Today the heat index in Alexandria, VA went up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the "Real Feel" as I sit at my desk typing these words.
Yesterday my dad had a third operation on his heart. It was a minor procedure. But a heart is like a battery, you really need one that works. On Monday, I learned that the cancer growing in my godmother, my mother's sister, has spread to her lungs. My husband will receive the results tomorrow, we hope, of a test to determine whether or not he can donate stem cells for his brother who has leukemia. My father-in-law is still paralyzed and unable to speak (the result of a stroke) and now living in a home full of advanced dementia patients because he requires full-time support to sit up or move. Both of my kids are away at summer camp. And I hear there's some stuff happening in the news.
Problem solving
I received an email this morning from Charles Schwab. I opened the email because of it’s header: "Extreme Weather and Your Portfolio." The email directed me to an article with advice for how to profitably invest in municipal bonds given that storm intensity/economic damage is increasing and expected to get worse but not all cities will be equally affected. So here, the article concluded, are some tips for choosing which cities are safest to invest in, as well as a strategy for safely investing (short-term only) in doomed cities. (Unstated but assumed is our obvious shared and ultimate objective: money get bigger.)
But let's leave Charles Schwab for a minute and go to another thing. I also read recently that people working in the U.S. food industry are exquisitely sad, that this too has reached crisis level, with one group particularly affected being those working at abattoirs (one 'b' and two 't's). People who spend their lives working at factory farms and in some way adjacent to killing animals are pretty depressed, statistically, as a group. Likely there are also some individuals who love it and are very satisfied with their lives, I’m not trying to generalize individual experience. Also statistically bummed as a group: the people who work in giant factories making instruments of death/what we are sold as "food."
The article describes ways we, as a culture, can rise to this challenge. An overview of what’s being done, or is needed, to support the humans who daily go to a slaughterhouse or windowless box and kill/slowly kill so that we can make a lot of food waste. (I'm sorry, it did not talk about food waste or about the health of the modern American diet, that's just my own bad attitude.) The article went deep on the need for monies for therapy. Access to meds. Types of support groups.
I'm just kind of staring at the article, mouth open, as I imagine one of these therapy sessions:
Dr. Herman: So how are you feeling today?
Foodguy: It's been a pretty rough week. I spent most of my waking time in a windowless box that stinks of mammalian fear and death where I killed a bunch of sentient beings who've been living in squalor for their entire lives. Then I went home and ate one of them and fed them to my children.
Dr. H: So how does that make you feel?
(very long pause) (doctor hands man a “wheel of emotions”)
Man: I guess I feel depressed and guilty and angry and stuck.
Dr. H: And where do you feel that in your body?
I know we all believe that factory farming is a necessary evil of 8 billion people or just a great way to get rich. But I don't think therapy is the best we can do. Just like I don't think figuring out which muni bonds get you a marginally better return over the next decade is REALLY the place that informed and resourced people should be pointing our attention at the moment.
House hunting
This morning, I was reading a real estate listing for a house that's on my regular walk loop (did I mention both my kids are at camp), a new build replacing a teardown. Five thousand square feet, 6 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms, 2.7 million bucks. The house backs up to a local nature area and at the bottom of the listing were four close-up photos of different brightly colored birds, including -- and this is true -- a photo of a dazed woodpecker in the glove of, presumably, a builder. Look!! A newly homeless woodpecker that just flew unwittingly into one of the windows! Nature!!!!!
I'm sure they'll be a lovely family. I’m just loosely proposing that the person who's choosing to pay for the energy to air condition 7 bathrooms in this hellish heat doesn't give a rat's ass (no offense, rat) about nature.
I suppose the birds in the listing are not presented as evidence of proximity to a diverse array of interwoven lifeforms of which one feels a connected thread, or even as expensive living chits in an I Spy game you play at the kitchen table, but instead a proxy to show that, in addition to the area’s location, proximate to power, here one still maintains comfortable and safe distance from human-created noise and ooze, and it comes with a soothing soundtrack.
What are we waiting for?
A question occurred to me, as they often do, while driving my non-electric vehicle. In a neighborhood where houses are frequently topping a million bucks, why aren't there any solar panels?? Why hasn't anybody put any solar panels on a roof? Even if you're just a prepper type or a proponent of extreme freedom? It's not even a losing financial proposition anymore.
We haven't, at my house. We did get a heat pump when our A/C breathed it’s last. And we will replace the gas stove next because my new hi-tech thermostat alerts me every time we cook that our indoor air is suddenly filled with VOCs. Now I know you’re thinking that VOCs are just a lie the government tells us for control. But I also know that when you burn things, stuff happens (because I recently watched The Martian). You can't see the resulting invisible chemicals, but The Martian used them to grow potatoes and (spoiler) get the heck off Mars. We use them to turn the Garden of Eden into The Sahara Desert.
I know usually I try to be cheery and hopeful. I know you have a lot on your plate. You have relatives and friends and children and they also have hearts and genes and prognoses. You probably watch news.
I like to share hope. And I like to feel hope. That reminds me of something Jane Goodall said that I DIDN'T agree with about hope (but later read again and decided to have some humility, maybe Jane Goodall has some good ideas after all). I won't share her words here because I'm not about dissing Jane Goodall. I will share some words from Vaclav Havel:
The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.
Note to self
Turn off the noise
Step away from your righteousness and loathing
in other words
your shame
Find the quiet inside yourself
and love something
so much
and in an outward direction
that it moves you
to do something
you haven’t done before
in hope
You have a gift for calling attention to the absurd — with humor and a touch of light.
Thank you Jennifer for bringing your honest and open self to the page/internet.
P.S. I’m kinda glad AI fell flat on its face with birds and hammers. 🤭
Solid. Tears may or may not have welled. Poem is fantastic. Loved it.