Oh no. Not one of these.
Whose year?
“Not mine,” you say, and might be wrong because no life is like another, yet all are one— first breath in and last breath out. The deer in the garden, the cat on the sill, souls in the night, and the whip-poor-will. Try the breath meditation ten minutes before midnight. Leave Times Square and all those human stares begging for a stupid ball to usher in another year of capitalist nightmares. Open your eyes and I’ll open mine, let’s breathe in and breathe out. What we love is all that matters, and I can hope we relearn how to love the living things outside of Dunkin’ Donuts®—enough to push the Dunkin’ Donuts® toward the catchings of the whip-poor-will. Less coffee. Less trinkets. Less want, less expectation, Less me, less you. More life.
Whatever that means.
2021 ends tonight. Gaia gave us another year to think about everything that matters. Thank you Gaia.
I’ll recap the year with a song and a couple 2021 writings I feel have helped me to accept our quick-step to doom. I wish for the human race a non-fatal cold-cock to the floor, and recovery in a consciousness 11-15% less arrogant. I don’t know how to dream this alone. Can we forgo the second cup of coffee this morning? Maybe drink an extra glass of water and pick two less prosciutto roll-ups off the party tray? And instead of those café au laits at DD for that necessary jolt to keep us awake past midnight, perhaps a slew of afternoon cat naps making more pleasant daydreams that by definition can never become nightmares?
It might be just enough effort on our part to satisfy some anonymous snake on a rock, or foraging black bear, or migrated bird picking out her choice worm. Maybe over time, with many, many more New Years Eve naps, the Chinook salmon will increase their number, and not for any benefit to the goofy killer-capitalists wading in rubber thigh-high boots, but from the natural, unhumanated recurrence of salmon swimming through life without coffee beans picked by salmon brothers and sisters 10,000 miles away. Last night I read that not too long ago a man could cross the backs of horny salmon to reach the other side of the Klamath River in Oregon. One couldn’t see water for all the salmon rushing to make new life and forgoing their own in the process.
What a dream! A species that matures to the highest love attainable without microplastics. I will think about salmon this afternoon, while lying on the couch, breathing in and breathing out, a few hours before the party.
More time together please!
Ron
Here is a song I wrote in January: Armageddon Songs Shouldn't Rhyme
A Gas Story from February:
For the past two weeks I have been losing sleep and ramping up my anxiety because our furnace is malfunctioning. They call it “short cycling” in the business. Which means it goes through the motions of starting up, makes all the right sounds, even turns the blower on to circulate air throughout the house. But it’s cold air, because the gas failed to ignite. After a couple minutes, a safety sensor shuts down the furnace and starts it up again five minutes later. It will repeat the process a few more times, and if ignition continues to fail, the furnace will shut down completely until it is manually manipulated.
Which is what I do in the middle of the night, when I wake up with a chill. I have the flashlight and screwdriver set by the bed. The first time this happened I took off the hose that drains the condensate and flushed out the wet dust bunnies and cat-human hair that tends to clump and block the flow. This seemed to be the fix, for the rest of the day anyway, until 3:00 a.m. the next morning when I woke up with the chills again. This time I turned the thermostat way down low, switched off the power, unscrewed the cover doors, and stood by the furnace for five minutes praying to the god of houses and heat to wake up and stoke the fire. Then I replaced the doors, switched on the electricity, and upped the dial on the thermostat. Wonderful warm air blowing out the vents. Then back to restless sleep to wait for it to happen again.
It will work fine throughout the day, with or without my anxiety, until bedtime. This is the routine. It’s a long story, but there’s a reason I won’t call the technicians. They gave me the runaround this same month two years ago, trouble-shooting, changing switches, cleaning sensors, charging a couple hundred bucks, and saying all looked fine. Until the middle of the night when it shut down again. And again. I don’t call them anymore, especially with coronavirus on the prowl. Don’t need professionals to tell me I have a fickle furnace. Don’t need COVID and a loss of a couple hundred bucks to not fix a problem.
I don’t think we need gas either, but that’s just because I’m crazy to think so. All this anxiety over a gas furnace. My ancestors survived without one. Some were quite able to maintain a sense of humor while chattering enamel off teeth on February mornings. The successful ones managed to eat and make babies because here I am. In 1851, my 3X Great Grandpa, William the Farmer, had a house with five people, and a woodburning stove and fireplace to heat it. And they all lived! Several hundred years before William, Throops of England and Rizzos of Italy (lines of patronym) had stone fireplaces. Five thousand years ago, a community fire in the clan circle kept the stories coming, even if the heat wasn’t so efficient. Forty thousand years before that, a fire got lit in the forest any night folks had to cook their kill and/or not freeze to death.
Of course we don’t have the wood to heat our enormous indoor spaces, cars, airplanes, space rockets, and favorite Chinese take-out franchises. Even if wood was rapidly renewable, it is so much less efficient than burning coal, gas, and oil. And the efficient methods (wind, solar, geothermal) burn countless tons of fossil fuels in their creation, and re-creation (not to mention disasters in mining and disposal of waste). Our problem is how we live, why we live this way, and who says it must be so. All popular methods and measures for living in the modern age are raising global temperatures. So much chatter about sustainability, so many important people paying lip service to the doom of global warming, yet all are mute on what needs to be said.
And that is this:
We must be forced, not persuaded, to cut off nine parts of our carbon footprint. Within a year, not twenty. Yes the economy must be crippled. Yes, democracy must die. Majority rule will never vote to reduce fossil fuel use to pre-industrial levels, which needs to happen now to retard the effects of the sixth extinction. Who do you know who would voluntarily load up his or her Corolla® with nearly everything and drive it into a pit, just to save a million-billion species (and perhaps its own) from extinction? We can’t even stop shopping at dollar stores run by the Sino-American plastic nonsense cartel. Having a birthday party? Dollar General® has an all year sale on streamer rolls made in a China factory village, loaded onto trucks, then trains, then ships and sent round the world to be unloaded onto trains, then trucks and then shelves at Dollar General®. All for one dollar! The streamers could have been made with old paper, some crayons, love and a wee bit of talent, but Bill Gates needs to thrive for our great grandchildren to afford real estate at the north pole and gobble up any parrot or porcupine who felt the need to move there too.
Gaia is begging us for our own sake (and she never begs), to get with the program (followed by the rest of life), and act immediately. She gave us coronavirus to kick-start the effort. It is estimated that this year global CO2 emissions were reduced by 7%. Wow! We survived! And with our smartphones in tact. And also our cars, bowling alleys, jet airplanes, pork spareribs, satellite launches, Seattle brunches… All we had to do was let a virus turn down our knobs a little bit. Nothing really changed. An extra valve opened for the boredom to flow in, that’s all. No longer could we eat out every night just because we felt like it (and were overpaid enough to afford to). Can you imagine the reduction in CO2 if plane travel was ended? There weren’t any planes in 1902, but there was Mark Twain, and trains (say that three times fast). How about eradicating the factory manufacture of place mats, decorative sconces, coffee mugs, ChapStick®? What if we outlawed everything we don’t need? I’ve read that food-related CO2 emissions would be reduced by 60% if the world became vegetarian by 2050. Also 68% of the world’s arable land would be freed up for agriculture. Divorce that animal husbandry! Vegetarian means you still get to eat cheese, which is awesome. Eggs too! What if the meaning of “to be human” metamorphosed from being “insatiable feeder of earth” to “conservator of life”. What if we didn’t have a choice, and either obliged or had our arms cut off and composted in fields?
Enter the Philosopher/Warrior King and Queen in possession of great climate wisdom. (Listen to Lou Reed to imagine the arms spread over lentil fields).
This week the good news is out that coronavirus cases in the U.S. are below 100,000 a day for the first time since November. Great, we can lick this thing on two fronts—physical distancing wearing masks, and a robust vaccine rollout. So, what does the Governor of Montana do? Well, he ends the mask mandate of course. “Cases are low boys. Hell yeah, it’s about time we stop lookin’ like sissy male nurses in our pick ups.”
The Governor of New York won’t be out-stupided by his backward colleague out west. He decides to increase customer capacity at restaurants on Valentine’s Day, the perfect time to express your love and the Governor’s newly discovered penchant for reaping death, like he did to the old and infirm in nursing homes.
All this bipartisan political short-sightedness over coronavirus ensures that, as it pertains to the environment, the planet is doomed by democracy implementing status quo bureaucracy. I think we understand the problem, and cognitive dissonance forces us to push it out the door. If we can’t (won’t) collectively adjust to save our neighbor’s skin, then forget about preserving the continuity of oak trees and grandchildren. Powerful politicians and world leaders aren’t basing decisions on how they will effect junior’s asthma, let alone the next seven generations. They set the platforms and parameters of systems that the masses follow blindly, impotent to implement drastic change collectively. People are allowed to pick a side, although no side plans to upset dysfunctional homeostasis wrought by infectious greed. The banality of evil is not reserved solely to enormously influential ideaologue/demagogues controlling bureaucracies of the past. Modern democracy shall continue to ignore the dire warnings of science to satiate the wants of the very few while maintaining the normalities for everyone else. Even these dysfunctional, dystopic normalities we suffer day after day.
No one is innocent. No saints of the environment will be anointed. No Green New Deal can be successful wherever dried cereals are shipped over state lines to populations who have never experienced a world without General Mills, Inc®. There might be a Green New Deal for more jobs, but more jobs means more carbon, and leftover inhabitants of Miami floating in Hard Rock Stadium, post game. We need less jobs, not more. Less pets, less cheese, less wine, less status to dine. And we’re not gonna get that good news under the present political and economic systems. We need an Octavian or Octavia philosopher emperor to strip us of all rights while doing his or her best to preserve the dignities.
This year, without our permission, a pesky, deadly virus dropped carbon emissions by 7%. You see, earth is giving back to earth by forcing human beings to slow down, scale back, and live with it. I cannot fix my furnace. There are moments during its malfunctioning that I don’t care if it ever gets fixed. I just want to acquire a little land and build an insulated hut, heat it with wood, and gather some books to read. My wife and I live in too much house for two people. We both work from home this February, and nine-tenths of the heated space remains unused all the time. Big furnace heating most of a house for no one. Complication churns the ridiculous. We know we must cut back tremendously. But look left and right, look ahead and behind. Nobody else seems to sense the inevitable. The tribe isn’t ready to give up the trinkets. There’s got to be a chief among us to take them from us. But how? And when? Next year is not soon enough.
I’m ready to relinquish false liberties to stabilize a climate. I’ll shut my mouth and turn the compost. I’ll sleep in the corner on a hot stone, and boil lake water before drinking. Maybe next round, Gaia will send us an emperor of climate wisdom, rather than a more deadly pathogen. Probably not. After coronavirus no longer posed a shutdown threat, everyone turned up the heat to party like it’s the end of the world.
I know it’s not much, but it is all I intend to do. I will keep a 100 mile radius awareness often but not always, avoiding purchase of any non-food product manufactured more than 100 miles away (I’ll try the same with food too when just mildly inconvenient). While waiting for the emperor, I’ll continue to hang my laundry out to dry when the temperature outside is above 50°F, drop my meat consumption by 75% and work toward a permanent vegetarianism (I don’t even know what that means).
This is more effort made than anyone else in my family has promised, and I’m sure many friends and acquaintances too. And I’ve thought enough about the problem to write about it, which means I probably worry about environmental catastrophe more often than my neighbors. And yet this is all I got to sacrifice, which is practically nothing plus a malfunctioning furnace I don’t need because I never had to live so large in a brief lifetime.
That’s my reality as an individual confronting the carbon crisis. And we should just forget about the collective power of democracy stepping up to solve big problems. There are three Dunkin’ Donuts drive-throughs in my little town, and some of the best people I know would make a secret deal with the devil to poison my groats if he would keep the wheels of Coolatta® machinery turning. If Gaia declares I’m not worthy to walk her back skin, as pitiful as my carbon footprint reduction is, one can imagine the dreadful plan she has for the rest of us put together.
In the meantime, while we wait for her next move, I’ll keep a record to leave to my descendants proving that fools never stop fooling themselves. Good clown stories will help fuel the clan fires of the future.
Damn! The furnace shut off again.
A strategy to unguilt the species written back in April before I learned how to breath:
I have so much to complain about at any given moment. Stop by and test me. “Ron, what time is it?” And I’ll tell you that it’s 100 seconds to midnight because the scientists tell me that. Many of them are actually paid to be consummate messengers of portents. Some get a hundred thousand a year and awards ceremonies. Some get book publishing deals with print runs of 5,000 copies to be distributed by cargo ships on oceans gradually becoming lemon water. Some fly to Melbourne to a conference with a headline speaker who explains, entertainingly, how air travel gives us all Sasquatch carbon footprints. He takes a sip from his plastic water bottle, and a room full of scientists applaud.
Just type “global warming news” on your hand held encyclopedia of all things human, and see that it’s not me being the only bummer in you life. They’re everywhere. Step outside and get bombarded by what you already know, but gracefully deny, just like the climate scientists who get grants to fly in planes to the Antarctic to count dead penguins and sample surface ice for microplastics. Back at camp are 50 cases of bottled water, tapped from the mountain springs of Maine.
At present the earth’s atmosphere has as much carbon as 3.6 million years ago. At that time the Miami Dolphins were actually dolphins swimming up Ocean Drive to Bluefish school. Trees stood in Antarctica, and Greenland was a good name for solid ground with lots of vegetation. Because of the plenitudes of scientific research and media’s lust for bad news, we know exactly what’s coming. But enough already. Stop paying these vanities to take and retake ice core samples just to give graduate students something to do. We get it. We deny it, but we get it. Just stay home! No more embellishment necessary. The assistant professor should know better than to apply for a grant to fly a team around the world to test and retest what has already been proven. It’s not an honor to release more carbon in order to publish another paper about releasing more carbon. There must be sustainable ways to remain a careerist. For instance, I’m writing and publishing this polemic from a table in my house. It’s easy. I don’t need anymore proof of impending climate catastrophe. I can hear it in the wind, and modern science predicts it too. Climate professors should know better. Change direction. Experiment more on potential solutions. We must take science into our home laboratories. There has been enough carbon counting by hypocrites. We need more natural philosophers, not Bill Nyes flying Airbus® first class all over the earth, landing in smog choked cities to lecture about wind and solar power. The time is now for more pre-industrial scientists. Dedicated people who reject modern living standards to teach and lead by example while experimenting with methods of carbon sequestration. Ghandis of the scientific method. Priests of the climate.
Of course their influence will be nil without the backing of a super power of benevolent all-powerful kings and queens (or their equivalent), which is very unlikely without a massive culling of humanity. But something must snap. The plutocracy must die off, quickly. A monumental shift in political expression is the only path we have to provide a human hand to roll the dice.
An immediate and intense regulation is the first step after we dissolve the fake democracies. How we get there is up to nature. Humans never had decision-making power, though, as nature’s imbeciles, they pretended too. Gaia will determine if our presence will be tolerated another century. Politicians and military industrial complexes do not morally love (nor mortally fear) the people enough to look after them. However, Gaia can flip reality very quickly with a well-timed caldera or continental shift pouring cities into seas. Even a teensy tiny microbe puts the fear of God into a non-believer. Humans are out of the loop. If I can’t persuade my family to let the pee water sit until it absolutely needs to be flushed, then no amount of people push will give us a sustainably correct bullet train to Omaha, especially while travelers still expect a Fruity Pebbles® breakfast in the club car.
Humans are the super catalyst to the sixth extinction. We get this whenever we stop to think about it. Our systems have locked humanity into a cycle of waste that is mind boggling. The enormity of the problem causes denial, and any one of us will drive to the drug store to purchase dental hygiene products because the periodontist recommended a plastic-based daily tooth care regimen to keep us chewing past 90. One trip to Walgreens® should fill a free-thinking American (an oxymoron) with hopeless despair. There is more pollution on those few shelves dedicated to mouth care than was generated by all industry in the kingdom of France during the spring of 756 CE.
And there is nothing that can be done about in time. Under the present system, to teach by example (in this case, a popular boycott of teeth cleaning products), it would take 2,000 years to persuade Proctor & Gamble® to dismantle perhaps, half of its Crest division. The next time you shop at your local supermarket or convenience store for oral care products, please note that there are about 250,000 of these cement boxes scattered across the United States. In my town (population 17,500) I counted 29 buildings, large and larger, where I can get my toothpaste and flossing accessories.
I could double up on baking soda and boycott oral hygiene products for the rest of my life. I could write about the process, paint the protest, tell my friends, and hope they tell their friends. I can feel righteous, and one up on my neighbor, while hastening inevitable gum rot and tooth loss. And yet not a single store will close its doors for lack of consumer interest in trendy toothpaste with activated charcoal.
But if a caldera erupted…
Now we’re talkin’. Unfortunately, though, with caveat of an even speedier extinction.
Now for some religious exercises…
Six years ago the periodontist diagnosed my bottom four front teeth to be just hanging on. They needed to get pulled and replaced with a partial or implants. I told him no way, out of the question. I’ve gone hairless without a toupee, and would go toothless too, since I was already married. He suggested a deep cleaning and a daily hygiene regimen to follow religiously if I wanted to keep my teeth another year. Yes please.
It’s been six years and I still have them, minus the two healthy wisdom teeth he pulled to make cleanings easier for him, (a story of malpractice for another day). I have followed his instructions at night, which is half the time, yet it’s been enough to persuade my gums to hold on.
The nightly regimen, in order:
Swish with mouthwash
Floss teeth
Brush teeth
Interdental brush
Swish with mouthwash
Pick and poke with rubber-headed gum stimulator while watching TV
I thank the flossing and interdental brush for my success. I also followed a vegan diet for two of the six years, and I’ve always cut back on meat consumption—one reason being that it makes much worse breath than broccoli. Although floss and wire brush are excellent tools used to maintain healthy gums and teeth, they are just two of the 3 billion factory made products that are poised to deliver extinction to 558 mammal species by 2100. Still, that doesn’t prevent the guilty conscience from overriding a logical assessment of the problem, and I often go to bed with a fresh, clean mouth, yet irrationally feeling that I am solely responsible for the deaths of White Rhinos on African grasslands.
And if it isn’t my teeth cleaning causing overwhelming guilt, then it’s my car, the cereal box, recycling bin, stuffed toy, candle holder, smartphone, exercise bike, guitar stand, bird feeder, cat food, computer chair, plastic everything which is plastic anything that can be dreamed up by greedy losers wanting more money.
Who isn’t guilty for the end of civilization?
There isn’t oneupmanship during the climate crisis. Certainly not among nations in the industrial wild west or east. People of Burundi, however, are off the hook. They can and should look down on Americans with high aloofness. Annual U.S. toothpaste proceeds (27 billion dollars) is 9 times Burundi’s national wealth (GDP of 3 billion). I know that if I was a Burundian, I’d merrily trade economies to add 20 years to my families’ life expectancy. So although poorer nations can remain aloof and guilt-free, it’s not because they want to be. Burundi would crap on the earth too if Walgreens® stocked shelves there.
It’s just hypocritical posturing to point a disapproving finger at your neighbor. If it’s teeth-cleaning products guilting me, then it’s dish scrubbies guilting you. And if we both went cold turkey, it wouldn’t stop neighbor Joe, with a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint, from buying a thousand of each to hoard up for the next pandemic. Yes, Joe’s a slob. But so am I. Scale of slob doesn’t matter in the climate crisis.
My doctor prescribed teeth cleaning products with built-in obsolescence. The wire of the interdental brush he recommended bent and broke after the third use. Likewise the packaging and unpackaging of floss containers before floss ever reaches my gums, has me begging Gaia for a super volcano to give the dolphins a fair go at evolutionary improvement. With us out of the way, they might flop out of the water and grow opposable thumb-fins to write their pre-industrial histories on kelp paper. Maybe they’ll be satisfied with sunny days and good fishing, and opt to execute any James Watt dolphin that goes insane and tries to turn a profit.
In January 2020, my hygienist gave me three individually wrapped flossers (see first painting) to take home with me. It was like a gift from on high. I am using the last one now. That one inch of floss reused has kept the plaque at Tooth Decay Bay for four months. I just wash it after each use, like a tooth brush, and use it till it breaks.
No more plastic containers with 13 foot floss rolls tossed into the “recyclables” can each week. Hooray, I’ve lightened my bedtime guilt load! Though after a 100 days using the same flosser one begins to despair heavily over the state of humankind. Perhaps 3 billion earth citizens wouldn’t be as thrifty, and would let the capitalists sell them 100 count bags of flossers. Even if there were regularly programmed public service announcements decrying the sale of nonessential plastic (all plastic was nonessential when my grandfather first combed his hair), and multiple lesson plans used to teach the three R’s in elementary education, there would still be a billion ignoramuses left to sell flossers too. Two flosses a day adds up quickly. 730 billion flossers per year laying in parking lots and floating on ocean tides near you, and over 18 trillion laying around when your baby grandchild graduates from college.
Or, governments always have the option to legislate regulation to outlaw all nonessential plastic, which they do not do, and frankly cannot do, because what’s essential to you, ain’t to me, and vice-versa. You think sporks are nonessential. Of course they are! And so are cars. Marty says when plastic bags are outlawed, he’ll feel better about the environment. Good show Marty. I agree, But nuclear weapons are built of nonessential plastic components, and who on earth really thinks total annihilation is necessary? Sarah is convinced that flossers are essential and can also serve as a potent symbol of suffering and great joy to come.
And I have good news for Sarah…
I think they are too!
This is like Jesus good news. Like born again religious lingo. A devout jargon for the sixth extinction, with its iconic symbol: The Holy Flosser.
Christians used the cross to remind followers of Christ’s suffering. It kept true believers humble and species worthy, and made Popes rich and gluttonous slobs. Who could have thought in the beginning that it would warp into its opposite meaning, and function more or less as an adjunct of capitalism, individualistic greed, and universal laziness?
I want us to use this flosser to let go and freely allow what is to come. We need a hopeful symbol for the real future rather than a relic of the faithful past. Forge a bronze one, loop it through a chain link to wear around your neck (and use it twice a day). Touch it with a million “Hail Gaias” while waiting for the holy leveling that is to come. We must accept the new reality. Ancient paganism was earthy and down with the business of the natural world. Then the writing religions appeared and trumped the pagan’s pseudo science which could not refute the written word. The Industrial Revolution honed the predictions of modern science and invented machines and systems of our own doom. Let’s bear our modern cross and wear around our necks the flosser that was manufactured for you.
I’ll drill a hole in my plastic one, and wear it around my neck to forgive the sins of my species, one of a trillion left on a planet where life began 3.7 billion years ago. For 300,000 years we built fires to keep warm and cook fish. Things pretty much remained the same until James Watt boiled water to make disposable flossers to decimate all the tree frogs in Costa Rica.
I believe there is a path which will lead us back to Gaia, back to earth, sun and cosmos. How did some loving-kindness reform Judaism (Christianity) warp into this horrendous Moloch with its blind humanity army? A minority of greedy monotheists just garbaged up our paradise, didn’t they? Why did our ancestors allow it? How did we get locked into our own doom? Are daddy complexes this destructive on other planets too? It’s like Gaia threw up her big arms in 1800 and said, “Oh just screw it! I give up. These humans really suck. I’m so tired of their uptight false god(s) too. Worshiped like some big daddy when all he does is gamble and get drunk. And the plastic! And the wars and famine! Don’t even get me started with their poking their noses into my mass extinctions. Such arrogant ignorance from a useless species. Their cities smell like piss. And their offspring are incomprehensibly depressed while growing on the most beautiful planet in the universe. Oh I’ve had it! I’ll go play Mahjong with the ladies. When I’m ready, I’ll come back and make their ‘Biblical proportions’ look like tiny ant problems in the wake of the atmospheric monster I intend to let loose all over my backskin.”
And here we have arrived. The scientist priests tell us that Gaia has finished Mahjong. After tea she’s going to send Category 7 hurricanes to our next decade of summers. They’ll feel like 4 hour long tornadoes spinning in the same trailer park. After tea she’ll put on her slippers and melt an ice cap or two. We’ll board the Queen Mary from the 23rd floor of the Empire State building. A few crackers later, half the world’s species have become extinct. Our great great grandchildren finished decimating the Northern Alberta Clan and are eating the hairs off the heads of their vanquished enemies.
Finally Gaia sets her tea down and calls to one of the medium-sized asteroids in the Jupiter Belt to break away and lay waste to all life on earth besides the 50 species of cyanobacteria that never complained. Then she lays her head back to take a brief nap.
The end.
I’m gonna wear my flosser and live my life. Just like the Christians wore their crosses during the world wars and plastic revolution. Meanwhile, dear Poindexter prophets with a penchant for scientific study, go down into your basement laboratories and experiment with carbon sequestration. Don’t waste any more time with the futile disciplines. If you succeed with the development of the inedible hybrid crabapple that can suck in 50 times its mass in carbon, seek an audience with Gaia via the usual channels. She might back your plan. Then again she might let the neighbors nail you to a wooden flosser at the summit of Molar Mountain.
Either way I’ll keep murmuring my “Hail Gaias” and get better acquainted with the sun that graciously shines for us (until it decides to cook us).