Shave the planet
I never really got classical music before I listened to Rachmaninovs third piano concerto.
I slept way too little the night before last and way too much after work yesterday morning. As the end result I spent the rest of the day in a really queer mood; The kind of anxiety you get from wanting to create something - anything - but failing to start and resorting to secondary activities that pass the time and nothing more. At least some of it had to do with putting off blogging for far too long and developing a morbidly obese backlog of issues to cover. (Thus leading naturally to the solution of ignoring said backlog and writing about something completely different. Almost the first thing that came to mind, actually.)
I finished The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. On saturday, having read the first half of the book - most of it a treatise on the sexual activities and peculiarities of our species from a zoological viewpoint - I was constantly self-conscious of my behaviour. Amidst the crush of bodies at the Iron Maiden concert at Ratina stadium I kept noticing how my gaze wandered toward certain female members of the throng. It was quite odd and amusing to realize just how much it is the primal instincts that keep me going and not the self-tacked-on veneer of civility and intellectualism.
The latter half of the book added to the gotchas of the first but with a twist. There, sitting innocently between the analysis of behavioral quirks, was a paragraph on population density that compared the current human head count of some 3000 million to the mere 500 million a couple of hundred years before. That was in 1967AD. It brought to mind one of the recurring motifs from Pain of Salvations Be album: the exponentially growing number of people read aloud against the background of continually intensifying music. At first the intervals are measured in hundreds of years and the changes are small, but towards the end a veritable explosion presents itself. There are about 6,8 billion people now. In Be the story takes a turn towards pessimism and the population count for 2050AD crashes down to just five million people as natural disasters triggered by the overtaxing of the environment take their toll. In the real world events of such magnitude have yet to present themselves, although some might say that in recent years we've already seen the first signs of natural occurrences turned disastrous by overly dense habitation.
The most troubling part for me, though, was that the sentiment concerning overpopulation was nothing new. I've been aware of the problem for years - as I believe any man with even an iota of mental capacity and civilization about them would be. There still exists that part of me that resents me for being alive - for callously prancing around as a bacterium in the collective plague that we are on this planet. I know that my way of life with its computers, cars and refridgerated malt beverages takes a toll on the environment (much more so than, say, an average african - even though I'm not the one chopping down and burning rainforests to make room for my next crop because I'm too (lazy|stupid|ignorant) to fertilize and reuse my old fields). Indeed the ones saying that saving the world should start by offing oneself are completely right. The only problem is that that'd still leave the other 6,8*10^9 minus one living; The third world farmers deforesting their part of the world, the former Eastern Bloc and far east polluting the hell out of theirs and the white folk strip-mining, sweat-shop producing, di- and investing and waging pointless wars to satisfy their incorporeal overlords. That this problem is unsolvable barring the extreme personal solution or some impossible collective moment of total enlightenment and exacerbated every time another denizen of the developing countries starts wanting a piece of the american dream, another desirable item of media is made or I upgrade my hardware annoys the hell out of me. (Thinking about it now, I should probably be out there on the street corner, singing about it instead of wasting electrons, but what can you do? I'm way too comfortable being comfortable.)
Goodness gracious, it seems I'm developing an environmental awareness. Best go see a doctor before it festers, methinks. (For some reason it also irks me that I can't seem to write about such issues without resorting to crankiness and sarcasm. You'd think that I could at least try and be mature about it. Perhaps I need to vent a bit more to cool myself down after keeping it all bottled up?)
Talking about those things - unrealized creative impulses and how our world is going to hell in a hand basket - with her, she was curiously sympathetic. This is me counting myself blessed to have found a woman with such a depth of understanding. At times it's almost frightening how much her thoughts mirror my own, but luckily we are not without our differences. Playing four-in-a-row turned into a slowly heating philosophical debate on the correct way of playing a completely deterministic game. I advocated calculating as far ahead as one can and through some twists and turns we arrived at the consensus that the game was too simplistic to serve as proper material for argument. Our discourse will resume over a go board some day in the future. Later on we segued into writing poetry by candlelight, the pencil scribbles satisfying my hunger for accomplishment and her fresh-baked bread with chevre-flavoured processed cheese, tomatoes and basil sating my belly. Even though I didn't get that much sleep (again), I woke up refreshed. Lines in the Sand was a better morning song but the best thing was her, sitting across the table, smiling at me.
I slept way too little the night before last and way too much after work yesterday morning. As the end result I spent the rest of the day in a really queer mood; The kind of anxiety you get from wanting to create something - anything - but failing to start and resorting to secondary activities that pass the time and nothing more. At least some of it had to do with putting off blogging for far too long and developing a morbidly obese backlog of issues to cover. (Thus leading naturally to the solution of ignoring said backlog and writing about something completely different. Almost the first thing that came to mind, actually.)
I finished The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. On saturday, having read the first half of the book - most of it a treatise on the sexual activities and peculiarities of our species from a zoological viewpoint - I was constantly self-conscious of my behaviour. Amidst the crush of bodies at the Iron Maiden concert at Ratina stadium I kept noticing how my gaze wandered toward certain female members of the throng. It was quite odd and amusing to realize just how much it is the primal instincts that keep me going and not the self-tacked-on veneer of civility and intellectualism.
The latter half of the book added to the gotchas of the first but with a twist. There, sitting innocently between the analysis of behavioral quirks, was a paragraph on population density that compared the current human head count of some 3000 million to the mere 500 million a couple of hundred years before. That was in 1967AD. It brought to mind one of the recurring motifs from Pain of Salvations Be album: the exponentially growing number of people read aloud against the background of continually intensifying music. At first the intervals are measured in hundreds of years and the changes are small, but towards the end a veritable explosion presents itself. There are about 6,8 billion people now. In Be the story takes a turn towards pessimism and the population count for 2050AD crashes down to just five million people as natural disasters triggered by the overtaxing of the environment take their toll. In the real world events of such magnitude have yet to present themselves, although some might say that in recent years we've already seen the first signs of natural occurrences turned disastrous by overly dense habitation.
The most troubling part for me, though, was that the sentiment concerning overpopulation was nothing new. I've been aware of the problem for years - as I believe any man with even an iota of mental capacity and civilization about them would be. There still exists that part of me that resents me for being alive - for callously prancing around as a bacterium in the collective plague that we are on this planet. I know that my way of life with its computers, cars and refridgerated malt beverages takes a toll on the environment (much more so than, say, an average african - even though I'm not the one chopping down and burning rainforests to make room for my next crop because I'm too (lazy|stupid|ignorant) to fertilize and reuse my old fields). Indeed the ones saying that saving the world should start by offing oneself are completely right. The only problem is that that'd still leave the other 6,8*10^9 minus one living; The third world farmers deforesting their part of the world, the former Eastern Bloc and far east polluting the hell out of theirs and the white folk strip-mining, sweat-shop producing, di- and investing and waging pointless wars to satisfy their incorporeal overlords. That this problem is unsolvable barring the extreme personal solution or some impossible collective moment of total enlightenment and exacerbated every time another denizen of the developing countries starts wanting a piece of the american dream, another desirable item of media is made or I upgrade my hardware annoys the hell out of me. (Thinking about it now, I should probably be out there on the street corner, singing about it instead of wasting electrons, but what can you do? I'm way too comfortable being comfortable.)
Goodness gracious, it seems I'm developing an environmental awareness. Best go see a doctor before it festers, methinks. (For some reason it also irks me that I can't seem to write about such issues without resorting to crankiness and sarcasm. You'd think that I could at least try and be mature about it. Perhaps I need to vent a bit more to cool myself down after keeping it all bottled up?)
Talking about those things - unrealized creative impulses and how our world is going to hell in a hand basket - with her, she was curiously sympathetic. This is me counting myself blessed to have found a woman with such a depth of understanding. At times it's almost frightening how much her thoughts mirror my own, but luckily we are not without our differences. Playing four-in-a-row turned into a slowly heating philosophical debate on the correct way of playing a completely deterministic game. I advocated calculating as far ahead as one can and through some twists and turns we arrived at the consensus that the game was too simplistic to serve as proper material for argument. Our discourse will resume over a go board some day in the future. Later on we segued into writing poetry by candlelight, the pencil scribbles satisfying my hunger for accomplishment and her fresh-baked bread with chevre-flavoured processed cheese, tomatoes and basil sating my belly. Even though I didn't get that much sleep (again), I woke up refreshed. Lines in the Sand was a better morning song but the best thing was her, sitting across the table, smiling at me.