ask the girl of the hour by the water tower's watch

[greygirlbeast]

Yesterday, I wrote 1,215 words and finished the new "Yellow House" story for Sirenia Digest #17. But I still do not have a title that I'm happy with. The total word count came to 7,165.

The headache only slowed me down a little bit.

But I didn't leave the house yesterday.

Sometimes, like now, it feels as though I am destined for some sort of atrophy, all parts of my person not directly involved in the act of writing gradually withering away. In the end, I shall require a different sort of chair, more a cradle. Only three or four fingers are necessary, and I could likely get by with just my right index finger. The brain must remain, of course. I'm already down to one eye. With rewired digestive and endocrinal systems, I can lose everything below the mid-thoracic region. There's certainly no need for a mouth and two nostrils.

In my cradle, I will dream unlikely things, and with my shrunken hand, I will tap it all down.

Surely, I can make do with a single ear.

Last night, we finally saw Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), a brilliant film in every sense a film may ever be brilliant.

And today is Earth Day. As of 16:03 GMT (EST+5) Apr 22, 2007, the human population, worldwide, stands at 6,590,429,167. The population of the US stands at 301,670,353. Something like 27 wars are currently being waged. The rate of species extinction worldwide is somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times greater than normal. And today is Earth Day. And it seems to me that people are more concerned with finding "green" solutions that will permit business as usual, and continuing technological escalation, rather than drastically scaling back this runaway civilization, which is the only truly "green" solution. The only solution at all. I might as well be asking for world peace, and I know that. Humans hate. Human breed. Humans consume. Humans spoil. There are other things that humans do, and some of them are wonderful, but the global effects of these wonderful capabilities pale by comparison with all the hating, breeding, consumption, and spoilage. I do not hate humans, and I don't want to give that impression, but I see no point in denying that today, on this Earth Day, I'm rooting for the other team.

Comments

[jtglover.livejournal.com]

A friend pointed me toward a good piece about why today should be the last Earth Day (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006520.html), which you might enjoy.

[cause-catyljan.livejournal.com]

The cradle, the brain, the single eye - you realise you're turning into a Dalek right?

[stephenhsegal.livejournal.com]

On my good days, I believe that the filthy-richest of the filthy rich are finally starting to realize that the big new game of the new century is strategizing for the planet's continued survival. On these days, I think we've got a shot.

On my less good days, I sing myself T-Bone Burnett's song "Humans From Earth" and agree that, if we do in fact survive to colonize the universe, it will be because we act more like evil alien invaders than any imaginary species we've conjured in science fiction to date.

In the meanwhile, I will continue to think of myself as an earthling first, a human second, and all other categorizations a distant third. And for what it's worth, I will continue flying James Cadle's flag and trying to live by Fred Rogers' words: "Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel, a facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not."

[corucia.livejournal.com]

Our intelligence has given us the power to ignore the usual boundaries set on other species, boundaries that act to limit the expansion of a species. However, our intelligence hasn't done a single thing to negate the drive to expand that is inherent in all species. It's buried too deep for most people to even comprehend that it is there, let alone do anything constructive about it. Unfortunately for the human species, we didn't eliminate all of the boundaries, merely sidestepped the more common ones. Our drive to expand eventually will cause us to come up against a boundary that we can't think our way around, and our expansion will stop. In all likelihood, that will mean that our population levels will implode, as our current numbers are only supported by expansion, and not by maintenance, as you point out. If model organism population studies actually do provide a reasonable overview of likely outcomes, we could be looking at a drop of more than two to three orders of magnitude, leaving Earth with a human population of five to fifty million, or less. I would expect the technologically based groups to be the most affected. Once again, if model organism studies can be used as an indicator, the rapidity of the descent could be measured in years, not decades. It depends on how far out over the abyss we are when we finally hit the triggering event.

Sorry to be all somber and gloomy, but today is Earth Day, and not Human Day. The good news is that Earth, and life in general, will not have too much problem picking up and continuing, after the humans have effectively killed themselves off.

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

I completely agree about The Pianist. I couldn't get over it when I saw it in the theater. I sat there and wept like a fool. To think, some people won't see a Polanski film because of his past. I felt as though he was trying to redeem himself in the way an artist does best.