I don’t know what that is, but I wish I hadn’t touched it

Curiosity has a funny way of rewarding action sometimes. Normally people only mention the highlights of curiosity – the exploration, the quirky discoveries, the interesting facts gleaned from odd experiences and strange people met along the way.

What doesn’t get mentioned so much is how hard it can be to live with. One gets bored with an otherwise perfectly acceptable life if there is not at least a trickle of curiosity-worthy material. Being bored with one's life is a slow poison. It is an ally of depression and they are both distant cousins (in my case) to eating binges. Ah, potatoes.

But I digress.

The main difficulty I find in this yearning to know about things, is that although it is easy enough to find out, it is then very very hard to keep quiet about the picture eventually drawn by all these points of data. Generally other people are not interested or they would have already googled it for themselves. Take as an example the methane plumes in the Arctic that are in the news this month. That sounds interesting doesn't it? Sounds also a bit like bad news too - isn't methane a greenhouse gas? Yup, twenty times more so than carbon dioxide. Oh shitbags. What will that mean for sea levels and polar bears and weather weirding??  Well probably a lot but no-one has a guaranteed divination method for anything other than "maybe this, maybe that" (all of which are sobering enough). Still, at last we're having the conversation.

Oh no. Wait. We're not are we?
New Zealand might be.

Maybe it is because we live so far away. If we lived closer we would care.

Oh wait, the Earth is a globe, all that water up the top is connected to all our water down below....

See what happens? One question leads to another. And thence to another and so on until my mind if full and I spin out of my chair and trip over my feet falling into fevered-dream sleep. Perhaps I exaggerate that loop a little for narrative tension, but you get my point.

Lots of data. Lots of consequences. Not a lot of ideas about what to do with this knowledge or (one step further) what to do in response (well actually the established ideas all involve individuals using and consuming less, and no-one wants to be the first to blink). Instead our news is filled with predicable politically flavoured blandals (like scandals only really really bland) and circus gossip.

This isn't the first topic this little pattern has repeated itself on either.  You'd think I would resist the urge to scratch the curiosity itch. I've tried. It doesn't work.

Curiosity killed the cat but a life unqueried is unlivable.



 

Morning Planetside

Do you ever dream of birds, of warm currents that lift and caress? Do you dream of eternal sunsets and wondrous, unknowable patterns? Do you aspire to lift and see more? I'm held here by the miracle of gravity, part of this web.

That's the urge of sap rising, of rich complex earth smells.

Bronze Nails

I intended to blog tonight, and I even made a bit of an effort to think of decent ideas for once, but obviously this plan has not come to fruition. Please forgive me. I've just spent a cozy two and a half hours snuggled up to my Greader. So many blogs and articles and essays all queued up for me by topic or author. I have barely gotten through half of it. What a pleasure. If only I could read it on the couch.

The major distraction tonight was catching up with new posts from Club Orlov. One of the things I love about this blog is the "been there, done that" nature of the analysis and information. Just because the big big mass of Russia is a long way away (in all the different nuances that hang around after the cold war) doesn't mean we can't learn a lot from their recent history and experiences. It is one thing to look at a bunch of graphs and say, "This is going to be bad" and another to hear exactly how bad (and I don't mean just having to live on cabbage). There are little tidbits too, such as the value of bronze nails.

"It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels - better than most. They are compact and easy to store."

I didn't even think about the possibility that nails might be made of stuff that erodes. I mean, that's a stupid idea, right?! What a perfect example of how our thinking as a system is faulty. Not that I'm ever going to be able to build a boat. Or even that I can use a hammer without hurting myself. Who am I kidding anyway, I'm almost certain to die off as soon as the chocolate supply gets dodgy. I've got three lightfittings in my house where I can't even get a lightbulb to work. Plus, I live nearly 150 kloms from the ocean. And I don't eat fish. Now. I reckon if rotten cabbages get on the menu, pretty much anything goes.

But I digress.

It's not just the handy hints towards a happy post-peak-oil-life that I enjoy and it is more than the fabulously footnoted details, it is that Club Orlov presents with a fabulous sense of humour. Anyone who can make me laugh involuntarily about global economic collapse due to the denial of the (easily projected) minimum production volumes and maximum affordable costs of energy has to be clever, resilient and fundamentally very, very funny.

I don't want to spoil it for you in case you have the urge to explore for yourself, and maybe you won't think so, but I'm still chuckling now. Anyway, that's the reason there will not be a blog from me tonight. I've been deliciously distracted and suddenly it is past my bedtime and time to don jammies and sleep. Ah, but my mind is spinning, trying to recalibrate my plan to take in all the knowables, the unknowables, the things we don't know we don't know and now to do all of this and yet remain flexible, with lots more humour!

Solstice and Spaceship Earth

It is winter solstice again; the long night.

I went to my little sister's place for dinner and to play cards and it was good to see them and catch up on their news. Time is moving faster for them now that she's going to have a baby. There's a very finite and concrete sense of 'time left before the baby comes' and 'everything after'. I can see what shape it is giving to weekends and plans and of course their relationship. All the natural winter urges are heightened for them.

I was thinking earlier today - what is the most beautiful thing that you can think of? Or perhaps it is a place or a person or a sound... feel the joy and the beauty it brings you. How precious and wonderful that is.
Now unless you naturally think of the Eagle Nebula, the Sun's corona or the rings of Saturn, chances are very very good that what you thought of - even your top ten - are all here on earth. Everything is here. So why is it that being a 'greenie' or someone concerned about the well being and survival of the planet is still considered such a social crime? I just don't understand how anyone can be so obstinately ignorant of the peril we're in. It isn't even that "if we break this one we don't have a spare" because we know this one is already broken and the question on every body's heart and mind should really be more like "how much can we mend it if we all pitch in?"

All those extinct species won't come back, but maybe we won't all have to genetically merge with salamanders to survive.