I was up again before the sun — though “up” implies I ever really went down. I spent most of the night horizontal, watching the clock do its slow work. These night shift hours are a particular kind of misery that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived them. Your body loses the thread entirely. It doesn’t know whether it’s supposed to be at a workbench or in a bed, whether the darkness outside means go or rest. I’ll need a nap later today just to function, which will of course make tonight worse. Round and round it goes.
But I have a job. That’s not nothing. Every month brings fresh numbers — unemployment climbing, the dollar sliding, the housing market somewhere at the bottom of a hole looking up. We’re borrowing from China to fund a war, the gas prices are being yanked up and down like a yo-yo by people who don’t lose sleep over it, and the interest rates have been cut so low that anyone on a fixed income trying to live off their savings is quietly being eaten alive. Strong economy, though. Very strong, according to the people in charge — the same people who have their oil money and exit packages already waiting and will never spend a single night wondering how the bills get paid.
I’ll tell you what I’d like. I’d like to see both of them pull a twelve-hour night shift for a month. Better yet, hand them a uniform and a rifle and put them on the streets of Baghdad after dark. Let them explain the strategy from that angle.
And then there’s the election coming. I look at the choices laid out before us and I’m not sure whether to laugh or lie back down. We’ve got the Manchurian Candidate, a young senator who seems to have outsourced his theology to Reverend Wright, and Hillary Dillary — who, I’ll give her credit, has fought hard, but right now looks like a shoo-in to lose the thing she’s spent her whole career waiting for. You just know she’s furious. This was supposed to be her year. Barack Obama could have waited — he’s young enough that the moment would have come around again. Now he’s got the Clinton machine watching him with long memories and longer patience. That’s a weight to carry.
It being Good Friday yesterday, I found myself thinking about another man whose politics got him killed. The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem thought he’d come to run the Romans out of town — a liberator, a general, a solution to an occupation. When it became clear he hadn’t come to fight that particular battle, they turned on him. Funny thing is, he knew exactly what he was doing. The plan was just bigger than anyone around him could see at the time.
Politics hasn’t changed much.
My mind drifted further, the way it does in the small hours, to forty or fifty years out. What does the world look like then? I’ll be honest — I’m glad I’m fifty-seven. Not because I feel fifty-seven; most mornings the arthritis has a few words to say about that. But I think my generation may have lived through the best years this world is going to offer for a long while, and I hope with everything in me that I’m wrong about that.
What worries me most isn’t the things everyone argues about. It’s water.
We had a drought here in the South last year that should have frightened people more than it did. We’ve been treating fresh water like it’ll always be there — wasting it, fouling it, assuming nature will quietly clean up whatever mess we leave behind. I see it every night at work, the sheer volume of water my industry burns through and dirties without a second thought, and it appalls me. Young people need to understand this clearly: in fifty years, clean fresh water is going to be worth more than gold. Not as a metaphor. As a fact.
Fuel is just mathematics. More people means more demand. China, India, Vietnam — enormous populations building and manufacturing and moving, and right now doing it with very little concern for what gets poured into the air and water in the process. Have you seen photographs of the Ganges lately? Or the smog hanging over Chinese cities like a permanent bruise? I wouldn’t want to be running a marathon there this summer without a personal oxygen supply. The problems building up in the atmosphere and watersheds of those countries aren’t going to stay in those countries. There are no borders on air.
I’ll leave Tibet alone, except to say I genuinely don’t understand why you’d want to kill monks. It seems like a lot of effort to solve a problem that didn’t exist.
Anyway. That’s enough rambling for one early morning.
I keep saying I’ll stay in better touch, write more, be more present — and then life does what life does and the hours disappear into the work of keeping things together. I’m trying to simplify. Went through a pile of belongings yesterday, and there’s more to go. I found forty-seven shirts in my closet. Forty-seven. I’m fairly certain I’ll go to my grave without wearing at least a third of them again. I’m half-tempted to go the Simon Cowell route — just pick a color, buy ten of the same thing, and never make that decision again.
There’s something clarifying about letting go of things you’ve been hauling around out of habit. I recommend it. Especially at three in the morning, when clarity is hard to come by and everything feels heavier than it should.
Writing for Sanity's Sake 