Conversation (non)Starters

      The Fox News panelist and author Kat Timpf brought this up, that of topics we don't discuss because they make people uncomfortable.   Here's one such segment from her book, You Can't Joke About That: ...the next time you're at a party, just try breaking a small-talk silence with the question "So who here do you think is gonna die first?  It's gonna be someone.  Who do you think it's gonna be?  Such is her book, although it brings up a good point because as she later notes: ...I really wish that it could be acceptable to talk about dying and death more often, more honestly, and more casually than we do.  Not just for my sake, but for everyone's.  Our fear of talking about dying and death --our paralyzing ourselves out of our fear of saying something "wrong"-- not only hurts the people experiencing grief by making them worry about making other people uncomfortable, but also hurts anyone who is ever going to go through it, because it does a piss-poor job of preparing people for what it actually looks like...people don't know what death is really like until it smacks them in the face.  More about that "smaking in the face" thing later since her book is actually a comedy book...no really.  

     Place yourself among children or sometimes people who are autistic and discover that many of the "filters" we think are normal are not there.  So imagine if we could also talk about such taboo subjects with equal candor.  "How much do you make," or "how much money do you have in savings" are two things usually considered uncouth to ask, just as perhaps in today's world asking, "who did you vote for?"  And here's another one, asking someone about their sex life or the size of their you-know-what.  Now neither of these issues would usually come up, and especially not the last one, except that, they did.  Celebrated investigative author Mary Roach dived into the world of today's soldier and along with hearing loss and PTSD, the somewhat common injury was an injury from an explosive, and an injury to exactly those "private parts."  The use of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) caused our military branches to rethink how they constructed their protective armor since the devices exploded from below, forcing shrapnel and such upwards.  And what was next in line to be hit after one's legs were...one's "privates."  So not only did protective plating change, but so did reconstructive surgery  (a side note: credit is seriously given by the military to transgenders who pushed for such surgeries).  So it was strange enough to read about rebuilding or even replacing a man's genitals  --as in the ideal tissue used for the urethra is from the mouth-- but consider the issue of replacing the entire "structure."

     Wrote Roach: I'm thinking now of combatants who injuries leave them unable to generate sperm.  It might be nice to give them, along with a functioning penis, a reproductive feature.  What's a few more ducts and tubes to hook up?  It's trouble.  That's what it is.  Hook up the testes, and now the penis donor is also a sperm donor.  If the transplant recipient impregnates someone using the dead donor's testes --and more to the point, his genes-- whose offspring will that child be?  What if the donor's widow tries to lay claim to her dead husband's sperm, now being generated inside a different man?  What if the dead man's parents want a relationship with their biological grandchild?  As one law professor told her: "Some countries, sensible countries, have statutes and regulations about what happens to the sperm of dead men."  The United States isn't there yet.  It's a place where judges have ordered sperm donors to pay child support, and rapists have been granted visitation rights to a victim's child.  As one Army surgeon told her, "It could get weird."   

      So speaking of weird, I've been puzzled by the new phrase making the rounds among younger men, their tee shirts and sweat shirts emblazoned with the words: Your Body, MY Choice.  And yet, stats are showing that of the women that voted, about 50% voted in favor of keeping the status quo about reproductive rights and (mostly male) courts making and enforcing what women can and can't do with their own bodies.  But then neither can I understand the new push for nuclear fuel, mostly to meet the demands of the heavy energy and water needs of the AI industry.  So a quick bit of background on nuclear reactors developed during WW II (another "great" party topic); the demand to create plutonium for a bomb was a top priority, one which led the US to evict entire populations from the middle of Washington state (they were given 30 days to leave their farms and homes) and build 9 nuclear reactors (the Hanford complex is midway between Seattle and Spokane, and slightly south).  During that period, 4000 lbs. of uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo produced a single pound of plutonium (the Fat Man atomic bomb required 14 pounds of plutonium).  Some 40 years later (the last reactor was deactivated in 1987), Hanford had produced 148,000 pounds of plutonium.  And that nearly 600,000,000 lbs. of radioactive waste left over?  Well, there's the problem.  Wrote a piece in High Country News: Beneath the scattered buildings, nuclear waste seeps into the soil and groundwater in catastrophic doses.  An online tracking tool reveals underground plumes of 10 different toxic chemicals and radioactive isotopes, ranging from fewer than 100 acres of subterranean uranium contamination to over 14,000 acres of tritium.  Many plumes overlap, and some contaminants appear in multiple locations.  Once they soak into the groundwater, they spread even faster, migrating to the Columbia River.  In 2010, the DOE discovered that, underneath one building, the cesium and strontium levels in the soil were "high enough that direct contact from a human would not be survivable."  The DOE has to handle demolition carefully to avoid kicking up radioactive dust...Today, the 580-square-mile Hanford Site holds 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, much of it radioactive sludge stored in 177 sometimes-leaky tanks.  The DOE has dismantled some factors down to their cores, cocooned them in concrete and metal, and left them to decay for the next 75 years, when the federal government will re-evaluate whether full demolition is possible.  What??  Is that my salmon glowing?

     So here's another way to make yourself the life (or death) of the party...ask about climate change.  Now before I lose you entirely, at least take away this from Pulitzer Prize winner, Elizabeth Kolbert and her piece in The New Yorker on what's been discovered in ice cores taken in Greenland.  First off, it's rather unimaginable how much ice is in Greenland, as in an ice sheet about the size of Alaska and capped by a dome which is nearly 2 miles thick; it's weight is enough to depress the crust of the earth.  And that ice is melting quite a bit faster than scientists have seen since they began measuring it back in the 70s; already six trillion tons of ice have melted.  The debate, however, becomes...is it us humans causing this melt, or is this just the natural cycle of nature (you can ask this right after your remaining crowd answers that question of who's going to die first).  But here's where the climate change quandry enters the picture.  Two miles of ice cores --ice in the cores can show what fell in summer vs. what fell in winter, as well as atmospheric gases trapped inside the bubbles, thus giving scientists a nearly year-by-year record of both amounts and relative temperatures during those years-- reveal a bit more accurate history, one going back to before Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs, one going back to the time of our first ice age:  Analysis of the core showed, in extraordinary detail, how temperatures in central Greenland had varied during the last ice age, which in the U.S. is called the Wisconsin.  As would be expected, there was a steep drop in temperatures at the start of the Wisconsin, around a hundred thousand years ago, and a steep rise toward the end of it.  But the analysis also revealed something disconcerting.  In addition to the long-term oscillations, the ice recorded dozens of shorter, wilder swings.  During the Wisconsin, Greenland was often unimaginably cold, with temperatures nearly thirty degrees lower than they are now.  Then temperatures would shoot up, in some instances by as much as twenty degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again, somewhat more gradually.  Finally, about twelve thousand years ago, the roller coaster came to a halt.  Temperatures settled down, and a time of relative climate tranquility began.  This is the period that includes all of recorded history, a coincidence that, presumably, is no coincidence.  The conclusion was two-fold: 1) our presence may be accelerating nature out of this "stable" period (the Atlantic's Gulf Stream flow is indeed slowing, according to a recent study); and 2) once we do so there will be no turning back...or maybe there was no turning back anyway.

     Write about what you know, they say, wrote a review on geology in the same magazine. All due respect, that’s lousy advice, far too easily misinterpreted as “write about what you already know.”  No doubt you find your own knowledge valuable, your own experiences compelling, the plot twists of your own past gripping; so do we all, but the storehouse of a single life seldom equips us adequately for the task of writing.  If you are, say, Volodymyr Zelensky or Frederick Douglass or Sally Ride, the category of “what you know” may in fact be sufficiently unusual and significant to belong in print.  For the rest of us, the better, if less pithy, maxim would be: before you write, go out and learn something interesting (as the review notes, humans have been on Earth for just 0.007% of its history).*

     So jump back to who's dying (still at that party?).  Here's the sobering view of author Timpf as her mother lay dying in the hospital: Thanks to what I'd seen in movies and on television, I expected a lot more.  I expected that I would be spending those final moments having important, meaningful conversations with her --ones where we would solve all of our issues and she'd leave me with some kind of beautiful, thoughtful, flowery words of wisdom and inspiration that I could carry with me for the rest of my life-- in an ambiently lit room with soft piano music playing in the background.  It wasn't like that.  First of all, the two lighting options in a hospital are "Off" and "Have I Always Been This Ugly?" and the closest thing to background music in an ICU is all of the beeping, sometimes communicating to nurses that one of the keeping-alive machines is losing.  As for the conversation?  My mom was a little too, well, dying for flowery pronouncements, so the majority of our final exchanges of words consisted of her telling me how tired she was, or asking me if she could have some ice chips because she was thirsty.  I pushed so hard for the kind of deep talks that I thought we were supposed to be having, and it wasn't until years later that I realized how quixotic my expectations had been.  I couldn't help but think back at all of the crap fed to me throughout my life that had created those expectations.  While she paints that scenario with humor (her book's theme is that humor allows us to broach difficult topics), I could relate to that almost stupid feeling of hope against hope that whoever it was in that hospital bed (my brother) was going to "turn the corner," and when they don't, how much you realize that you should have simply held their hand and talked to them while they were alive, alone in that bed and fighting for their life, and that you were also scared and that you also didn’t know what was next, but that you treasured the time you had together.

Leaves on my maple tree, late November

     For me, I've discovered, and continue to discover, that I know little about life here, especially when it comes to how our planet works.  And I think of the words of Friedrich Nietzsche when he asked how you would answer if you were told that you'd be forced to live your life over and over: Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?  Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine."  Would I learn any more or be more open to doing so if indeed, living life was something repeated over and over?  Even looking outside now, in late November and after a few snowfalls, I am puzzled that the maple trees keep clinging onto their leaves, as if unsure themselves if they would return.  It was the same observation made by naturalist Ann Zwinger in her underground classic, Run, River, Run: Cottonwood leaves scuttle across the sand like yellow crabs.  Shreds and snippets --ivory twigs, copper oak leaves, bits of bark-- slip, hang, flutter, snag, snatch free and catch again, beat frantically with the wind, held against going, a season on the wane but not allowed to leave.  The few leaves on a scrub oak are just tacked to the branch tips; the wind worries off more and arms them spinning.  The willows are already shorn of yellow, and as the reds and yellows go, warmth seeps out of the landscape, bleaching to November gray, a draining of the golden time. The river answers back to each gust of wind in a thicker rippling, more audible, coming up into the bank and its gullies in determined waves... Sun sweeps honey across the river and it is at once warmer, and then immediately the shadows sweep upstream and it is chill again.  Even when the wind stops for a minute where I am there is always a restless simmering somewhere else, and then it is back to whistle in my ears, water my eyes, blow sand in my teeth.  The wind is bothersome, but it belongs, a part of the river and is parameters.  When low-lying clouds break away from the cliffs, a bank of white far up the slope, the visualization of the separation between freezing and nonfreezing, fall and winter.  Wind blows ripples upstream, against the current, à rebours.  Times of transition, seem as difficult for nature as for people.

      So final ice breaker before you're kicked out of that party.  Ask your remaining group: do you feel that you are the chosen "one," or race, or religion, or species.  Chosen in the sense that somehow you are above others and that is that.  Atop a pulpit or in front of a firing squad, do you/would you feel that?  And if so, what about all those before you, from ancient cultures such as the Aztecs or Spartans who discarded babies if they felt they would not grow up to meet "the" standards; or those entire civilizations who believed in Zeus; or the dinosaurs who lived in relative peace nearly 82 times longer than we humans have existed.  And now that the barriers are down and you're having this open session, ask your remaining listeners what it's like to be black, or white, or disabled, or queer, or abused, or abandoned, or a murderer, or someone at a party asking deeply personal questions that were not meant to be answered or even thought about.  And if the guests turned on you and asked about you as in "tell us why any of this bothers you or that you feel you need to know?  Who are you?," they might ask.  And more importantly, would you know?

    At this point, I would likely be leaving that party with a head full of questions.  Who was that person and did I have any answers to such questions.  And why should such discussions bother us?  If left unanswered, do we leave this life with more than a few regrets, or do we simply carry on and it is what it is.  My head would be fuzzy, but churning.  Perhaps because I would now be reflecting back to Nietzsche and his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Quoting a portion of the book (from Wikipedia): People have never asked me as they should have done, what the name of Zarathustra precisely meant in my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist; for that which distinguishes this Persian from all others in the past is the very fact that he was the exact reverse of an immoralist.  Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things.  The translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work.  But the very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors,—morality; therefore he must be the first to expose it.  Not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinke --all history is indeed the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things-- but because of the more important fact that Zarathustra was the most truthful of thinkers.  In his teaching alone is truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue—that is to say, as the reverse of the cowardice of the "idealist" who takes to his heels at the sight of reality.  Zarathustra has more pluck in his body than all other thinkers put together.  To tell the truth and to aim straight: that is the first Persian virtue.  Have I made myself clear?...The overcoming of morality by itself, through truthfulness, the moralist's overcoming of himself in his opposite --in me-- that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.  This is all partially credited to an earlier god and a religion once practiced by millions and still in existence.  Wrote National Geographic: The Zoroastrian god is not a negotiating or punishing deity.  There's no notion of original sin that requires repentance.  Rather, the Zoroastrian god is more like the force of gravity, indifferent to your daily well-being.  Hmm...

     Now with that, head home and give thanks for what you have, both inside and out.  It is a time of thanks, as it is daily.  You are here, now.  To all, a wish for your time of Thanks and Giving.

*Despite the boring (that persona is referred to in the article), the topic of geology can be quite interesting.  Here's one quick excerpt from the book's review, noting that the book's author ties in her own history with the history of geology: The field of geology encompasses almost five billion years of history; to grasp it properly, you must understand everything from the distribution of minerals at the time our solar system was created to the physics of convection currents in the mantle of the Earth.  To make matters worse, even when you limit your focus to the present day, almost all of your object of study is occluded from view.  The crust of the Earth amounts to less than two per cent of the total volume of the planet, and much of it is invisible anyway -- hidden by vegetation, submerged beneath oceans, buried under layers of rock that aren’t the rocks you’re looking for.  As for everything below the crust: outside of the imagination of Jules Verne, it is entirely inaccessible.  The deepest hole human beings have ever managed to dig --the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a pet project of the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War-- goes down seven and a half miles, or about 0.2 per cent of the way to the center of the Earth.  We have had better luck sending ourselves and our instruments to outer space.  And in case you're wondering why Zarathustra may be sounding familiar, a portion of it became a poem from composer Richard Strauss which was later used in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001 (the groundbreaking film was made in 1968).