Nature is Not Out There; Nor is It In Here

The same gray car has driven by twice. One begins to get paranoid. Might they be casing for a caper. Planing a foray in the middle of the night.  I go to bed uneasy. Twice now in two days I have been stung by bees. This time it was on the inside of the little finger. All I did was move my hand. I didn’t notice the bee licking my finger and when the fingers came together she stung. I pick out the detached stinger. Boy does it hurt. The other time all I got was a little puffiness. This time it is throbbing. I went to take a drink and found four drowned bees floating in the juice. I fished them out and took a sip thinking of what it must be like to get stung on the tongue. I worry about the dog that snaps at any thing that flies. These are mean, mean little bees. Too many of these mean little buggers are getting too close to me. While shooing them off, it is too easy to provoke one to commit suicide. I  am very careful about where I wave my hand trying to chase them away. The dog evidently has no such concerns as of yet snapping at anything that come by. My hand has swollen up. Later the arm began to ache. The pain was still there the next day. Are these Africanized bees? Are these what they call killer bees?

Wood, unlike stone, lives and dies on a human scale – Roger Deakin -  Wildwood, 2007 p157

Deep in the forest along

Dark paths

Blackberries ripen – pick

            A few – leave the rest

            For the birds and the bears

Something will come along

            And help propagate them

You can afford two-fifty

            A peck and they can’t

            And your poop doesn't

                      Help them

For the blind person, people…. Come and they go…  A hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly addresses you – John M Hull – Touching the Rock

The dog didn’t like primitive camping and neither did I. Sand was into everything and I was dirty. The dog wanted into the truck. He wanted to leave last night rather than take a walk. He walked over to the truck and sat by the door and pleaded with sorrowful eyes. So this morning we left. I had paid for another four days. My permit was good through Sunday.

The poor contribute only about 1% to the global warming process but will suffer 90% of the consequences

Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed benevolence but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better treated than it deserves – Peacock – Nightmare Abbey, 1818

No longer will the future be like the past. The assumption has been that our impact as a species has been insignificant. This has not been true for thousands of years. Australians and Native Americans have long managed their environments by fires. Primitive hunters drove a number of species to extinction. Most of the forests of Europe had been chopped down by the middle ages. A basic assumption of neo-liberal economics is that commodities are infinitely substitutable. Non-sustainability means exactly that – the future can no longer sustain the past. This is a hard concept to grasp. It causes much cognitive dissonance.

Hoarding is not defined by the number of possessions, but by how the acquisition and management of those possessions affect their owner – Randy Frost – Stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of stuff, 2010 p58

Got Milk!

PBJ Sand

            Witch

Yum yum

She ate them

            All up

Have some

            Sticks

To the roof

Wide open

            Oven

A light bulb

            When off

Is like a bottle

            Of wine

A  rocketship

            Moon bound

The chair is a chair, the wine is whine, / in a wineglass that’s the wineglass / standing there by standing there. / Only I’m imaginary / make-believe beyond belief, / so fictitious that it hurts – Wislawa Szymborska – Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997, 1998 p46

There are an estimated 40,000 SWAT team assults conducted in the US each year. Each year approximately 1,200 pets are shot in the process

Swatting: a prank call aimed at getting a SWATT raid on a neighbor’s house

89% of police departments and 60 federal agencies maintain SWAT or other paramilitary units. There are 56 different FBI SWAT teams

Where liberty is, there is my country (Benjamin Franklin) – Where liberty is not, there is my country (Thomas Paine)

Crop yields may soon begin to decrease due to rapid evolution of weed resistance due to available herbicides. Corn, soybeans and cotton resistance to glyphosate (Roundup) have created the opportunity of a perfect storm. In Central American they have already begun the return to hand cultivating of corn crops.

Riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness,  but are not in themselves happiness – Thomas Love Peacock – Nightmare Abbey, 1818

The new DSM will broaden diagnostic boundaries by adding precursors of disorders – so you may not actually be mentally handicapped but can be diagnosed as on the path to mental illness. More and more false positive patients will be caught in a more widely defined mental illness net and milked by the pharmaceutical industry and its allied psychopharmacologists. - -  It looks as though it will be harder and harder to be normal – Marcia Angell – New York Review of Books 7.14.11  p22

With the introduction of anti-psychotic drugs, psychiatrists began calling themselves psycopharmacologists. Chemistry is more scientific than is Freud and besides it allowed them to limit their responsibility to the reduction of symptoms – something for which they were assured a higher success rate.

Reliability is not the same thing as validity. Reliability… is used to mean consistency; validity refers to correctness or soundness. If nearly all physicians agreed that freckles were a sign of cancer, the diagnosis would be “reliable” but not valid – Marcia Angell – New York Review of Books, 7/14/11, p20