Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? So asks the genie within my brain. Tomorrow I am committed to giving a short program to a neighboring Lions Club. Two months ago, I wrote a speech that I would use to give to fellow Lions to awaken them to blindness which is one of our pillars of service. I posted the speech on this blog, but no one has read it. That told me that the speech was not very good. Or else the title put people off. I thought it was rather catchy, “How Many Ways Can You Go Blind?” It turns out that there are so many ways that ophthalmologists have lost count. No one is interested into why some people go blind until that person is you. Then it becomes the number one priority on your list.
My job today, immediately after this post, is to rewrite my speech to eight minutes down from fifteen. Why am I procrastinating? I didn’t become a Lion to write and give speeches. I joined to serve my community, and giving speeches has become that service. So, I must put my mind into gear and rewrite what I thought was a perfect speech.
When Obama ran for president, he hypnotized the populace with phrases like “I’m going to transform the country.” He never said what he would transform the country into. Now, his opposite-sex mirror-image candidate, Kamala, uses a phrase that begs questions: “We have to turn the page.” What bothers me is that she never explains what is on the new page other than her being president. Another phrase that she uses often, along with too many other politicians, is, “Our immigration system is broken.” In all my years, I have never heard a single way it is broken. It’s my belief that the system is fine, but the politicians administering it are all perverting it.
It is not even noon yet, and I am fighting off sleep. Most likely, it is because I have high blood sugar from eating too large a breakfast. Instead of falling into the urge to sleep, I am writing to keep my brain neurons firing. This morning, I awoke at 6:00 a.m. and returned to bed without falling back into a sound sleep. I finally got out of bed at 8:00 and dressed for my walk. The temperature this morning was 34 degrees, and the walk was brisk. I passed a section of shaded grass that was covered in frost. Although there was some light frost it was not what we call a killing frost. Killing frost occurs when the temp drops to 28-30 degrees. Many flowers we plant for color are tropical and will not survive that temperature. The plant stems freeze through and kill any chance of the plant recovering. Nevertheless this morning was a warning that winter is definitely on its way.
The trees on my street are finally turning colors but holding their leaves. In another two weeks, most trees and flowering shrubs will be void of foliage. There is one tree, however, which holds its leaves until mid to late November. The Bradford pear will be loaded with deep green leaves and then one day you awaken to a perfect circle of yellow leaves on the ground under a bare tree. This past summer, my pear tree suffered some serious damage when a violent gust of wind broke off two four inch branches and dropped them onto the patio. The shape of the tree is now seriously lopsided. One side is in the shade of a few mighty poplars growing to the west and there is no growth on that side of the pear leaving it flat. The opposite side has been pruned by the wind leaving ugly jagged spikes of wood jutting out of the trunk. My decision is to remove the tree and let the light back into the garden. At the same time, I’ll have an apple tree removed from the front of the house. It has outlived its prettiness. The past two springs it has not had a colorful bloom of pink flowers and the leaves were sparse all summer. The trunk and branches are rough leaving it looking like a gnarly mess of twigs suspended in mid air. The tree was planted too close to the house so I am constantly pruning branches away from the roofing shingles. This pruning has also forced the tree to form into an awkward unsightly shape. I rather like the red-pink-lavender flames coming off burning apple logs.
What was the world like before YouTube? My addiction to it is causing me to lose interest in doing things for myself. My sports, collections, friends, and social activities are all falling away from me because I watch videos of other people doing those things. My butt is slowly growing into the chair in front of my computer. My brain is creepily changing into mush, and my muscles are shrinking into strings.
How will anthropologists catalog our generation when, in the future, we are being dug out of the earth for study? Will they reconstruct us in the museums of future civilizations? How will people look upon us? As civilized humans or as programmed robots glued to a black box doing nothing? Where will they find all the millions of digital YouTube videos depicting the subject matter that kept our era so mesmerized? If, when they find the videos, will they have a way to know what they are and will they be able to play them or see them as we did? Even we have trouble playing old photos on new equipment. There is a business dedicated to converting old movies, photos, videos etc into the latest format so they can be viewed. I had all of my home movies converted to digital and stored on discs. Now, I find that I need to keep a disc player and a computer screen just for that. Forget about looking at an old vhs tape. My experience is that the few times I wanted to play, a preserved forever copy of my life, the tape was frozen to itself and could not be played. Technology changes quickly and our efforts to make the job of the anthropologist of the next millennia easier are nil. Instead of using brushes and nut-picks to uncover our bones they will be using ultrasound, x-rays, and MRI to interpret the mysteries they have uncovered.
One of the more interesting and educational video channels I am hooked on is “Desert Drifter.” This young man takes videos of himself wandering through the terrain of the southwestern states, looking for evidence of life from another era. He finds many sites on the face of cliffs that are almost impossible to reach. My knees quiver just watching him climb on slippery rack faces to reach a hollow in the rock face too high for anyone to want to live there. Yet humans have walled it off with rocks and mortar made from mud to create shelter. The best estimate he can give the viewer is that the civilization lived there about six hundred years ago. He will pick up chards of pottery and and arrow points chipped from flint stone and discuss them being careful to return the pieces back to the spot where he found it. He shows smooth and steep rock faces with footholds hollowed out of the stone to provide a staircase to a living space. Inside the living spaces he will find evidence like dried corn cobs indicating that people did in fact live there.
What will the Desert Drifter of 2624 find from exploring our habitats?
Lovely went out to check the mailbox today and came back empty-handed. This is unusual because the postman puts junk mail into the box if we get nothing legitimate. That way, we know he was there. I pondered momentarily and remembered that today is Columbus Day, a national holiday. When I was in grammar school, our nun taught us that Columbus discovered America, and he is remembered for having done so. It means some people have the day off from work, like the mail service, banks and most government offices. We never got the day off from school, so I guess Columbus wasn’t a very large hero.
In today’s world, Columbus is seen as just another sailor who got lost and bumped into some Caribbean Islands. He didn’t even come close to North America. Two hundred years ago, no one had a clue that he never touched the continent. Columbus sailed back to report his findings to Queen Isabella, his sponsor, that he discovered India. We were all happy that he did and that his trip opened the floodgates of migrants coming from Europe to be free from the oppression of their kings to settle into the wilds of America. The natives didn’t know the Europeans were coming in illegally because they didn’t have stupid laws forbidding it. The laws defining separation of colonies were drawn by those same early migrants.
Today, the climate is different. Many years after the migrants were settled and the lines were drawn to separate the colonies from one another someone discovered a Viking ship buried in the sands of Canada from four hundred years earlier than Columbus. These people argue that Columbus does not deserve to be honored, because the Vikings made the discovery before him, except they didn’t come home and declare they did. Others, who hate the idea of America denigrate Columbus and deny him the finding. They want to change history so they can rewrite it to their perspective. For whatever reason, Columbus has lost favor with the people of America simply because they have forgotten what they were taught in grammar school. The result is that some of us only remember that it is a day the mailmen get off, therefore there was no mail today.
