peas please!

My peas are small but happy.

I planted them late this year, and I think with all the gnarly weather we had until recently it was for the best.

What’s on my mind today:

Sometimes the most comforting thought I can muster is that the human race is finite, and that we will at some point have an expiration date.

Every Sunday I sit in the back of the bus because the loud obnoxiously chatty old couple I call Denny and Shirley always sit up front and I have to move. Shirley has a voice like nails on a chalkboard, and even with earplugs she gives me instant migranes. They always find a seat right in front of me and make inane, blaring conversation with one another. This time I think ahead- I go to the back of the bus.

So do they.

They sit right in front of me as though they are somehow aware that I just want quiet. So I move again, to the very back row where the drunks sit. Lady sits right next to me. Talking as LOUDLY as possible about her personal life on her cell phone. I sing LALALALALA In a REALLY obvious manner. She finally gets the picture and moves. By then it’s time to get off the bus.

Off the bus: On my way to work there’s a dead pigeon in the street. Car drives over it. Horrible pop. I have to go pick it up with the sleeve of my sweater and put it in the ivy, half in tears. All I can think about is how disgusted I am with everyone.

I try to picture the city overgrown with forest, being reclaimed by the earth and how QUIET everything would be. No more cars, no more shrieking teenagers, just birds and fish and squirrels and deer and bears. No more assholes in expensive suits, no more nice bums that you politely avoid, no more sidewalks, or bikes, or offices.

It’s sometimes the most wonderful thing I can imagine. A plague, catastrophic climate shift, anything that would eradicate us. I only regret that I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it. I (of course) imagine being the only one here- or one of a tiny group of survivors. But really, I’m no more deserving of that than anyone else.

But I do know- I mean- I know as an irrefutable scientific fact that we won’t last forever. Even if we managed to not destroy ourselves though war or climate change (which is much more likely), the earth will eventually become uninhabitable because the sun will simply get too hot. Before that though, we should have some major species crushing disasters that will, at the very least, bottleneck humanity down to a few thousand or hundred thousand members. That’s good enough for me, and really… that’s all I want. Not gone completely- just… mostly. There are just too goddamned many of us, and we’re disgusting.

I’m a big believer in catastrophic climate shifts- which is nice at times like this. I think- in a few thousand, or even a few hundred years we’ll be nowhere near the dominating force we are now. It’s really comforting. It’s like believing in armageddon only there are facts involved.

The Permain extinction was caused by the gradual buildup of C02 and methane from peat bogs and volcanoes- it killed around 99% of all life on land and in the ocean, completely eclipsing the more popular and well known K-T dinosaur asteroid.  The ocean currents ceased, turning our water into an anoxic wasteland, inhabited only py purple sulpher bacteria, which breathe out hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.

The ocean would have looked purplish and thick from the bacterial mats. It would have been kind of mellow and slow motion without currents, no big crashing waves- just a slow, oily sloshing. It would have belched up bubbles of gas, like a bog- only the gas was poisonous, and if you were standing onl shore, you would smell the overpowering stench of rotting eggs, then you would die.

It’s like the earth was pushing back against too much life- she was getting annoyed by all the noise-

There have been other times that climate shift has done away with most life. The dinosaurs were in pretty bad shape before the K-T impact. Things already looked pretty grim. Not poison oceans grim, but still, not great. Most species were hanging on by the raggedy edge already, and the impact was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Soon, we’ll be looking back at our squabbling politicians and shaking our heads sadly at our own pathetic inaction, but it will be way, way too late. I’d say it probably already is. Which is fine.

I wish I could glimpse a few hundred years into the future and see where we’re at when the Amazon rainforest carbon sink is gone and there are no polar ice caps. When the asian monsoon is an ancient memory but the pacific northwest monsoon is totally the norm. When most atolls are long sunk and New Orelans is Atlantis. I’d just like to take a PEEK. A glimpse- to sate my curious mind.

So anyway.

That’s my morning.