I got chatted up by two ladies for five minutes before one of them pulled out a Jehovah’s Witness bookmark and implored me to visit the church’s website. She seemed diffident. And her partner was looking down as if embarrassed.
I didn’t feel guilty about interrupting the spiel and contradicting her because of the disingenuous way she had used friendly conversation as a pretext to poop out her religious nonsense right there in front of me. No one likes having a nice conversation only to suddenly get a sales pitch at the end.
I should have said something about how I did not believe, but was convinced by, the evidence for a large, old universe, with natural selection driving life on Earth; and that we should not be preoccupied with ideas about cartoonish gods, but instead focus on improving ourselves and the environment in the here and now.
But instead I mumbled some kind of thank you and said I would check out the site. I don’t have the rhetorical skills or the energy to take a stand with every evangelist I meet.
Included: a primordial-looking island at Veterans Park in Richfield, MN.
It’s been a wet late spring and early summer in and around Minneapolis. Many of the thunderstorms have been quite violent and the flooding has been severe. In one of the very first storms I set out with my clear utility glasses, lights and waterproof layers and biked through the heavy rain, down the Minnehaha Creek trail.
It was a rare event and a privilege to get soaked by the first warm raindrops of summer. While cranking the pedals of my shitty steel bike I thought about the statistic that for every one woman who dies from a lightning strike, seven men die. This is thought to be due to men having more outdoor occupations and being generally dumber.
On that trail I thought about how people delight in a wide variety of natural phenomena. It’s fun and enchanting to see the sunrise or to be outside when the first snowflakes of winter start to fall, especially when you’re dripping with effort and exertion.
I thought about my most recent National Geographic magazine, whose feature article was on the huge numbers of exoplanets being discovered every year. There may be another world out there where storms burn the continents with acid rain. Or another world where the oceans churn with cold liquid alkanes. Or another world where ultraviolet light blasts apart the molecules of heredity of the inhabitants there, causing them to grow opaque exoskeletons or to live totally under the planet’s crust.
I pictured creatures whose greatest delight is to swim in those cold, volatile oceans, or to run about amid the caustic showers. Perhaps, even, there’s the collective joy of a wise old civilization that had calmly confronted its ultimate peril: thermal death and entropy. Maybe as their star fizzled out, they dispersed into space in a diffuse cloud of electronic signals, coding their memories and cognition into bits conveyed by the flickering charged particles they would become. They would still learn and grow, and remain individuals, but they would never again inhabit bodies, instead continuing to communicate and to reduce their use of energy asymptotically as they delayed oblivion for as long as possible.
“We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”
Perhaps these beings, in their remote cloud, would delight in suddenly feeling x-rays from a distant pulsar. Perhaps they would witness the birth of distant stars as grandparents do here on earth, with the most exquisite, genuine, vicarious joy, picturing the spring showers and cool dips those future beings are in for.
But back to my bike ride: I made it home safely, dumb as ever, and grateful to be acquainted with springtime.
Included: photos from a trip to the old Cedar Avenue bridge in Bloomington, Minnesota.
I am reading "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss. It provides ample motivation to follow the simple rule of thumb to avoid the center of the grocery store and instead make your way around the periphery, to pick up fresh produce, a small amount of meat and dairy if desired, and a moderate amount of whole-grain bread on the way out.
The findings in the book clearly suggest better laws regulating Big Food without bashing the reader over the head with a political message.
People are suffering and dying in part due to unhealthy foods. As the states said to Big Tobacco in the nineties, "You caused this, you pay for it." It’s a simple message certain food companies should internalize as they look toward their own future.
pseudoisaac 