Wednesday, May 12, 2010

3:11



That's the amount of time the average visitor to the blog stays. I am not being realistic if I write something that takes longer than 3 minutes to read. Maybe I should say I'm not being realistic if I expect anyone to read more than 3 minutes worth of material. The urge to serialize my life comes and goes. Lately, the meetings with the placement services have been straight out of a movie where they lay their hands out in front of them and say, "There's nothing I can do for you. We'll keep you resume on file if something comes up." and their tone is like they've given me a terminal cancer report.

I've been falling asleep in my clothes with the radio and lights on lately. The Nat King Cole bio is good but it just reminds me of my lack of piano. He played every day for 6-10 hours and still had to struggle and play for $5 a gig. Then I'll try to get through Plan B and am only up to the shrinking polar ice caps. In 2007 researchers estimated there were 7 years before the climate change would gain more momentum than we could stop. It'll be hard to say if it is our fault. It's 40 degrees in mid May. Vermont just got a bunch of snow. The mid west always had flood problems. Is it because of coal burning energy plants? Maybe. Does it matter? Kind of. We won't know if we'll burn to death or create another ice age until it's too late. Half of the survivors will say it would've happened without 4 stroke engines, and the other half will say we caused it.

Also reading a book of testimonies about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. It's remote and seldom visited. I had my chance but didn't take a trip there with my roommate. I was crippled at the time and the disabled do not survive a winter in the Arctic Circle. The polar bears hibernate there and the exploration teams wake them up. Is it worth it? Am I a druid who would place the hibernation of a bear, a bit of biodiversity, over the comfort of man. Not every bit of energy goes into video games and McDonalds. Some goes to research cancer cures and develop other forms of energy. So, the bear may become collateral damage but eventually the oil will run out and we'll leave the arctic alone. Maybe we'll set some zoo raised bears loose. Reintroduce them like wolves to Yellowstone. It can happen. Is it specious to argue in favor of preserving ANWR? Do big white bears have priority simply because we read Winnie The Pooh books as kids? That seems fallacious and emotional. We need the oil, obviously, and it's not like we're harvesting it from the bear's liver. They'll just have to find another place to sleep. We can build them some caves and airlift them to an isolated area...and still get the oil. Or we can let them wake up and run away from their blind and helpless cubs. Their being blind and helpless doesn't diminish our need for the oil. And of the Indians living up there, we're not killing them, we're just temporarily altering their livelihoods. We'll airlift them food. Eventually, the caribou will return...just like the bison.

Ok, I'm out of time. My three minutes are up.

Fort Stark renovations continued today. We cut some Chokeberry bushes to reveal some native columbine flowers on the seaside hill. It was cold and windy but we were in good spirits staging rocks for a stone wall and dragging brush. They all want me to find work but mostly they are retired so it's not like they can help. Since there is no budget for dump runs we have found sink holes and throw everything in them. All of New Castle is a land fill so it's traditional.

The American Academy teaching job in Kuwait is only for women so I'm thinking of changing my name to Oggylina Bleacher and wearing a wig at the interview. No, I'm not desperate.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.