Somebody Else
Magritte
If you were one of the lucky ones who opened up their Blogger Account on Friday to find their blog locked because the bloggerbots had determined that your blog was a spam blog, then you know the way I felt Friday morning.
Not only is your blog locked, but you are informed that your blog will be deleted in 20 days if you don't respond immediately.
Now, if you don't know what a spam blog is, it's probably just as well. But in short, it's a blog with lots of links but no real content. It's designed to attract google hits and send them to some other commercial site I guess.
At any rate, by late Friday night, after checking numerous times during the day to see if earthfamilyalpha had been unlocked yet, the blog was still locked. Then, late in the evening, the "blogger guys" posted a statement in "issues" that lots of folks had their blogs locked up that day and that they were working on it.
By the next day, everything was fine again, but it did leave that funny feeling that three and a half years of writing could be placed in jeapardy by some creation of code that had somehow gone haywire. Yes, I do have the blog backed up in two different places, but it still gave you that creepy sense of potential dread.
Meanwhile on Saturday, just as I was getting ready to put up a new post, my partner called to report a fairly glorious geyser in her front yard. It turns out that a 1 inch line had ruptured.
Instead of calling an emergency plumber, we decided to fix it.
When we finally managed to get the water off, we dug down to find not one pipe, but two, and they were both next to several electric irrigation control lines. So the excavation turned into something more akin to an archeology dig.
As we got more familiar with the problem, we could see that this break had been a problem before. The odd shaped piece of pipe that busted was actually a fix from another time. And the problem was further compounded by the realization that the two one inch lines were not the exact same diameter. Consequently, a standard fix was not going to work.
After a thorough romp and stomp in the mud, and a trip to the big box store, all in 100 degree plus heat, we managed to install a nifty compression fitting under flash light well after dark. And it worked. At least it worked long enough for us to have the celebratory hit of Don Julio. When I went out to check the fix after watching Kevin Costner's Dancing with Wolves, I was pretty unhappy to see that it was full of water. But it was under control.
The next morning, after going to our standard Sunday morning brain brunch, we drained the hole using the magic of a syphon hose, and we tightened the compression fitting just a bit. This time it seems to be working.
Now I know that most of us have this kind of stuff go on in our lives and that it hardly merits a blog post. But in a way it does.
The blog was locked up by a so called robot that is actually just code, a computer program gone slightly amuck. We are very dependent on these programs. And whether its your bank account, your network provider, or your automatic electric meter, we count on these programs to behave.
The geyser was created more likely than not by the ground moving under the extremely high temperatures that we are enduring in Texas these days. And we are just now into August. We also count on our climate to behave, even though every responsible scientist and policy maker in the world is warning us that it's not going to anymore.
Whether it's our pipes breaking from the heaving of the earth, or our AC being pushed beyond its limits, the change in climate is beginning to raise its head up. In the far north, where the tundra is moving north at a fairly rapid annual clip, you can see telephone poles and roads that look like they're drunk as they weave and bobble through the undulating landscape.
I don't how much longer we as a people can continue to avoid dealing with the pressing issues that we face. This weekend, instead of writing about them, I can make the case that I was dealing with them.
And when we get to the point where we are fixing, where we are reacting, the opportunity to act proactively, to put in that stitch in time that saves nine, becomes more difficult.
As we sat on almost parched grass on the banks of our spring fed urban swimming hole last night, I mentioned that it doesn't do much good to be angry with the practitioners of Disaster Capitalism who are doing their best to destroy the world as we know it, even as they mine its riches as their own private treasure.
No, surely we must look at ourselves.
For isn't it us, the People of Conscience who are failing to act?
We go on with our lives, eating, drinking, hopping around,
hoping that somebody else will act.
Jerry Garcia had it right.
"Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us".
Labels: personal philosophy
posted by oZ @ 7:41 AM
1 Comments:
thank you, my love...d
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