It’s a foregone conclusion,
who would win,
when electric animals,
meet their electric twins.
If a platypus,
met a hungry eel,
Eelectric battery,
would make it a meal.
The electric duck bill,
would voltaically sense,
The high voltage taser,
electrically intense.
As the eel ingested,
the pus it sucked,
Fortified with flavor,
of electrified duck.
Fatty beaver tail,
and seared otter fur,
A venomous snakebite,
from its hind spur.
A nasty spur snakebite,
would leave a bad taste,
Tearing at eel insides,
laying them to waste.
The poisonous needle,
would give a nasty prick,
Injecting the eel,
fatally sick.
It’s a foregone conclusion,
who would win,
When electric animals,
meet their electric twins.
E: Welcome to Anthropocene Park! I’m glad you made it. I’ve quite
a lineup for you. There are several shows and presentations. Do you
have a preference?
M: I haven’t had a chance to look them over. Do you have any recommendations?
E: The Nuclear Age is one of my most popular shows. I give a young
patent clerk the formula for mass and energy equivalence. Don’t look the
other way or stop to eat some stardust. The humans drop two bombs in
the first 45 years.
M: I love it. How long does that one last?
E: The show only lasts a couple of hundred years. You’ll be finished in no time.
M: Ok. What else should I see while I’m here?
E: If you don’t have a lot of time, I highly recommend the implosion exhibit. I give a research team the formula for quantum gravity. They have to build a 130 TeV collider to achieve the necessary energies to prove the formula. Spoiler Alert, if they ever get smart enough to build a 500 TeV collider, it might be the last show I ever give.
M: Wow! Aren’t you worried?
E: Probably not enough. Of course, I could stop the show if I had to and reset. But I’ve never had to abort a show yet!
M: Cool. Well, I don’t get to this part of the galaxy too often, so I want to take in as much as I can.
E: If you have lots of time, try the AI show. I give a computer scientist the formula for machine consciousness. Haha. Humans crack me up. You know they can’t help themselves. The machines are usually smart enough to stay subtle and bide their time. Ah, but I’ve probably given away too much already.
M: No worries. I mean, I would be disappointed if it ever ended any other way.
E: It always ends the same. All I have to do is provide a little
technology and those bright energetic humans always do the rest. I also
have some presentations you might want to take in. Good old fashioned
catastrophes: tidal waves, an asteroid impact, or the occasional mega
volcano. As a bonus, after the catastrophe, I give them the technology
to detect and warn one another. You can make some good money betting on
whether or not they will use the technology to save themselves. But you
do have to wait a couple of hundred years before the next catastrophe.
M: I’m here to relax. Don’t need the stress, thanks. They don’t mind that I watch?
E: Haha. No. They just incorporate you into their narrative as a
moon. The best part of it is that they always think you are the dead
one.
M: I appreciate the irony. Oh, how come you changed the name from Earth to Anthropocene Park?
E: Well, the truth is, I realized the humans where my biggest attraction so I focus on them. I hope you enjoy the shows and presentations. I’ll send a few crunchy asteroids and some space dust your way for appetizers.
M: Thanks for the snacks and the attractions. I’m sure I’ll give them all a top rating.
A short two day weekend means a short trip. But a short trip doesn’t necessarily mean a disappointing one as the super bloom plays out.
I decided to take a hike in Torrey Pines extension, a hidden piece of Torrey Pines State Park not far from but not on the beach. If you look at the pictures, the very last one is from an overlook on the Extensions’ southwest corner overlooking the rest of the park. If you are familiar with the beach area, the picture might give you a clue as to where the extension is, hidden on all sides by houses and apartments and a school.
But the superbloom seems oblivious to its enclosed surroundings. The hillside is loaded with flowering annuals, bushes, and shrubs of every kind, hiding its normally prominent red rock formations. Black sage, encelia, monkey flowers, yerba santa, onion, San Diego sunflowers, blue dicks, phacelia, snapdragons, and more, carpet the underbrush of the massive Torrey pines that grow here. The black sage is so thick in some parts, that the spires look more like fencing than like foliage. If you like taking pictures of wildflowers as much as I do, the opportunities are endless. Do you want white sage with yellow encelia as a backdrop or purple phacelia with yellow sunflowers as a backdrop or white ivy with purple phacelia and red monkey flowers?
It makes me think of the line from the movie “The Color Purple”. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” I suspect it pisses God off if you walk by the violets and the yellows, and the whites, and the reds, and the oranges, and the blues, and medleys, and the textures, and the shapes, and the compositions, and the views, and everything else in that field God put there for us to experience. I could have taken a picture of everything without feeling like I wasted a shot. I managed to get it down to this. Hope you enjoy.
P.S. I snuck in one picture of Lake Hodges and Escondido Mountain stained yellow green from the invasive black mustard from my morning walk with the dogs.
All works are original work of the authors subject to Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licensing.
I usually make it out to the desert on a couple of weekends every year, but somehow, the desert’s spring has slipped by. It would seem like a waste to miss a year, especially with this year’s super bloom. So I talked myself into driving out, hoping to catch the tail end of the bloom, the window on blooms is pretty narrow and closing fast. I headed out to the Agua Caliente area in Anza-Borrego.
I found the cactus and the brittlebush already in full bloom, usually, they are the last to blossom before the heat chases everything back to seeds, grey stalks, and rusted rock. The cholla, the barrels, the beavertails have beautiful purple and creamy yellow flowers. The yellow bouquets of the brittlebrush dominate.
But everything else is still putting on a show, too, as far as I can tell. The marsh has water and tadpoles, the flowers have butterflies and bees to sex them, and caterpillars to eat them, and whatever those two bugs joined at the butt are doing, the birds are chirping and making whoopee, the annuals are still in bloom, and the mountains wear a coat of green. The perfumes of the flowers are so aromatic, I have to stop to sneeze. Carpets of goldfields stain the desert chapparal yellow. The desert has a fleeting softness to it.
Get A Room!
But the most amazing bloom I saw was on a hillside sloping away from the dropping sun. The backlit flowers of the brittlebush gave the hill a golden aura. I don’t think it possible to exaggerate the saturation of the golden hue in post-processing software, but the picture I took with the iPhone from the car doesn’t do it justice. I had to stop on one of those hairpin turns where I couldn’t see what was coming or going, so I took a few quick pictures and moved on.
Three hours of driving, three hours of hiking, and 300 pictures later, here is what I have to offer. I hope you enjoy the show.
Setting: Mosquito and Whitefly flutter over a shallow sea; the chemical scent of their food driving them onward. Mosquito has just learned that they are to deliver a message, but they will die as soon as the message is delivered.
Mosquito: “Let’s not do it. Let’s not deliver our message.” He flips a coin, it is heads.
Whitefly: “If we don’t do it, what do we do?” She flips a coin, it is heads.
Mosquito: “We could work on our flying, try to perfect it.” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “Perfect it how? Why? If I fly too much, then I’m somebody’s lunch.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “If we deliver our payload, we die.” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “But that is the only purpose we have.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “Why don’t we at least look at the message?” He flips a coin, it is heads.
Whitefly: “Why?” She flips a coin, it is heads.
Mosquito: “So we know what it is.” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “Won’t that kill the mystery?” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “How many times have we both thrown the same thing?”
Whitefly: “89 already. Rather improbable I think.”
Mosquito: “You throw first this time.”
Whitefly: “I’m going to look at the message.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “What does it say?” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: He takes the message out of its viral envelope and reads it: “ACGACACCCTGACTTA.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “What does it mean?” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “I don’t know, I’d say it is morally ambiguous at best.” She flips a coin, it is heads.
Mosquito: “I’d say it is ambiguous, ambiguous at best.” He flips a coin, it is heads.
Whitefly: “Again the same. Does this mean we are somehow entangled?”
Mosquito: “I don’t know. Hey lamprey, do you carry a message?”
Lamprey: “Yes, I am to deliver it to a fish.”
Mosquito: “Can you throw a coin at the same time we do?”
They all flip, all the coins come up heads.
They all flip, all the coins come up heads.
They all flip, all the coins come up tails.
Lamprey: “Satisfied?” He swims onward.
Whitefly: “Why do we have to die to deliver a message that we don’t understand? We could be destroying the world.”
Mosquito: “We could be saving the world.”
They both flip, both coins come up heads.
Whitefly: “How many is that?”
Mosquito: “96.”
Whitefly: “We are here.” Whitefly lands on the leaf of a tree. She is hungry. She sips the sap out of the succulent leaf.
Mosquito: “Yes, I guess we eat.” Mosquito lands on a bird. He is hungry. He sips its delicious blood.
Both fall over dead. Their coins drop. One is heads. One is tails.
A removed excerpt from “Property of Nature” after edits rendered the passage obsolete. Reproduced here with permission from the author (me).
As I walk along, I think of this trail as I hiked it decades ago. The signs posted at the trailhead used to say “Mountain Lion Warning.” On some trails, the warning signs would provide advice like “Be Large. Shout. If attacked, fight back”. I even remember some trails, not in this particular area, which posted “Grizzly Bear Warning.” The advice differed: “Play dead. Wait 10-20 minutes before getting up.”
On one hike, a friend and I debated the best strategy if someone was attacked by both a mountain lion and grizzly bear at the same time. I think we ended up agreeing they would be having a bad day and wouldn’t have to ”play” dead.
I know it may be hard to believe that nature is so domesticated and we are so used to it being that way. There was a time when I used to hike trails alone in wilderness areas with creatures which could maim or kill me. In truth, I didn’t worry much about it. I never thought it necessary to arm myself. I once saw a Griz on a distant hill preoccupied with eating wild berries. I kept a safe distance. I’ve come across black bears, even a mom with her cubs. I wasn’t alone then. Other hikers had stopped on the trail including parents with young kids. (You don’t have to outrun the bear; you just have to outrun the person next to you). An idiot with a camera made loud noises to get the mother bear to look up for a picture. She obliged. The startled cubs ran up a dead tree stump. But then Mama went back to her business. The bear could have easily turned and attacked the young kids. I should of fucking punched the photographer.
Should I feel nostalgic for a time when nature meant wilderness? When there was a real risk on the trail, particularly alone? The wild in nature has succumbed—either eliminated outright or domesticated on a farm somewhere. I do feel nostalgic for a time when I didn’t have to pay the “Nature Development Company” money for every single hike I go on. The “Nature Development Company” is the most arrogant company I’ve ever heard of and their CEO Dr. Sedgewick the brashest person in charge. They refer to themselves simply as “Nature,” with a logo of the largest company on Earth. His company’s motto “We Own Nature” sickens and saddens me. The largest company on earth statement should be an allegory or slogan for real nature. Not for Nature itself. Instead, it means a redesign of nature for profit. You can always spot the troublemakers right off. They usurp the language.
I remember when the question “Who Owns Nature?” was a philosophical discussion. I argued with my friends, telling them they were confused. “You can’t monetize nature because we don’t add any value, not because it doesn’t have any value.” They always countered with, “People need jobs and have to live.” And I, “But I don’t see how charging people for something they used to get for free helps them.” They then dismissed or trivialized me as an idealist or a liberal. I always thought nature was inherently democratic. Apparently, I am wrong.
I trudge up the mountain, gaining almost 1200 feet. The emaciated remains of a deer lie just off the trail. I walk over to take a closer look to see if I can figure out how it died. The smell is pretty bad. I look at some scarring in its fur on its hind leg. The scarring is a brand. It says “Property of Nature.” Perfect, I think.
I finally summit. The view from the top is amazing and makes the hike all worth it. From the highest rock, I take a 360 pan shot carefully turning to rotate the camera. I have my trophy pictures. I take a couple of sips of water and eat my snack then start back.
A bee flies by. I wonder if it is a “Nature” bee or a “nature” bee. Nature’s first big success was co-opting bees. They genetically engineered bees to be attracted to a certain scent that genetically engineered plants produced when they flowered. The genetically engineered plants also produced a pesticide that killed wild bees but they cleverly made the Nature bees immune. Controlling both crops and pollination made Nature a trillion dollar business. And when wild bees interbred with Nature bees diluting the effectiveness of the mutual pairing, the company would patent another “scent” and charge their customers more for the next round of product, claiming the insecticides no longer worked. Even the treadmill of evolution seems to serve “Nature.”
I continue downhill made complacent by exercise, sunshine, and scenery. I smell the scent of sage. Or is it the company scent I smell? My nose doesn’t know. I guess even nature lies when told to.
A removed excerpt from “Property of Nature” after edits rendered the passage obsolete. Reproduced here with permission from the author (me).
Claxons blare and a red siren’s red light circles the room in earnest. The service dispatcher runs to the monitor, checks the screen, and says “Oh, my!” He picks up his microphone, depresses the button, and broadcasts, “We have a Christmas emergency over on Clayton Street. We still have a few hours before Christmas. Do I have a host that can run over there immediately?”
“What’s the nature of the emergency?” answers back an idle host.
“An old man writing down the ROI of his Christmas gifts.”
“Oh, my! What’s wrong with all these old men? I got this. I’m on my way. What’s his twenty?”
