Skip to main content

Merry Christmas from the States Side

So this Christmas we decided to get a tree anyway,the first in years. Recently, within an interminable month, Grandpa's passed on, Grandma's gone off a cliff with clinical debilitating anxiety and I'm suddenly chronically, critically ill. Every day is a new day - though I might probably have opted for the previous one. So we unload the boxes out of the attic, all the lights and ornaments, all the dust and memories, and pick through the lot. It's not a big tree, on purpose, and there's a lot more ornaments than can be hung on it, so we can be selective, and only hang the best; the tiny saxophone, the exquisite blown glass bells, an exact replica of the Wright brothers first plane.  When the kids had two sets of Grandparents, both sets got them each a commorarative ornament every year and the collection is out of hand.  We barely make a dent in it.

One year we had great big tree and we got every darn orament on there and in the middle of the night the thing fell over with a thunderous tinkling crash and a bunch of the best ones bit the dust.  We had lost a grandmother that year and the favorite ornament she had given us, a blown glass Santa's head of infinate frailty, was one of them. We cryed.What on earth could have caused the gravity of the tree to shift in such a way that it would suddenly topple?  Unseen forces effecting unseen changes until there is the rockslide or tsunami, pile of shattered tree bling or diabetes.   You wonder what the universe might be cooking up for you next.

The invaluable Stephen Gould identified the process of evolution as a "punctuated equilibrium;"  long periods of relative stablilty interrupted by short intervals of rapid change.  It's the same way the river does nearly all of its heavy lifting during flood stage. It's the way you can be lulled into a torpor by eight miles of flat water and roundly thumped in the drops.  "Sometimes the shit-storm," said Kurt Vonnegut,  "exceeds the powers of human comprehension."

Merry Christmas


  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Internet Writing and the Content Vacuum

It's been a few times now I've had full weekday control of the Monthly 's headline blog, Political Animal, and I feel like I have a decent idea now what it's like being at the top level of blogging. (Not to say that I am  at the top level, of course, just that I've walked in those shoes for a few days and gotten some blisters.) Anyway, the first thing I've noticed is that it is really, really hard to do well. I've had days before when I just didn't have anything to do and ended up at home writing 4-5 posts in one day on this site, but pro blogging is an entirely different beast. The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something , with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts. This ferocious demand for content is both good and bad. The iron weight of responsibiliy—the knowledge