July 2020 – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

Ten years after: cower in place 34

December 1, 2029. It has been 10 years since “patient zero” developed the first known human case of the coronavirus that swept the globe. Now’s a good time to look back, and see how our popular culture was changed.

As was predicted at the time, businesses that depended on people being in a specific physical location, especially on many people being in the same location, took a huge hit during the pandemic, from which many never recovered. The goods and services provided by these bygone companies are now largely supplied by new thriving industries, some of which didn’t even exist pre-covid.

In-building movie theaters no longer exist, having gone the way of video arcades half a century before. Drive-in movies are back, of course, with every city and town boasting at least one, modeled after (and usually built out of) multi-storey parking garages no longer needed for commuters. In cities still lucky enough to have an active in-person business district, these theaters still provide a daytime service as vertical parking lots.

For viewers who prefer a more immersive experience than can be gotten while sitting in a car, virtual home movie theaters became the rage. The competition between virtual reality home movie viewing and actual home movie viewing was fierce for a couple of years, but the balance was finally tipped by the incorporation of massive-multi-player capability into the VR experience, allowing one to watch in the company of friends. (This innovation was also credited with single-handedly keeping professional sports viewing alive).

VR made it possible to sit in a crowded movie theater or baseball stadium with a group of your friends, or your best girl, or famous players from history, even though they live across the country, or they died 25 years ago, or they never lived at all. Most viewers agree that the audience experience now is even better than in-person theaters and arenas provided back when they existed, especially when you consider that back then you couldn’t even program the rest of the audience to stay quiet, or to not complain when you are loud, or to laugh at exactly the parts of the movie you think are funny. It’s strange to think what we settled for way back then!

Not all new technologies designed for a post-covid world worked out. You may remember the “no-scent perfume” craze of a few years back, which promised that when you finally met your love match in person, you would smell exactly like you did during your torrid Zoom dating sessions: NOT. AT. ALL. The business model seemed sound enough, correctly reasoning that months and months of never leaving your house and doing all of your socializing via the internet resulted in a breakdown of personal olfactory hygiene norms and regimens. This caused mass panic when society started re-opening. What even are people supposed to smell like? was a common headliner in popular and health magazines back in the early 20’s.

The death stroke for no-scent perfumes was probably the same immersive sensation technology that helped VR movie and sports viewing become a hit. The scents that you purchase for personal use can also be subscribed to for remote transmission, so that whenever you videochat with your special someone, a subtle whiff of that self-same fragrance is released. This helps, so the advertising goes, imprint your aroma onto your hoped-for significant other, to cement the bonding experience when you actually meet in person. The best defense against body odor, as they say, is a good offense.

Nontherapeutic face mask wearing has become fashionable, especially among tweens through twenty-somethings. They are taking face-selfies, photoshopping out any acne and poofing the lips, or photoshopping in what you thought the moustache would look like when you started it, and having the new improved face printed on your mask.

Becoming increasingly popular (if you can afford it) are the new “smart” face masks, whose mouth image moves as yours does, guaranteed to be comprehensible to anyone versed in the art of lip-reading.

Nowadays, no one who goes through the enormous expense of chartering one of the few remaining commercial planes to visit a foreign country would think of doing so without a smart face mask with built in real-time voice-to-voice translation (although the deluxe enhancement of simulating appropriate facial expressions, from the japanese scowl to the french sneer, never really captured the public’s imagination).

most pundits of the time correctly predicted that the social isolation imposed by the pandemic would bring about an enormous increase in the usage of electronic social media outlets (with an accompanying increase in wealth for their companies). Some also predicted that when the threat passed, and conventional forms of social interaction were available again, these electronic outlets would continue to grow in popularity and social influence, to the point where they eclipsed many countries and world religions.

It’s easy to forget, for example, that before the epidemic, the idea that Facebook could apply for sovereign nation status with the United Nations would have seemed incomprehensible. Now that Facebook Nation can claim physical existence with its purchase of the Maldives, its eventual confirmation as a member nation seems all but assured (despite the fact that these same islands will disappear under the rising Pacific by 2100).

Should this happen, Mark Zuckerberg has promised to resign from the Presidency of the United States to assume the mantle of leadership over his new nation-state. “Being President of the United States is largely a powerless, ceremonial position anyway,” he was recently quoted, “ever since the reforms of the early 2020’s made it illegal for a President to do all the things that everyone in the twenty-teens assumed were already illegal.”

Thanks,
Dorn
12/01/2029
(pre-publication copy 7/26/2020)

P.S. A blood-curdling epilog has been added to the recent post, Invaders!

Things fall apart: cower in place 33

– in which Dorn battles against entropy.

I’ve written before about my fear that circumstances will force me to do something that puts me at risk of catching the covid bug. Following the fashion of human-being psychology, I only really worry about the things that I haven’t done yet, my lizard-brain^[what?] telling me that if I did it even once and didn’t die, it’s probably not worth worrying about.

What I haven’t done since February, not even once, is to have enter any building other than our house, or invite someone to come into our house, and what I’m fearing these days is that something will break that will require me to do one or the other of these things. And because it is a universal law that Things Fall Apart, I know I’m living on borrowed time.

Yesterday this warning light came on in the car while we were driving to the park for our daily walk. (See, even though we encounter other people, including gasping, spitting runners, while walking in the park, my lizard-brain doesn’t recoil. My spock-brain knows that our covid risk is only slightly mitigated by Kathleen and me wearing masks, since the runners without exception don’t wear them, but because it hasn’t sickened us yet, I don’t have the same visceral fear that it will.)

I’m not sure I could get my car’s warning light fixed without entering the shop building, and that fills me with dread. So I handled the situation in the government-approved manner: I ignored the warning signals, did nothing, and hoped the problem would magically go away by itself.

So far, I’m having better luck than the federal government in my risk-mitigation strategy—the warning light did go out, and so far has stayed out. Probably was just a glitch, or a hoax.

That technique also worked on our refrigerator. The ice-maker seemed to have stopped working a couple of weeks ago, which could signal disaster for our ice-tea sipping rituals during the heat of the day. But I hoped really hard for a magical cure, and sure enough the fridge healed itself, and started pumping out ice again.

Our fridge is pretty old and has multiple symptoms of breakdown. The other one I’m actively ignoring right now is its tendency to emit a loud pained groan every time I open or close the door. It probably means the door is about to fall off, but until it does, I’m sure not letting any repair man into the house!

Our pup Archie likes the cold, and loves to sleep directly under one of our air conditioners. The unit started dripping water the other day. Archie liked the cold water drip even more than he liked the continuous blast of cold air (no judgement, but eww), but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how the AC is supposed to work. In this case I couldn’t bring myself to just ignore the malfunction and hope it would heal itself in time. So I’ve turned the unit off, but haven’t been brave enough to call the HVAC guy. Poor Archie!, now he just has a fan.

Archie is getting pretty old himself (75 year-equivalents, by one count), and when he has to get up from a nap makes pretty much the same groaning noises as the refrigerator door. He does this stretchy thing that creates an alarmingly loud popping sound, just like that thing that Mr. Smith, the villainous computer program in The Matrix, does with his neck.

Archie’s aches and pains are not a breakdown that we’re willing to ignore. Fortunately, Archie is not saddled with my reverse-agoraphobia, so is willing to go into other buildings. His vet will see him in his office without requiring any humans to accompany him, so Archie has been able to pass his routine senior exam.

Me, I’m still stuck at home. I’ve developed a cavity. I’ve been able to feel the spot with my tongue for months, but the tooth hasn’t degraded to the point where I absolutely have to do something about it, so I haven’t. I’m not afraid of the dentist in non-pandemic times, but even so I’m glad I have a valid excuse ready for when he eventually asks why I waited so long to have this seen to. It was the coronavirus! Woo hoo, scott-free! (Damn! If only I had thought of this when I way playing the “Thank God It’s Covid” game!)

I’ve got other examples of things and people falling apart here, particularly related to our old house, the building style of which might generously be referred to as “rustic country”, but might more accurately be called “drunk fisherman”. But I think our house merits a post all its own, so I’ll save the rest for later.

* * *

Writing this post made me think of a good book I read, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It’s not a new book—it’s a classic of African literature, and is so old that it is almost as old as I am (published in 1958).

It’s the story of life in the Nigerian village of Umuofia, and especially of Okonkwo and his family, at a time when British overlordship of Nigeria has happened, but the effects have not yet been felt in the remote villages.

Okonkwo is respected by his neighbors as a good man, although by our standards he might be diagnosed with toxic masculinity. He’s a fierce warrior, having killed several men from other villages during their frequent wars, and kept their heads as souvenir drinking vessels. He’s a good husband by their standards—he is able to provide food, shelter, and a domineering discipline for all of his wives and children (there’s a surreally touching scene where Okonkwo worries that his son will not grow up mean enough to beat his wives when required for proper decorum).

The book is full of snippets of precolonial Nigerian village life that I found fascinating. Their world was as full of memes, mores and legends as ours, and much of the book’s actions are explained by references to fables that are only incompletely described. This left me with the sense of the observing a rich and strange culture often without knowing exactly what I was seeing.

Their codes of conduct could seem silly, or deadly, or both at the same time. Men in the village who had earned the honorific title of ozo were forbidden to climb trees. Twins, and people who developed certain diseases, were considered abominations and cast into the Evil Forest to die. It was acceptable, honorable even, to murder a child if the village oracle told you to, but if you killed a fellow villager without such sanction, even accidentally, you were banished and your houses and crops were burned.

If much of the societal motivations of the villagers of Umuofia were alien to me, they were also mutually incomprehensible to their Christian missionaries and British governors, who through much of the book appeared only as rumors about things that had happened in other villages. The eventual clash between Umuofia and the British was chilling to me not for its violence (there was some, but not much more than seemed to be daily Umuofia fare), but for the fact that throughout out it all, neither side understood the other, or even tried to. As often happened when pre-industrial villagers confronted Imperial Britain establishing its colonial rule, the collision was disastrous for the villagers of Umuofia, and amounted to scarcely a footnote in the annals of the British “civilizing” the dark continent.

Sad ending, but an engrossing, sympathetic book.

Thanks,
Dorn
7/19/2020

Invaders!

– in which Dorn spins a tale of gardening gone wrong.

My story starts many months ago. A dear friend, whose name I withhold to protect the guilty, offered us a dozen or so black seeds, like little wrinkled baby peas. “Plant them! You’ll like what you see!”

Our (especially my) skills at gardening ornamentals are commensurate with our (especially my) interest in it, so we weren’t holding our breaths for a spectacular result. After the seeds sat around the house getting in the way for a sufficient length of time, I tossed them out back, and promptly forgot about them.

Today, in the heat of high summer, it was time to hack down the undergrowth that was taking over our back, uh, 40. I was donning my protective gear and scoping out a plan of attack, and I saw that among the usual morass of weeds and vines was peppered here and there a squat stem, atop of which sat a cluster of bright berries in the process of changing from green to red. “How pretty! Why have we never seen these before?”

Kathleen figured it out. “It’s those seeds you threw back here last year! They sprouted! Now, what the heck did she say these were called?” Neither of us had any idea, so we sent a query out on Facebook. Several people said they were Jack-in-the-Pulpits, but that didn’t look quite right. One friend called them Lords-and-Ladies and said they were a popular garden ornamental in England. Another helpfully pointing us to the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board. Uh-oh…

It’s Italian Arum, in the same family as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and also known as Lords-and-Ladies. It’s also a class-C weed (whatever that is) in Washington State, poisonous, and an invasive species.

Now, I don’t like to brag (shut up), but at one time in my career I was quite the high mucky-muck in the world of invasive species. I was hired by NOAA to work on their invasive species efforts at a time when (a) after years of warnings by scientists, their damage was finally starting to cost big bucks, and (b) NOAA’s research arm, and especially the Sea Grant Program, was one of the only significant sources of federal funding for invasive species research and outreach.

Those were good times, when I was responsible for designing and executing the program to hand out invasive species grant funding! Back then, within a certain audience, my insights were wiser, my scientific observations were astuter, my jokes funnier, and my boondoggles boon-dogglier. Ah, memories!

But nothing lasts forever, and the funds appropriated by Congress for Sea Grant to give out for invasive species work slowed to a trickle, much too little to justify my job of managing said funds. My audience followed the money elsewhere, and I moved on to other things. But my pulse still quickens when an invasive species emergency looms!

And now I had my own invasive emergency of sorts. Apparently, this stuff thrives in the environment where I threw the seeds, and it can grow and propagate, not just by seeds, but also by sending up new shoots if you pull out the plant, but leave the root ball, or “corm”. So I had to dig out all the plants—there were 15 or so—while being careful not to let any of the seed-carrying berries fall off and roll under the brush, and not to pull too hard on the stalk and break it, leaving the corm behind to sprout again. That corm, by the way, is a woody, round, tendrilly, creepy looking thing that resembles a coronavirus, if a coronvirus were two inches in diameter.

I was more successful at capturing all the escaping berries, I think, than at rooting out all the corms. Sometimes, the stems broke and I just couldn’t find the woody corm at the bottom. So I think we’ll have to stay vigilant next year to see if new Arums pop up.

We destroyed all the plants, seeds, and corms I could find, except for one survivor, which we let live so it could tell the others what happened here, and to warn them to keep their old-world tuberous toxic selves away from our shores!

Is my language species-ist?

Thanks,
Dorn
7/17/2020

* * *

EPILOG – July 22, 2020

The Arum italica got its revenge. As it clearly says on the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board webpage, “avoid skin contact with Italian arum as plant parts may cause skin irritation, which can be severe for sensitive individuals”

(I will be writing to the WSNWCB about the vagueness of the warnings on their website. Clearly, that sentence should have ended with THIS MEANS YOU!)

Anyway, sure enough a few days after my hand-to-hand combat with the Arum, I got this rash that morphed into blisters after a while on the back of my hand. I got a few spots elsewhere too, but I didn’t include photographs as they don’t really add to the story (read: not gruesome enough). I had worn stout leather gloves, but when I would accidentally break a stalk and have to root around in the dirt, my sense of touch wasn’t sensitive to find the corm unless I took them off.

So I guess the Arum got the last laugh. Or maybe, the fight isn’t over even yet—any seeds or corms I missed could still sprout up to taunt me, or worse! So I must KEEP WATCHING. KEEP WATCHING THE YARD. KEEP WATCHING. (That’s a homage to the closing line from that great 1951 movie about another invasive plant, The Thing From Another World .)

Black Lives Matter 2

Last weekend ushered in our country’s 245^th year of independence from Britain. “Independence” and “Freedom” are two of our country’s rallying cries (as well as the names of the two space shuttles that nuked that earth-killing meteor in the Bruce Willis classic Armageddon.) Well, America is still independent of foreign rule, but is it free? Was it ever, or has that just been a dream?

Like many of my tribe struggling to fully understand the Black Lives Matter movement and the abuses perpetrated on Americans of color that are excused or ignored, I reached for a book. Several sources suggested Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015 Random House), so I started with that. I’m glad I did—this is easily the best book I’ve read on any subject in a long time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a MacArthur Fellow and a Pulitzer-nominated writer. He’s a sometime contributer to the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the NY Times, and my friend Jon E. reports he’s also the writer of the Black Panther graphic novels.

I didn’t know that he was also a poet, but I thought he must be as soon as I started reading his book. His command of the language, and his care with every word he uses, made me think of Margaret Atwood. I was hooked from the first page.

Between the World and Me is an exploration of Coates’s world as a black man in America, written as an extended letter to his son Samori. The book is thoughtful, deeply personal, and true. By true, I don’t mean this is a history or objective analysis of the black American experience (although it is full of references to real, well-known events that revolved around Coates in his life). It is Coates’s own story of his experiences and beliefs, and it is made powerful by the effort he makes to speak only the truth as he knows it to his son.

A central theme of the book is the systematic authorized brutality on black men and women in this country by police and others. The title refers to the separation he and his fellow black Americans feel from the “real world” of the American Dream. The anecdotes he tells of casual or planned violence done to black men and women start when he was a child in Baltimore in the 1980’s, and continue up to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown in the 2010’s. It was chilling to read these stories, and realize how little has changed in forty years.

Coates’s thesis is that not only is this brutality accepted or ignored by most of those living the American Dream; it is that the American Dream itself requires this brutality in order to exist. His struggles with the American Dream, first to reach for it, then to build a better alternative to it, and finally to transcend it, form the story arc, and his message to his son is that he, too, must find a way to look beyond any dream and understand the reality of his life.

Between the World and Me has won several awards, including the National Book Award in 2016. It was not without critics, including some that found it too pessimistic, ignoring the progress that had been made (this book was released in the sixth year of Obama’s presidency). But I think those critics forgot that the book was his own story, not the country’s. And in this post-Obama world, his more fatalistic view of black people’s “progress” seems to have worn better than his critics’.

I’ve written enough about this great book. I should let the author speak for himself.

On police reform in 2015:

At this moment the phrase “police reform” has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people.

On the pervasiveness of sanctioned violence and murder in the American Dream:

[My mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me…. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.

On the harm that the American Dream causes even to those privileged to enjoy its benefits:

The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

And on his message to his son:

I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance [between black men and women, and the world of the American Dream]. Was it Mike Brown? I don’t think I want to know. But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. It is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. . .

Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto. — I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness.

Thanks for listening,
Dorn
July 6, 2020

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Driftwood Rhinoceros

I’ve always wanted a rhinoceros. I mean, who hasn’t? I also have wanted to try making a driftwood sculpture, so I had the happy idea of making a driftwood rhinoceros back in the Fall. Initially, I prepared for the project by watching a youtube video of a guy who made his mother a driftwood horse for her birthday – in only two days! I started collecting four pieces of driftwood every time I took Teddy for a walk down by the river. Then, when I had amassed what I thought was a huge pile, and armed with my youtube knowledge, I started the project. I made a rough sketch and a plan for a sort of armature (see below). I had some used pressure treated 2x4s lying around so I used them for the armature by screwing some pieces together. When the proportions didn’t seem quite right, I sawed a little off of each leg, then did it again. Once the proportions were right, driftwood was added piece by piece, with 2 screws going in each piece. I soon found out that my huge stash of driftwood was inadequate, since I had been collecting big pieces and more smaller pieces were really what was needed, after just a few big pieces were in place. I kept taking this as far as I could go with the pieces of driftwood that I had on hand, then going for more walks to increase the collection. That became a very pleasant hobby and I loved finding pieces that looked like a rhinoceros horn or foot or ear. My sole cost outlay was for about 4 lbs of screws in different sizes, from 2 inches to 3 ½. I used a Ryobi Power Screwdriver to do most of the work. Instead of two days, it took me around six months.

I call him Huey. Just as I was writing this it occurred to me that I should help out his species, since they are critically endangered so I gave a contribution to the International Rhino Foundation at Rhinos.org