.

Every day is the same. Every day is here.

Cars. Houses.  People.  Nights.  Days.  

This is the canvas. Year after year. 

.

Live your own Van Gogh. 

Be tortured, be driven―go.

Be in love, be lonely, be crazy, be

beautifully focused on yellow.

.

Look at yourself looking back.  

See, and feel.

The contours of truth ravage

and the colors of truth heal.

.

Bloom late. Be poor. Be undiscovered.

Let the world not know.

You will still have your own

sunflower days and starry nights.

.

Find your own yellow.

.

.

Transport

2: to carry away with strong and often intensely pleasant emotion

.

The joy of reading was brought back to me recently while reading a book that I picked up by the merest happenstance. 

I’ve started to automatically be inclined toward digital entertainment and creativity interests― versus the printed word―like the rest of us swept up in this digital revolution.  It happened slowly and overlappingly until I had mostly transitioned from one camp to the other, the way one starts to have a new favorite candy over time.  Or perhaps the way one slides into alcoholism—you like it a lot at first but begin to sense that there is a rewiring going on and that it could well not be good.  Or, maybe we’re using digital media the same way we happily used DDT in the beginning, for years unaware of the neurological damage to the psyche’s landscapes over time.  But, as of now, I usually reach for Netflix or YouTube, or video games, etc. whereas most of this time would have been spent with books before.  Growing up, many of my siblings were big readers and we did well in school and even used to go to the library for the fun of it sometimes.  I would be enthralled sitting on my little chair in the big hushed important library; even as a child I read voraciously upon every imaginable subject as long as it was dinosaurs.  Later, I was an English Lit major in college and was force-fed books and great works of literature and so reading was/is anchored in me as one of the lifelong core importances.   

The happenstance was this:  me grabbing this book out of an enormous pile of books that were going to be discarded from an estate sale I was working at.  I took about twelve books and it broke my heart to let hundreds more obviously great books go to waste.  Books are virtually free nowadays and it is astounding to me:  from closely guarded papyrus scrolls at ancient royal libraries through the Gutenberg flourishing to now: boxes of free books everywhere you turn.   It has even become a significant trash/recycling problem in some ways.  It looks like the arc of the collapse of an animal population due to digital predation.     

Big caveat before you curmudgeonize me:  I know that a ton of the digital content is great, innovative, and there is an amazing energy behind new apps and new ways of -ugh- ‘consuming’.  (The vibe I get from ‘consuming content’ is very American:  I picture a taxed recliner and a bucket of Cheetos.  And, while we’re here, isn’t ‘content’ a stupidly flat way to describe all of digital creation?)

But the delicious digital offerings entice us into the world where we inevitably find ourselves grazing on empty calories for hours and hours- long after we watched the gateway thing- and we’ll never get that time back.  We are still as a society plunging headfirst into the wave; we’re wet and exhilarated but are in the moment before we feel the power of the wave.  Parents are noticing that they can’t get their teenagers off the phone at restaurants, or even between bites.  Military Basic Training centers are encountering a generation of kids with odd physical and mental frailties.  And mental health centers’ counselors are tracking serious issues bubbling up from the various tar pits of validation (like me!) that drive so much digital interface.  I think it might be a small matter of time before Draconian regulations start getting discussed.  Tik. Tok.

But the good news is that books are still incredible when you find an interesting subject married to a great writer. 

The book I’m reading now is Arctic Dreams and it is transporting.  From the beginning, I found myself rereading passages just to be in that moment again.  It’s about all things north and arctic―the history, the regions, landscapes, animals, weather, light, the wonder, magic, mystery, strength, colors and unforgiving but beautiful austerity and yet abundance of this vast region of our world.  And man’s forays into it, from original inhabitants to current incursions.  I’m still only a little ways into the book but am already in thrall with everything from the exquisite muskox behavior to all the unfamiliar and haunting rhythms of  light and time that govern everything about this land.  I wouldn’t presume to really describe these complexities―the author is such an expert and his writing is magnificent.  And transporting.  (Author: Barry Lopez)

Why is reading this so much more magic than watching a great documentary on the Arctic?

It’s the old ‘what’s better:  the book or the movie?’ question.  It’s almost always the book.  We know why, in general terms:  With books, we get to supply so much of the experience ourselves―launching from the author’s words into the limitless reaches of our imagination.  With books, we can read in our own quiet time and place, all the while indulging our favorite chair, blanket, and cup of tea made just so.  And with books, even the feel of the book, the smell of the pages, can be pleasing on its own.

But the thing that strikes me the most as I’m reading this 464-page book is how quiet this activity is.  Maybe there is a visceral connection to early childhood library experiences, but I don’t read unless it is very quiet.  I’m fortunate to live in a quiet place and it is always very quiet at night while I read.  Compared to the relentless audial assault of digital media, and most of life now, it is a balm. 

So.  It’s very quiet, I can feel the snug weight of book in my hand, I smell the pages as I riffle them.  Blue couch.  Something fleece on.  Tea in my favorite clear mug, the dab of cream still swirling.   I begin reading. The dark letters against the snow white pages are stark, clean, fresh, quiet, and ethereal in their power.  I am transported.  It is an arctic experience.              

(with appearances by Chimps, a Monkey, and Cows)

I periodically have a conversation with my brother Keith about what will be the next ‘big thing’ society will realize we’ve been way wrong about forever. And this is big picture stuff like slavery, or women’s rights, or Civil rights, for example. The arc of our species’ growing ethical awareness is in sharp trajectory; as recently as Viking times even murder and theft were on the table as a societal norm. (They may have called it ‘raiding.’)

We both think the next ‘big thing’ in social change will involve how we treat animals, and I think that, consequently, we’ll not as a species be meat-eaters much longer in the grand scheme of things. By the grand scheme, I refer to the 10,000 years or so that we’ve been running around as people who could pass as human in that dimly lit dive-bar you frequented in college.

I know we already have vegetarianism, veganism even, and PETA-minded people but I haven’t really myself thought about the issue too much until recently. (I eat meat, by the way). But it brings so many nuances to the fore!

There is a vast spectrum available as to how and where we start:

On one end, think of a big kindly mommy elephant nuzzling her tiny young flappy-eared baby elephant and now someone walks up to the mother with a high-powered rifle and shoots her dead.  Surely, this is pretty goddamned close to murder, and it will trigger that kind of outrage.  But, on the other hand, if I squash an ant found on my kitchen counter, it will pass unnoticed.  Between that elephant and that ant, a lot of ethical decisions have to be made.    

How and where we start― hold it―we’ve already started.  By keeping pets, by enacting endangered species legislation, through various hunting regulations, and by nibbling at the edges of treating animals ethically in our agricultural industries, we’re sliding down the road of treating animals better already, right?

But, whoops―we still end up killing and eating billions of animals. 

Is it murder that we eat animals? 

Is it any different than a gang of Alpha chimpanzees chasing down and killing a neighboring monkey? (They may have called it ‘raiding’.) Tearing it apart and eating it after the frenzied howling attack? That animal, the unlucky monkey, was living the only life it knew and then was suddenly murdered and deprived of the rest of its life to sate the horrible engine of violence-hunger that the chimpanzees had worked themselves into. The chimps didn’t need the small amount of ‘food’ that each got and hunger was not the only issue. They had ample alternate food sources. Picture that scene, high in the trees, the grabbing and biting and then the horde tumbling down the branches with the kill, to tear it apart on the ground and revel in the torn bloody flesh, fur, and even passing the dead monkey’s legs, arms and skull among themselves in a goulish sharing ritual from hell. (I actually saw this in a documentary recently. F’ing horrifying.)

Now, is that scene, fully in the wild, ethically more repugnant, or less repugnant, than the scene of one of us picking up a nice cellophane-wrapped roast from the meat section of our grocery store?

Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I wonder if what we humans do is worse than what the chimp gangs do.  Let’s look at them side by side:

In common with the chimp attack is the fact that we humans also have alternate food sources and still choose to kill animals for food. We could immediately convert our entire society to healthy diets with plenty of protein―diets that do not involve slaughterhouses (just think of the word). Some forays into this conversion with Impossible Burgers, etc. send mixed messages: it must still look bloody. We must still sate the cultural inclination that it should look like we are tearing our teeth into a fellow animal’s flesh- even though we don’t really think of it while eating. So that’s the main commonality.

The main difference, one might suppose, is that, though we eat meat, we humans treat animals- and the irony is leaping off the page for me here- ‘humanely’.  Yet we’ve all seen these documentaries wherein terrible things are filmed covertly in some, arguably many, rogue slaughterhouses and you can’t even look at it.  I would like to concede, however, for the sake of the argument and certainly hoping it’s true, that in most slaughterhouses deaths happen ‘humanely’―and by that let’s presuppose an almost instantaneous killing with some high-power bullet or macabre machinery. 

And, having ceded that, I still would rather be the monkey than the cow.

That monkey was living the only life it knew -free as a monkey in a tree- and then was suddenly murdered and deprived of the rest of its life to sate the horrible engine of violence-hunger that the chimpanzees had.  But only two minutes of its life were wrecked by the chimps.  The cow was also living the only life it knew―-horribly restricted, crowded and subject to all manner of psychological, chemical, and physical rape in the name of fattening cows and profits.  It’s entire life.  We did that.  The chimps did no such thing to the monkey.  The monkey got two minutes of terror.  And it was over.  But the manner in which the cows are deprived of the rest of their lives is different. When the cows are herded into a slaughterhouse, after leading their entire shit life, the cows know what’s happening and you can see it in their wild eyes.  Their terror lasts much longer than two minutes before the blood gutters of the slaughterhouse stop running red for the day.   

Slow it down here, Kev.  Enough with the monkey and chimp stuff.  And the poor cows.  You’re freaking me out.

OK.  And I buried the lead anyway:  Recently I’ve been squashing the occasional ant on my kitchen counter.  Just a quick instinctive killing when I see them.  And here’s the thing, I can always see the moment they realize that the hammer of oblivion is falling:  they begin to run.  And here’s what freaked me out:  I can see that they are, well . . . frightened.  Right before I grab them with a napkin or squash them with something, they get scared and make desperate runs for it, trying to escape.          

I wonder what they’re thinking when they are scared and running?  There must be something going on in there, right?  Something!  And that something, that sentient little something, has to be on the spectrum of ethical consideration.  Am I murdering these poor little guys?  I feel bad enough knowing that I’m scaring them! 

I don’t know how to end this. 

I guess I’ll wrap it up with two things:  Granted, there is a lot of road between mama elephant and the ant.  But I’ll bet we get there.  We’d have to.  If not, then who are we calling animals?  And secondly, try not to think of that horrible chimpanzee attack every time you pick up a neat package of cellophane-wrapped meat at the supermarket . . . and realize that what we are doing is worse.