Yesterday morning, it rained again in Iowa. All the puddles, all the standing water reservoirs on people’s lawns are refreshed and full. Being Sunday, the morning put a damper on religious services and many of the “day-off” activities that could use a break from June’s continuous rainfall.
By afternoon, the Sun broke through and the tone of the day shifted. In the mariner’s backyard, weeding the gardens is put off again – a thorough weeding hasn’t been performed since the end of May. The vegetable gardens are growing as if they received a miracle drug. Anyone who grows Zucchini knows how fast it balloons in size. This year, a gardener had best check the zucchini every few hours! The compost hasn’t been disturbed for a couple of weeks; there’s a fine set of cucumber plants growing.
This is the kind of day when one’s brain is slowed like a computer on a busy network. A lot has happened in just a few days: the Charleston murders, two unbelievable decisions by the Supreme Court about LGBT and the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s Eulogy at the funeral of Clementa Pinckney, the Netherlands required to reduce carbon emissions by 25% in 5 years, James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate’s Environmental Protection and Public Works Committee denying that global warming exists, and having the local family over for the mariner’s specially made pizza. The Wimbledon Grand Slam is in action, too. It’s a day just to let life happen.
To demonstrate the lack of focus on a day like today, the mariner and his son are exchanging emails about how thick the bark was on plant life during the Carboniferous Period (began 350 million years ago and lasted for 68 million years). This is the period from which we mine coal today. The subject draws the mariner’s mind back to the earliest Hominids (the split from the ape family that occurred 8 million years ago). Humans and their ancestral Homo family have been around for a very short time. How much longer will the Holocene Period (right now) and its Hominid family last?
These subjects seem irrelevant and too erudite to be worth conversation or even casual thought. What’s more important is our financial status, our zucchini, and fixing that stuck basement door; the church’s pancake breakfast is a few days away. That’s probably as it should be. There is a lot of living to be done today – too much to worry about events that did not and will not occur in our lifetime. Yet, these seemingly unimportant subjects are emerging in the news, the strategies of corporations, and how the US government and every other government are operated.
The mind drifts to computerization, robots, and the fears of artificial intelligence, when computers will be smarter and more aware than we are. The mariner likes the response of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. He said, “Don’t worry about the robots eliminating humans. We make good pets.”
Time to make pizza.
Ancient Mariner