| Email Edition | ContactNever thought I’d hear Safeway’s in-house music channel play “London Calling” this morning. But I sang along with it anyway.
“WHAT CAN I DO, RIGHT now, to better myself?”
“WHEN THE CENTER IS MOVING, no quiet is.
When the center is still, no chaos.
Where is the chaos when there is no center?
Where is the center when there is no motion?”
– From the Red Papyrus in O-kaze Temple, an Egyptian Zen sect nestled in the deepest shadow of Mount Fuji. Follow the Serene Sphinx signs and tell ‘em “Bob” sent you.
WHAT THE HUMANS DIDN’T REALIZE was that, for everyone else in the galaxy, it was largely considered bad form, and even bad luck, to visit planets settled by intelligent apes. (You’d think the quality of their UFO sightings would be a tip-off.)
ONE THING I MISS ABOUT the pre-21st-century days is the sense of humanity plunging headlong toward some destination.
These days, that collective goal seems hellbound and handbasket-wrapped. But in the days and years leading up to 1/1/2000, the Great Rollover, that sense of heading toward something great and mysterious was sometimes almost palpable. Maybe it’s because we could see a deadline.
Deadlines are wonderful tools for focusing the mind. Without one, I find myself picking listlessly at the keyboard; with one, I have an excuse, however small, to get off the couch. And that’s important. Our planet’s emerging global culture is lacking something without that sense of notional and communal quasi-closure, and I would like to offer a replacement.
In just about 25 years, give or take a month (or, to put it more or less as accurately as I can, in
days:hours:etc.) an asteroid named Apophis will make its second pass at Earth and quite possibly collide with it. That’s about as dead a deadline as you can get, but it’s also a good chunk of time — it’s a quarter-century off, which is sort of good news for us would-be codgers as it obviates the need for Social Security and other obligations; it’s close enough to inspire the imagination, yet far enough to finally develop those %$#@! jetpacks. And it’s a great excuse, however small, to get off the couch.
April 13, 2036. I hope to see you there.
BY OUR BEST CALCULATIONS, HISTORY began in Sumer when people first started writing things down (there are some examples of probable earlier scripts, but no one’s translated them yet). This would be about 6,000 years ago.
Let’s assume twenty-five years to the generation. That would be four generations per century. Six thousand years is sixty centuries is two-hundred forty generations.
Which means history began with your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandparents.
Kind of neat to think about.
HOW MUCH OF THEIR OWN flavors do, or can, Ben & Jerry’s’ honorees eat? Is there a celebrity discount? Free ice-cream for a lifetime, as long as you eat your own flavor? At what point do you just feed it to the potted plants when no one’s looking? This is where today’s investigative journalists should be spending their time: deep in the dairy freezer, scooping for clues (or as my mentor Daryl Curtis used to say, “We keep digging down to get to the bottom to stay on top.”) I’d say an eat-off is in order, except that Phish Food is named after a band and they’d have an unfair tag-team relay advantage over someone like Willie Nelson or Stephen Colbert. Or Jerry Garcia who, being dead, isn’t quite the foodie he once was. Oh fickle Fate and her hungry handmaids, who bring together such cows, such cane and such celebrity!
THERE MUST BE A WAY to get rich selling extra spaces as attachments for Scrabble boards…
QUIZ SHOW OVERHEARD ON THE TV as I entered the living room:
That’s right, ‘Illuminati’ is the answer! You’ve won $100!”
“HEY, MAN, IF YOU WERE in high school when the original Star Wars came out, you know exactly what I mean.”
Fig. 1.
Your pal, Neal (PS: Have I got a pitch for you!)
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