Planet Earth

I'm in my loft, David Attenborough speaking through my headphones with his soothing voice and comforting accent, explaining the cycles of the northern seal. As a seal waits for shoals of fish to feed herself and her young--shivering in an Alaskan snowstorm, I sit in layers. my blanket cocoon only giving way to the electric heat pumping out of my space heater. The image on my dvd player takes me around the planet and demonstrates its complex, dramatic beauty. I hear the muffled exclamations and song'n'dance rehearsals in the main space for Slim's "Super Secret Circus Social Club" grand opening "Klown Alley Muppet Show." But I'm pulling away from people right now. I want to be alone and do things that I want to do: work on my bike, make collages, read, domesticate, and watch Planet Earth. I am reminded of my time spent in Italy, alone and often in loneliness. But I was more productive than I have seen before or since. I am revisiting this place of productive alone-ness, only this time without the loneliness. I just want to feed my brain and be productive.

Animals breed when times are good: when there's plenty of food and good weather, low predators, etc. When chances for survival are the highest. These times are predictably cyclical. Each year has a high season and a low season. In the high season, when food is abundant, conditions for breeding are at their highest. The seal experiences its high season in the summer. The polar bear, winter.

For us here, food is always abundant. It's everywhere. The abundance that we require for our cycles is CA$H MONEY. Some with low cash crops may breed as a way of receiving income (welfare). Some others who are without breed for lack of education in connection with their religious beliefs. These poor keep populating the planet with armies of sheep: Capitalism's brilliance in action. And the educated poor (such as myself) may never breed for lack of stability and consistent income. Kids are expensive! It's not a shoal of fish or seasonal blooming algae that I wait for. What I wait for is financial abundance, as it was created for me by those that built the system and those that keep it going. And, like the polar bear swimming in search of seals in northern summer seas, I swim into the wide open with no intention of turning back. Doom and Fortune await me just over the horizon.

This is what optimism for the future has become. Just the opportunity to evolve and for other species to share in that opportunity. I don't understand how it's been possible for such control, corruption, and destruction to occur so sneaky and blatant. People work as a team to manipulate the many to feed the will of the few. These are the organizers of our systems. Like the humpback whale 'bubble fishing', tricking the fish, trapping them and feeding, these people harvest our time and our skills. And we, like the herring of the Pacific, enter into the trap. We're driven by our own needs and wants, and are too short-sighted to see what is waiting for us in the darkness ahead. This cycle continues around and around, though our cycles aren't with the seasons. They span generations, which gives plenty of time to distort it just enough to keep it going.