Pure Imagination

"Imagine There's no Fracking"

that's the message Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon bought a page of the NY Times to spread this year. Ok. Let's do that. I'll call Yoko's bluff of her trite misuse of her dead husband's words. Let's all imagine the world without hydro fracturing. And while we are at it let's imagine the world without any oil production of any kind because honestly you are an ignorant person if you think conventional drilling is much different than hydro fracturing since the end result of carbon in the air is equivalent though it's true less material is pumped into the ground, but that only matters if you drink water. So let's imagine a world without oil use...since that's a good exercise for those who will live to see 2040 when that won't be a fantasy and all the carbon we've deposited in the atmosphere will have to be scrubbed with gigantic solar powered vacuums...probably reclaimed football stadiums or Rush Limbaugh's bloated jowls...hahahaha.
Ok, I picked some newspaper out of the trash to clean up the dog shit around my front door and the radio shack and Walmart Christmas inserts WOULD NOT EXIST without fracking. I mean none of the products would exist. And even if they existed they wouldn't be available in the middle of the Texas desert because horse drawn carriages would be too valuable to ship plastic crap. I believe 100% of the commercial world relies on oil and doesn't really discriminate on how it is retrieved. So, it's real easy for Yoko Ono to imagine a world without fracking. Hell, she's one of the few people who are rich enough to actually live in a way that eschews oil...but she doesn't...BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE CRAZY.
The biggest problem I have is that the basic premise is the energy we retrieve from Cretaceous lizard guts and gigantic ferns from 20 million years ago...is going to be used to find a solution to a polluting method of energy use. That's the premise. But in practice that is obeyed about as much as the sign above the Taco Bell bathroom sink saying "All Employees must wash hands"
We're monkeys with inflated egos and that translates to enormous waste...like using two gallons of gas to retrieve the oil that will make one gallon of gas...or trying to reach Mars when some people can't get erections anymore. The ideal and the reality are so far apart that Lennon might really be The Eggman.

The moment when you think the world is ending is the point when you can call yourself "old". If you are too absorbed in nail polish or upgraded chrome rims for your truck then you are still young at heart...maybe ignorant...but definitely young and I envy you. Then you start to pay attention to the news or carelessly listen to talk radio or read self absorbed blogs and you hear the wolves at your door and watch young people lose their minds and gun kids down or pointless wars that kill your sons and daughters and all the signs point to an apocalypse. Obviously. That's when you are old and your kids "don't know how good they have it". This insane cycle has undoubtedly spun through humanity since Cain killed Abel....which makes me think the world never ends...youth ends and with youth exits your optimism and then your hearing and then your health and then you die and young living people write good things about you and your legacy is totally out of sync with what you really thought when you died and it doesn't matter since you are dead and they are not. They get the final word and you don't.

There is a war of ideas and convictions going on. As one of the casualties of the war against the poor I can say that fracking isn't going away. The giants of industry are not going to lose because they are better organized than the giants of conservation. They pay better. They give better holiday Barbeques. They get the job done at all costs while conservationists will always be hampered by their own convictions. Can you even name a giant of conservation? Probably not because they are not good at self promotion. And if you can't promote yourself then how can you promote a conservation issue like the Arctic Wolf? I'm puzzled why we humans give a damn about Polar Bears. Maybe we don't. Maybe it's the last trace of our monkey blood being expunged by iPod cache clearance sales . We will have virtual polar bears in the future and our lizard brains won't know the difference.

There is no Holiday message hidden here. I'm computer shopping and obsessed with Ram and firewire ports and software. It's the opposite of simplification and yet that's the path I've chosen these days. Whatever the disastrous consequences of fracking are...we will meet them head on. There will be problems no one even foresaw and the suffering will be manifest. And it will be in the name of soap on a rope and nanobots running on plastic trays and my own pitiful video projects and sentimental picture slideshows. Will it be worth it? The wolf doesn't think so. We are the bipedal lizards of the new eocene era and our waste and corpses will fuel the future toys broken on Dec 26th by spoiled kids. So when I read about some do-gooder like Yoko fouling the air with her trite platitudes I'm not outraged. I don't even want to defend my own handy work in the fracking arena. I am the enemy but as the enemy I can state unequivocally that she's going to lose. Yes, Yoko is a dreamer and she is the only one.