fuu-ture shock

The dawn blog is still slumbering, though it continues to register my tweets and "day-blog" posts (including this one) in its right margin, A glance at WordPress's so-called "support forums" shows I'm not alone, others have also mysteriously misplaced their "publish" option. I'll leave the geeks to their business, then. Fueled by sugar and starch and carbonation I'm sure they'll have us up and running over there again before you can say "gadget and widget."


So, here we are again this morning: sitting out back under the re-purposed port awning, birds in full voice all around, Old Sol peeking past the neighbors' gable, new possibilities pleading for recognition. After the rain and gloom of yesterday, this clear and magnificent dawn is especially reassuring.


Yesterday was stormy, so I didn't get to accept my student's invitation to attend the Laotian New Year festivities as his escorted guest. Rain check, please!


I did get to drive the Daughter Taxi, though, from Laser Quest to Love Circle to home to Love Circle... I really need to get that meter installed, I'm losing a lot of income running a free service. My wife insists this goes with the parental job description. I don't recall being quite so dependently mobile as a pre-driving teen, but then there's a lot I don't recall.

Didn't even get to enjoy many snatches of the Yanks-Angels game, after an inning or so the local weather team monopolized the airwaves with frightful satellite-tracking images and warnings that my responsible spouse took to heart. I'm a fatalist about weather, though about little else. Just don't ask me to duck and cover in the hallway, I'd rather be whisked to Oz.

I did find a few moments to spend with Bill McKibben's Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, which was officially released on Earth Day and just arrived in the mail. That's not a typo, the stuttering vowel signals that this isn't our grandparents' planet and it's not their "future" (or our grandchildrens') either. It's ours. What will we do with it today?

He's such a good writer, bearing such a sober message: the future is now.

So how did it happen that the threat to our fairly far-off descendants, which required that we heed an alarm and adopt precautionary principles and begin to take measured action lest we have a crisis for future generations, et cetera-- how did that suddenly turn into the Arctic melting away, the tropics expanding, the ocean turning acid? How did time dilate, and "100 or 200 years from now" become yesterday?

Good question. The good news is, he thinks we do have a future. A fuu-ture. I'm eager to talk about it in "Future of Life" in the Fall, and on the radio soon too. Stay tuned for programming details.