Our Ecological Deficit

We’re moving into earth resources deficit for the year and it’s only August. This means we’ve already used all the resources the Earth can sustainably supply us for this year. The date that we edge into deficit each year keeps getting pushed back further and further. When people first began calculating it, the date was early December, over four months better. Some simple steps could begin at least putting off  the deficit date annually if mankind would only take them.  See:

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/2018-earth-overshoot-day-were-expected-to-exhaust-a-years-worth-of-the-planets-resources-on-aug-1/70005145

Phil

The Fourth

     Another major American holiday came around last week.

     While I was downtown that day walking in the historical district, there had been an event at an intersection, and I found myself walking behind Uncle Sam himself in his striped pants, starry vest, beard, and top hat as he was heading for his car. A foreign model. He looked every bit of his two hundred and forty-two years and weary in the heat.

     I wanted to tell him, “Man, you’ve really got problems, don’t you? I know you’re in hock up to your bushy eyebrows, and I’d give you some money, but I’m afraid you’d only waste it on a thousand pork-barrel military programs and hundreds of dubious federal agencies. I understand how you became addicted to all that over the decades, though, and you have my sympathy. You might want to think about rehab or a twelve-step thing. You know, start over, lose a little excess weight, maybe even try to save a dollar here or there, harsh as that may sound to even attempt around Washington. And you can’t get your friends or anybody within your family to agree on anything these days, although I think everybody realizes that’s only making matters worse. You’ve been plagued by all kinds of natural disasters lately and that’s a shame. Just a damned shame. By the way, do you happen to have the FEMA number on you? I could use a free generator, and I understand they hand those out like party favors. Anyway, proud to have met you and thank you for your service and all that, and I hope you can manage to survive out here on the streets. I hope you don’t have any coke or Molly or meth or opioids or Mexican heroin on you, by the way; I know you’ve developed a powerful craving for that stuff. Maybe you won’t get shot, although your get-up could possibly attract the wrong kind of attention, I gotta tell you. There are people out here who’d love to steal that hat. Hey, why don’t you hang around for the fireworks later? Might cheer you up a bit, old fellow. That’s what the Fourth is all about, right? Well, that and getting buzzed and cooking out.”

     But I didn’t tell him any of that because I think, down deep, he already knows it.

     He just doesn’t seem to know anymore where to even start to fix it.

Phil

Dejecting rejections

    

     Fifty years ago, NASA Apollo scientist Bill Borucki had a Big Idea. 

     He said, “Let’s build a space telescope to look for planets orbiting stars.”  If a planet were to pass in front of its parent star, he reasoned, the light would dim, thus revealing that planet’s presence.  Scoffers lined up to shoot down the idea, which then languished for decades. 

     But in 2009 a team including Borucki launched the Kepler space scope, which has since found more than 2,300 confirmed exoplanets rolling around other suns in only a minuscule portion of the cosmic vastness.  Some have even been directly imaged.  Quite a few are earth-sized.  Cosmologists now suspect that most of the trillions of stars in the universe must have orbiting bodies, some inevitably within a zone wherein water is liquid, those star systems having formed in much the same way as our own solar system did.  This, in turn, greatly enhances the likelihood of life out there. 

     Many cosmologists now believe it’s virtually a statistical certainty we’re not alone in the universe.  

     A Big Idea, indeed.  But one roundly rejected for decades as impossible to ever research.

    

     After World War II, photographer Robert Frank crisscrossed the U.S taking thousands of candid photos.  Much of what he shot was raw and ugly.  Poverty.  Racial prejudice.   Mind-numbing work conditions.  His pictures contradicted happy-myths propagated by The Saturday Evening Post and TV’s Leave it to Beaver.  His photo book, The Americans, was vehemently criticized and then largely ignored.  Only 1,100 copies sold, earning him $800.

     Today, Frank’s book is considered an iconic 20th-century work.  Hope you kept a copy.  A single original print featured in the book showing sullen people riding a segregated New Orleans trolley sold not long ago for $633,000.

    

     Louisiana oil-field roughneck James Lee Burke spent nine years trying to sell his first novel, The Lost Get-back Boogie.  The manuscript gathered 100 rejections.

     When the University of Louisiana Press finally published the yarn, it drew a Pulitzer nomination, the first of many accolades Burke has since earned.  He’s still writing best-sellers, and several of them have been turned into hit movies.

     Myopic unimaginative publishers also rejected J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter debut novel 12 times, Agatha Christie’s debut novel 23 times, and Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind 38 times.  Almost every publisher in England spurned Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies.  

I hope all those editorial naysayers have been plagued by thoughts of the millions of dollars they turned away from their doors.  The Harry Potter franchise alone has been worth billions.

     Rejections are to a writer as tipsy shot gunners are to ducks.  We can only try to live with them.  I wish I’d kept track of the rejections I've gotten over the years.  They’d fill a barrel.  In fact, a few years back, a clever writer did keep track of his rejections and sold a magazine article about the number and variety of them.

     Even after we survive all that crushing rejection and finally do manage to get our work published, we face a gang of one-star losers out there who cruise the Net viciously putting down everything and everybody they encounter, while never actually accomplishing much of anything themselves.

     The naysayers have always been an ineradicable presence throughout humankind.  Society’s gleeful shot gunners.  We can take a lesson from the likes of Bill Borucki, Robert Frank, James Lee Burke, J.K. Rowling, and migrating mallards though, and simply ignore the naysayers as we carry on, trying our best.

     And there are occasional payoffs along the road.  Although I’m not in sight of the best-seller lists yet, I've gathered a thick file of e-mails and notes from folks all over who have liked my work.  One missive was from a man in Birmingham, England.  The first fan letter he’d written in over twenty years of reading, he said.  Five years before, an auto accident had left him in a wheelchair.  He said my books had brought back to him “the outdoors and all its splendor” and had given him strength to step up his therapy intensity.

     That one is taped to the wall behind my computer monitor.

 Phil

What are the odds?

   

     Whenever the Powerball jackpot climbs into stratospheric payoff realms, the publicity ramps up, as well.  This, of course, results in a frenzy of ticket buying fueled by that good old American virtue.  Greed.

     The thinking goes, Well, somebody’s going to win the windfall, so it’s worth a try.  But is it, really? 

     The odds of winning the correct five of the 69 possible numbers, plus the correct one of the 26 Powerball numbers, are one in 292,201,338.  That number is eight times the entire population of Canada.  The odds of choosing just the five correct numbers are still one in 11,688,053.  To put that in some perspective, the odds of being struck by lightning in any given year are only one in 700,000.

     You’re far better off trying for sainthood (a one in 20,000,000 possibility) or hoping to draw a royal flush in poker on the first five cards (a one in 649,740 chance) or expecting to bowl a perfect 300 score (one in 11,500 odds) or attempting to sink a hole-in-one in golf (odds for an average duffer 12,500 to one).

     Yet millions continue to feed their money into lotteries in 44 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgins. (Conspicuously there is no lottery in Nevada.)  In 2014, these lotteries took in $70.1 billion.  And such is the American addiction to gambling that 508 commercial casinos and 470 tribal casinos across the land now rake in another $20 billion or so per year.  That’s a total of some ninety thousand million dollars per year.  And ironically this behemoth industry is taking no chance at all itself.  It isn’t gambling like its patrons are.  It risks nothing, despite its glittering payouts, because the odds are always heavily in its favor, and the demand for it never goes away.

     Gambling in the hope of becoming rich, of getting something for nothing, is ill-advised, to say the very least, especially if it strains your budget.  The odds are simply way too heavily weighted against you.

     Besides, you’ve already won one of the greatest possible lotteries.

 

     What are the odds that life would arise on this rather ordinary planet circling a modest star at just the right distance in a particular galaxy of several billion stars among the many billions of galaxies, and that this life would adapt and improve over deep time to produce sentient creatures capable of determining their own destiny?  What are the odds that the right two lineages of those creatures among the myriad millennia-long ancestral lineages of those creatures would eventually combine to produce a single unique sperm and a single unique egg at the perfect instant to create unique you? 

     What are the odds you would be born into a time in the long evolution of humanity when so many killer diseases have been vanquished, when so much about all things has already been learned (often at great sacrifice and cost), a time when you can even witness mankind’s early explorations of the Universe?

 

     What are the additional odds that you would be privileged to live in a land of such advanced technology that your major organs and joints can be replaced and life expectancy is higher by far than it ever was, a land of abundant resources and excellent available nutrition, a land of clean water, a land where you can have access to virtually all mankind’s knowledge in a pocket communication device, a land where you’re free to express your opinions and become whatever you wish if you’re only willing to work at it, where you’re free to save and invest the fruits of your labor, free to enjoy life more richly than any other previous generation on our planet?  (Some 660 million people in Africa have no electricity, much less electric toothbrushes.)

     The odds of all that happening in perfect synchronicity are so preposterous as to verge on the impossible.  Billions to one?  Trillions to one?

     Yet here you are in this place and time.

     Congratulations on your big win.

Phil

The mystical aspect

     There’s a wonderful inexplicable something about the art and craft of writing.

     In a Glimmer Train piece about various writers’ approaches to the business, there’s a thread of the mystical running through the comments.  In response to the question, “Is there a point when it seems as if the writing is coming out of your fingertips?” Stephen Dixon said, “The first draft.  I write the first thing that comes to mind.  Immediately the magic occurs.”  Ron Carlson said, “Every story is a journey into the unknown.  The strangest feeling comes over you.  You can’t think your way into it.  If you’re true to the people in your story it’s going to happen.”  David Long said, “It’s like walking through the woods with a tiny flashlight—you just hope it doesn’t conk out on you.”  Carolyn Chute said, “I go into a quiet, almost meditative state.  It feels sometimes like you’re psychic, like you’re pulling in something that already exists.”  Alice Mattison said, “Sometimes I think the things that we write are located in the air above us.”  Robert Olen Butler said, “Many times I feel like I’m channeling something as opposed to inventing it.” 

     Flannery O’Connor once said the writer should be the person who is most surprised by the story.

     The usual explanation for this mystical aspect is as Tim Gautreaux said: “Much that a writer expresses comes from the subconscious, that realm of the nearly known.”

     Surely that’s in large part true, for the subconscious is a treasure trove for any writer or artist.  But there have been times when I’ve wondered if the magic could be something more.  Something yet undiscovered, much less explained.

      I’ve been privileged to feel that mystical energy and delightful surprise occasionally while I’m writing, and I hope you have, too. 

     I also hope a glimmer of it gets through to our readers.

Phil

Crimes against graphics

     Authors often invest nearly superhuman effort—thousands of laborious hours over many months or even years—in creating fine books worthy of publication and significant readership.

     But in all too many cases those efforts are sadly thwarted by hasty, half-hearted, or just plain incompetent graphic cover artists, who in most cases I suspect have not even read the first paragraphs of the books they’re tasked to work on for a mere few hours.

     There are many ways a fine book can be cloaked in graphics rags that are sure to relegate it to obscurity.  I’ve served as an awards judge for two excellent writers’ organizations and have studied book covers in stores for years, and I think I’ve seen them all.  Dark red lettering on a black background is a frequent way to render cover copy unreadable.  A background photo that was never interesting to begin with and has no relevance to the subject matter or setting of the book is another unsubtle way to turn off readers as they scan the shelves; a novel set in the dead-flat country of eastern NC featured a dull cover shot of mountains, for one bad example.

      Whimsical graphic experiments that look like something created during a workshop/vaping session at a convention of abstractionists can also doom books quickly; a recent cover had the one-word title broken up into syllables and scattered, so it required some study to figure out, and the author’s name, in dark gray over slightly darker gray, was utterly lost at any distance over two feet away.  Selecting tiny font sizes on covers and for the inside text is a just-plain-mean way of convincing readers to shun a book.  Murky low-contrast nonsensical collages that turn to mud when reduced to the thumbnail sizes often used to advertise books in magazine ads and online is a clever way to test the vision, and the patience, of book browsers.  Why publishers allow, or even seem to embrace, such criminal graphics is a mystery.

     There are fads and trends in cover design that come and go, some good and some not so good.  There’s one current industry-wide trend I like.  Almost every hardcover dust jacket is done with an overall finish of matte varnish, which provides a good grip and a nice rich feel for the reader.  Using spot high-gloss varnish on these covers, such as for the title and author name and a selected graphic element, provides pleasing, attention-grabbing contrast. 

     And of course there are the superb covers that complement and even augment their books’ contents and make these relatively few volumes stand out amid all the intense competition in any bookstore.  Those graphics wizards are to be commended.  The covers and interior layouts are indeed works of art done by thoughtful, caring people with real talent.  The authors lucky enough to benefit are deeply grateful, I’m sure.  Invariably, such covers adorn books that the rest of us writers would do well to emulate.  Just as these covers themselves ought to be studied and emulated by some of the lesser graphics practitioners out there.

Phil 

Fourteen aviation aphorisms (that also apply to driving):

An aircraft check ride (or a DMV license test) ought to be like a skirt, short enough to be interesting but still long enough to cover everything.

Always remember you fly an airplane (or drive a vehicle) with your head, not your hands. Never let an airplane (or a vehicle) take you somewhere your brain didn't get to earlier.

Don't drop the aircraft (or the vehicle) to fly the microphone (or to send a text or make a call). Dead pilots (and drivers) are found in the wreckage with their hand around a microphone (or a cell phone).

Those who hoot with the owls by night should not fly with the eagles by day. (Self-explanatory.)

Things which do you no good: Runways (or road space) behind you. Fuel in the airport truck (or in the last gas station). Two seconds ago.

If God meant man to fly (or drive a Ferrari), He'd have given him more money.

What's the difference between God and fighter pilots (or freeway drivers)? God doesn't think He's a fighter pilot (or a NASCAR hero).

Flying (or driving) is not dangerous; crashing is dangerous.

Trust your captain (or driver) but keep your seat belt securely fastened.

The nicer an airplane (or a vehicle) looks, the better it flies (or drives).

It's best to keep the pointed end of your aircraft going forward (or the dirty side of your vehicle down) as much as possible.

Any attempt to stretch fuel is guaranteed to increase headwind (or distance to the next exit with a station).

A fool and his money are soon flying more airplane (or driving more vehicle) than he or she can handle (or pay for).

You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back. (In either an aircraft or a vehicle.)

Phil