I Wanna Be Sedated

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[Lake Norman, SC]

I WANNA BE SEDATED

     So you go to the doctor because you have a nasty cold that you just can’t shake and she gives you a prescription for antibiotics and you take them for ten days and your cold goes away and you’re happy. Unfortunately, for your neighbors who share the same drinking water sources and waste water treatment plant (WWTP), your body didn’t absorb the entirety of that prescription and some of it just passed through your system and into the toilet so you flush, and off it goes to the WWTP where they are in the business of cleaning and clarifying and “slurry-ing” and reducing the waste to sludge and sending a purified water back to your tap. Or maybe you took your birth control pill again today, but not all of that stays with you so the WWTP gets the extra estrogen or progesterone which it also can’t process — the same way our bodies can’t process it all — and punts the leftover mess to the river, and since the earth has to clean Her own water, that doesn’t bode too well for the ground or surface water. Pharmaceuticals are not something the earth is used to absorbing, so, unsure of what to do, She just lets it pass. Generally, She can handle such things unless her cycle’s disrupted, or overloaded, or incapacitated, and this probably qualifies for all three.

Get your chill on here…

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From a Climate Change Christmas to a Hi-Tech New Year

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[photo by Arianna Rich]

“Roughly one-eight of the carbon in your flesh, hair and bones recently emerged from smokestacks and tailpipes. We are not only a source of air pollution — we are pollution, and our waste fumes will henceforth be woven into the bodies of our descendants, too.
“Tales of a Warmer Planet” by Curt Stager
Sunday New York Times Review

From a Climate Change Christmas to a Hi-Tech New Year

     It’s true, right? As far as I can tell, for most of us it was the strangest Christmas on record, the un-Christmas as I’ve taken to calling it. Here in Central Pennsylvania, the fog on Christmas morning was so thick you could barely see the farm fields surrounding us. Fog forms when condensed water droplets squeeze together as a result of air expansion. At some point — the dew point, actually — the air can’t hold all this water vapor and it condenses into liquid, forming fog. Apparently, the three days of on and off rain we had leading up to Christmas was just too much for the air and soil to handle. Driving across bucolic Central PA farmland with visibility limited to a couple hundred feet in any direction was like driving on the moon. The air was so dense and wet with dew that you could wash your hands just by holding them out the window.   Read more here…

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An EarthRespect Happy Holidays!

Best use of beach plastic that I’ve seen.

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From the Darkness Comes the Light

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[photo courtesy of Lucille Famulary]

From the Darkness Comes the Light

The winter solstice, that time when the earth is plunged into darkness and its inhabitants pray for the return of the light.  The internet is awash in backstories: the Bible (at least 13 verses); Gaming (World of Warcraft); self-help books; transformational coaching blogs; memoirs; music (“Jerusalem” by Matisyahu); and the Mayans (astronomy), the last of which is my personal fav because the Mayans studiously charted the courses of the stars and gave us the enigmatic, mathematically precise Mayan calendar.  Thereafter, they drew the equally profound, yet obvious conclusion that from the darkness comes the light because, well, sunrise and all. So to all these adaptations, let me add my own version of this oft used profundity. From the darkness comes “The Quality of Light.”

To read an excerpt from The Quality of Light, go here…

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Neil Gaiman Triptych

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Anansi Boys/The Ocean at the End of the Lane/Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman is crazy. Neil Gaiman is deep. Neil Gaiman lives in bizarro world. Neil Gaiman is ridiculously English in his storytelling. Neil Gaiman may be an extraterrestrial. Neil Gaiman is one of the most gifted, prophetic, and ingenious storytellers alive today and I wish we were besties. I feel like I came late to the game and am trying to make up for lost time so I read three NG books in quick succession. Each had at least one foot if not an entire body wedged into the paranormal, making you believe that Gaiman may have witnessed some of this stuff first hand.

Anansi Boys: My first NG novel was Anansi Boys, a story about two brothers, only one of which knows he’s the son of a god…

Read more of the review here…

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Just a Couple of Old People Holding Hands

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“Just a Couple of Old People Holding Hands”:
A Memoir of a Marriage in Alzheimer’s World

By Carl R. Smith, Jr.
Edited by William C. Smith

Post Five – “old fashioned things like marriage vows and duty”

“Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”

~ “The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage,”
Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979).

       Carl Smith and Mary Helen Lawson were married in 1981 at Christ Church Cathedral, the massive Episcopal church in downtown Indianapolis. It was the Lawson family church, where Mary Helen’s first husband served many years as priest, where her children attended Sunday school and her sons sang in the choir, and where daughter Ruth set out on her own career in the Episcopal ministry.

Carl was raised in the Disciples of Christ church, and became a Presbyterian early in his ministry. However, I’m sure the Episcopal wedding vows came as easily to him as to Mary Helen — including the part about loving, comforting and honoring their spouse “in sickness and in health.”    Read more here…

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Flutes and Tomatoes

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Flutes and Tomatoes – A Memoir With Poems

Originally posted on bookscover2cover

“I became sensitive to every vibration in the air, to every nuance of the changing light. It would be late afternoon. It was then that the snake of emptiness would tighten around my throat. It was hard to breathe. I didn’t know if I could make it to the next day. There was a bottle of red wine on the chair. I grabbed and gulped it and enjoyed the warm swish of the liquid down my throat.” Wade Stevenson, Flutes and Tomatoes, A Memoir With Poems

                                                                 Read the review here…

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The Climate It Is a-Changin’

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The Climate It Is a-Changin’

     Over 150 world leaders gathered in Paris on Monday in the city of love, and also the location of one of the world’s worst terror attacks since 911, to talk about the weather, or more accurately, how we can put the brakes on the runaway train ride to hell that will be our life on earth if we do not deal with our fossil fuel addiction. I found Obama’s remarks in the last few days particularly poignant, especially his challenge to those who would commit acts of terror, to show them what nations can do when they work together. Just the thought of such unprecedented levels of cooperation is thrilling, and the world will be better for it. Of course, it’s not all Kumbaya and Obama still has to fight the good fight at home with Congress, but right is stronger than might, Mr. President, so don’t let the naysayers or Big Coal push you around. They’re just scared because they’ll have to reinvent themselves and the lot of them are resistant to change.

Here’s a few reasons to want to fix the problem from the WHO’s top ten facts about climate change:   Change welcome here…

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We’re S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G

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We’re Shopping

When I was a kid, Black Friday was almost a holiday onto itself. My Italian, South Philadelphia-raised mother relocated to Jersey when she got married, but approximately once a season, she managed to take us kids to Philadelphia to shop even though she didn’t have a driver’s license. Growing up in Philly, driving was not a necessity. She got to work from her home in South Philadelphia to her job on Walnut Street in Center City via Trolley. For our seasonal shopping trip, my sister and I were not so lucky. We took the Greyhound bus and to this day I get nauseous thinking about it. Oh, but the end result was the reward!   No-shop here…

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An Attitude of Gratitude

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An Attitude of Gratitude

If a certain Congressman who happens to be Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology as well as a climate change denier gets his way, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be turning over all the emails it reviewed in a climate change study that resulted in a published paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Science (June 2015).

The research studied global warming trends by reviewing data sets. The NOAA scientists concluded that the earth’s surface temperature has increased slightly, and that warming trends over the last couple decades were actually quite a bit higher than originally thought, a study that global warming naysayers are not so happy about. So the subpoenas are flying, and despite mountains of documents already supplied by NOAA in response to the requests, Congress wants more, including all the scientists’ emails discussing the subject. To date, NOAA has said read my lips, no more info, but the tug of war is not over and it’s anybody’s guess where it will end.  Chill out here…

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