who picked up much of the cooking, always one of her specialties) that I don’t think Ginny quite realized.
When not doing her archaeo-related work, Morgan was trying to juggle between Ginny’s assumptions of how things should be, medically and otherwise, and the realities of a lovely woman on the way out. I don’t know how Morgan did it, how she has continued to do it (now aided by her sister Erin, who has flown in from Arizona to help settle the after-effects of death). She brought in outside support that Ginny had resisted, found relief for Ginny’s constant arthritic pain that had never been treated properly, set up in-home hospice care that I can only vaguely comprehend.
Ginny lived through much more negativity than I would hope to: the death of her parents at an early age (car crash? – I’ve been clear), being raised by a domineering grandmother (a woman who curled my toes), the death of her only child (Roddy looked and acted like Christ should have) and Rod’s death from heart failure. But she never gave up – though I’m not sure whether “not giving up” is accepting.
Morgan now has a monstrously ill-conceived house to live in (OK, I shouldn’t say that, but I will) with Sam. Lind and I will meet with those who cared most about Ginny on Monday.
Did I love Ginny? I think so. I’m not good at loving people, even those close to me. Most who know me don’t realize this, not sure why. But Ginny was as much of a wonderful human being as any of us can be and so few of us are. That should be enough.
In “Georgia Lee,” Tom Waits asks, “Why wasn’t God watching, why wasn’t God listening, why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?”
No, I don’t believe in God. But he was there for Ginny.

You ever wonder who comes up with product names? I mean, are there actually people who spend their entire lives naming car brands and models (“Infiniti,” “Lucid,” “Explorer”), or rattletrap RVs made of welded tin cans ( “Bounder,” “King Aire,” “Cornerstone”), or – worst of all – paint colors… there is actually a shade of paint labelled “Putty.” Who in their ever-lovin mind would want a living room painted “Putty”?
Well, I thought this last category should be made more verbally and visually accessible, so here are some color entries I’ve come up with:
Snot Green
Balls Blue
Trotsky Red
William-of Orange
Pestilent Purple
Privileged White
Fairly Pleasant Ochre
Resplendent Beige
Murk Gray
Widows Black
Mood Indigo
Vile-et
Aquamaroon
Spineless Yellow
* * * *
Songs of the African Coast: Cafe Music of Liberia
Never heard of this CD? Not surprising; I hadn’t until a couple ago, when I came across it after years of wondering where Dave Van Ronk’s had picked up his charmingly weird tune, “Chicken Is Nice with Palm Butter and Rice.”
(By the way, what’s the most captivating piece Van Ronk ever recorded? See * below, attached. And what’s his most uproarious take on the absurdities so often entrenched in traditional tunes? See ** below.)
I don’t know what I’d assumed about “Chicken Is Nice,” but certainly not that it came out of a Liberian café recording from the late 1940s, featuring “Professor” Howard B. Hayes and the Greenwood Singers.
On first listen, this café set is disorienting, pitting the man-woman emotional trials of the songs themselves against the obvious joy that these particular men and women have from singing together.
The first tine I heard “All Fo’ You,” it scared the crap out of me. Here’s a woman singing she will put up with anything from her lover – including having her throat cut!
But you soon come to sense a galloping mix of satire, horsing around with stereotypical sexual complaints, and taking emotional entanglement to the extreme for black-comic effect. (And “All Fo’ You” is really in much the same uncomfortable vein as Billie Holiday’s take on “It Ain’t Nobody’s Business.”)
In the opposite direction – playing with gender differences through gentle nods and winks – the Greenwoods “Woman Sweeter Than Man” reminds me of Harry Belafonte’s “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” from his Calypso album. And who can fail to smile at “Marry Me and Close the Door”?
In “Bush Cow Milk,” the male singer is asked by his true love to milk a bush cow for her liquid enjoyment, leading him to list hilarious limiting conditions before he will comply. Milk a cow – how big a deal can that be? Then I looked up “bush cow”—it’s a fucking buffalo! I’d rather not, thank you.
Whether because Liberia was established as a home for freed American slaves, or as a consequence of the linguistic blending during World War II (likely both), many of the songs are sung in English. Still, it may seem surprising to hear this in a local hangout.
While in college around 1960, I was a delighted proponent of Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, seeing it as a stunning example of the best in then current African music. But one of the staffers on the Penn newspaper, who had spent time in West Africa, brushed it off: “That’s not what they actually listen to over there.”
Instead, he turned me on to an album then called Gold Coast Saturday Night (since reissued with other titles), featuring Saka Acquaye and His African Ensemble. It’s a whole different experience from Olatunji, partly in English and closer to the Liberian café, but all of these albums are equally engrossing: “world music” well before anyone coined the term.
* * * *
A few short bits
Anastasia:
6’ 2”, blonde, elegant, walks with the confidence of a woman who could have whatever she wants but, instead, has the good sense to want what she has. She rides a Vespa.
Anastasia is our insurance agent. How do such things happen?

Flax:
In our geometry class in my Catholic grade school, we pasted little stickers on outline maps to identify an area’s major products. No matter what sector of the world we were covering, there was always a sticker for “flax” to be glued somewhere (in Europe, it was slapped on Belgium).
The tiny black-and-white sketch suggested a bound bunch of upright plant stuff. I had no idea what flax was or what you could do with it, yet (presumably) it grew and was harvested all the hell over the place. Now, enlightened, I know that it is and was (with a great deal of hand labor in the olden days) converted into excellent linen dish towels.
Way to go, Flax!

Proper Recognition Department:
Remember, please, always to refer correctly to a certain pseudo-journalist as Fucker Carlson.

Linda and I got talking about pattern-recognition the other night. The conversation started because of a major plot element in the book I’m working on, then it veered into illuminating something that’s been flitting through my head off and on for ages.
It started with Bush the Younger. The general consensus among leftists (at least) was that he was just plain dumb. I’m not saying he wasn’t or isn’t, but watching his responses, what struck me as more likely was a learning disability. Maybe that response came from Linda having been a reading specialist who dealt with first-graders who had a rough time untangling written words.
There was one time Bush was pictured supposedly reading to a kindergarten class in Florida but looking like he was being held hostage on another planet. I thought then (and still think) that it was not only a really bad photo op, but that it fit fit well with that look of scrambled confusion that so often would cross his face when he was trying to make sense of something – less stupidity than, “Geez, what the hell?” Having difficulty comprehending the written word is not the kind of thing a major country’s leader is going to announce, but it would have created a hell of problem for those briefing him on anything complex.
More recently, massive amounts of time were spent on Beloved Seditionist Leader’s bumbling, nonsensical pontifications, analyzing how they reflect stupidity, ignorance, a racist mental rash, and/or narcissistic self-glorification. I’ll go with all of them, but I also think there’s some important underlying neurological problem. I mean, what’s really going on back there in Rump’s head? And what does it say about the man himself – who’s a unique entity, as is each of us?
When he mischaracterizes a fairly simple statement made to him, is it lying, deliberate misdirection, political gamesmanship, or simply failure to understand because he can’t form the words into a coherent pattern? When he rants against anything that doesn’t mesh with his pre-conceived ideas, is it (only) bilious arrogance, or that he can’t assimilate new information and so has to deny its existence?
He comes across as bad enough in interviews and briefings, but his staff have made it clear that he never “liked” to read anything put in front of him. What if he just couldn’t? I’m sure he can recognize individual words, but what if sentences disentangle from their meaning, run off the page and fornicate in the undergrowth? What if he can’t assemble a coherent pattern in a paragraph?
[Hell, I get that way with certain essayists. I was trying to read Francis Bacon last month and it was like somebody forcing my head under muddy water and yelling “Drink!” There are still a few scholars who want to credit him with writing Shakespeare’s plays; let me tell you, simply and flat out – “NO!”]
I’m making no apology for Dump’s behavior as President or as a more-or-less-human being. I’m just trying to find ways to explain some parts of it: because if you don’t know the cause of a given problem, you’re not going to find a viable solution. As for the larger issue of personal responsibility… many a soul with learning problems is fully decent. For any limiting physical or mental condition – no matter what the details – like the rest of us, some will be upstanding, most will be of average moral character, a few will be, by nature, rotten.
Morally, spiritually, Sump is a vile being.