Wasted Calories are Sinful

Just read Slate's review of TC Boyle's new book "When the Killing is Done."  It follows the clash of an environmental engineer trying to eliminate invasive species from two islands and her running battle with an animal rights activist. The title comes from the animal rights activist who calls environmental engineers "Nazis" and states "I'll be civil when the killing is done." The Slate writer has a great line:

The killing, needless to say, is never done. Nature is as murderous as human beings, and neither is likely to change.

As an environmental science writer, I used to cover stories of these sorts of conflicts all the time. They also reveal two worldviews -- one scientific and analytical and the other moral without reason or perspective. As we've become increasingly divorced from nature as a people, we have lost our connection with its inherent brutality. The natural world is all about domination, all about killing and eating things. Our romanticism seeks to restore "order" and "harmony" that never existed. Natural systems are always dynamic and amoral. Everything is food for something else. Wasted calories are the only sin.

Lyrics: Coffee Love, Coffee Love

I'm in a fog, I'm half dead
Tractor beam pulls me back to bed
Until I get that first drop in my head

Morning cup of coffee, need you so

Chase away that sandman

Wash away the gloom

Morning cup of coffee how i love you so

Don't like the cream or frothy thing
Just fill it to brim and it'll make me sing
Works better than any alarm bell's ring

Black with sugar and I'm

Good

To 

Go

I'm grumpy cuss with a fuzzy head
Tractor beam pulls me back to bed
until I get that first drop in my head

I can smell it while its brewing
that magic that it will soon be doing
get me through another day
just a few drops away

Morning cup of coffee, I need you so
chase away that sandman
wash away the gloom
Morning cup of coffee how I love you so

Is it need or is it love?
Cus I can't stay away
even for a day
I'm an addict and I'm here to say

Morning cup of coffee, I need you so
chase away that sandman
wash away that gloom
Morning cup of coffee
I can't live
without
you

Forty days of rain

Found this old ball
and here's the glove too.
I don't think they'll ever dry out
Just a few things from my past
drowned in flood
but I ...
I can't let them die

Forty days
and forty nights too
Forty feet high in my mind
Forty years
Forty years and two
God willing, I still have some years left
With you

You can see
the water got this high
highest it has ever been
High water comes
most every year
But we won't see the likes of
this again

Silver light
shines on silt-brown fields
everything is corrupted and dull
little fish
fight for life
attracting a flock of gulls

All we had
was just things you know
and memories, we still have a few
guess we better
start again
Thank God I still have you

Forty years
where'd they go
staring out the window at the
rain rain rain
Forty days Forty nights
Forty years and two
Give me forty years with you.

Forty days of rain
Forty nights
Forty feet high
Forty years
Forty years and two

Motorcycle Graveyard

I remember being a kid with my dad, crawling around junkyards looking for Fiat parts. I miss those open repositories of parts and the treasure hunt adventure of searching through the industrial archeology of the recent past. My dad was an industrial engineer and so he taught me the beauty of the machine.

I wish I could fine a graveyard of old motorcycles that I could crawl through on a wet winter's day, finding that that diamond in the rust. I'm jealous of the folks at Classic Cycles in New York who had an opportunity to access such a graveyard of old motorcycles recently.Here's the story: http://dcclassiccycles.dynamitedave.com/graveyard.html