I Know Astrology Is Bullshit, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope

By: | May 11, 2018

I used to snicker at people who religiously read their daily horoscopes. Astrology is not science. Not even close. “No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates,” some exasperated person at NASA wrote in a Tumblr post debunking a rumor that NASA had changed the zodiac signs.

I share that NASA communicator’s irritation. (If NASA hasn’t convinced you, the University of California Museum of Paleontology has created a handy checklist to help you determine whether astrology is scientific. Spoiler: it’s not.) Yet I’ve also come to understand why people got hooked. One day last year while wrestling with my book writing, I accidentally read the horoscopes in my local paper and realized that they were actually just snippets of useful writing advice dressed up as astrological wisdom.

And that’s how I began reading Holiday Mathis’s syndicated horoscopes with an eye toward finding answers to my creative conundrums. Here are a few of the insights that I found. Continue reading →

End stage capitalism in the multiverse

By: | May 10, 2018

It started with the maggots. One hot Australian January morning, unlucky beachcombers had discovered millions of the fleshy nubs orgiastically crawling over each other and everything else on Newport Beach.

No one knew where they had come from, and the beach-storming maggots left without an explanation. But when they returned, it was for good. They were soon joined by hundreds of fetid whale corpses that washed into the harbour in their wake. Continue reading →

How Things End

By: | May 9, 2018

Some of the best shows on television should have ended before they did. Dexter, Weeds, some even think The Office dragged its feet out the door a few seasons too many. There are shows that are still going that really should be put out of their misery already (looking at you, Family Guy).

It’s hard to end something. It’s hard to figure out when to stop. Is it when the show stops making you enough money to be worth it? Is it when you stop being creatively fulfilled? Is it when enough other things come along that you really hate saying no to that you realize that maybe you should stop doing one thing so you can start doing another?

I think about how things end a lot. In part because I make a show that has no pre-set end point. I host and produce a podcast called Flash Forward. It’s a show about the future. Every week is a new future. Like many radio shows and podcasts, Flash Forward doesn’t follow a singular narrative plot. I could produce episodes of Flash Forward until I die. Which means that ending the show will be a choice. Assuming I don’t die first. Knock on wood for me people.  Continue reading →

And then there was weed

By: | May 8, 2018

These things always look impossible until they are inevitable. Cannabis is to be legal across Canada starting this summer. Hard at work on winning hearts and minds for the plan, our Prime Minister tells the story of his late brother Michel, who crashed his car as a 23-year-old with two joints stashed in his glove compartment. Their well-connected former-Prime Minister father made the criminal charges “go away”, but the whole thing didn’t sit right with Trudeau—the same episode would have marred the future of many another kid. As it happened, Michel would die in an avalanche a few months later.

We Canadians are some of the most rabid pot smokers in the world – 30% of young people use it, at last count—and the government’s stated reason for legalizing weed is to cut off a large income stream from organized crime. It’s a sizeable industry, and it’s not just about smoking. Last summer the sale of cannabis oils (10,000kg) started to exceed the sale of the flower. The new deal will be based on similar limits to those set by Colorado and Washington State. Adults 18 and up can grow four pot plants at home, carry up to 30 grams, alter it into edibles themselves, and so on.

Bogged down for decades in regulatory paperwork, medical cannabis researchers are getting excited about what might now be possible on the research front once things relax around the drug. “A lot of physicians meet patients who know far more about cannabis than they do,” says Mark Ware, who was on the task force that advised the government on the Cannabis Act. “I happily confess that it’s challenging when somebody comes in with papers and evidence, and starts saying, look, there’s this study that was done in Boston in 1965.” Continue reading →

Home/Not-Home

By: | May 7, 2018

I grew up near stands of what passes in northeast Illinois for old-growth forest.  The definition of “old-growth” is apparently a work in progress.  I take it to mean a forest that was there before a particular part of the country was cleared and settled, and in northeast Illinois that was pretty late, around the 1830’s.*  So these forests were named for local farm families that my family knew:  Egermann Woods, Goodrich Woods, Greene Valley Woods.  One forest that wasn’t named was behind our little farm — bottom of the hayfield, across the creek, and up a rise to the woods.

The woods was shaded by the treetops, not much on the ground except leaves, big rocks, moss, some grasses I think, and for sure wildflowers: shooting stars, dutchman’s breeches, may apples, jack-in-the-pulpits, spring beauties,** and in one place, yellow violets.

The woods had no suggestions for what to do except to look at things, sit down and lean against a big tree for a while, then get up and see what was beyond the next tree.  Back by the creek was a willow, easy to climb, that I sat in a lot, not thinking.  We weren’t supposed to go down to the woods — partly because it was someone else’s property and mostly because our mother couldn’t see us — so that was part of the draw.  The real reason we snuck down there over and over, time after time, for years was – I don’t know quite how to say it. It was deeply comfortable, you could breathe slowly, you felt lighter, it felt like you’d come home.

So decades later, in the city on the east coast, when my neighborhood got its shorts in an uproar over a local private school’s plans to clean out a tiny woods, I went to look at the woods.  The trees were scrawny, the ground was covered with ivy and brambles, and I thought, “What a wretched little woods.” The school could have cut that woods to the ground and the only ones suffering would be the displaced rats. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 5, 2018

April 30 – May 4, 2018

Sorry, this is late today. But I finished a hard story, the lilacs are going for world domination, the robins think they own the place, and I was unable to stay inside and type.

Why is it that writing about people who are normally-good is so much easier than writing about people who are just-plain good? And who are those good people anyway? I don’t have answers but I sure do love and admire those guys.

Cassie goes amongst the anti-vaxxers, hoping to find rationales. hopes, fears, something with which she can find common ground.  Instead she runs into rock-hard adamance and some really dicey genetics.

Maybe feeling a little down and house-bound, Becky heads out of the city and into this country’s heartland, and figures out as she goes why it’s called that, the heartland.

The Atacama Desert, says Sarah, makes the Sonoran Desert look like a rain forest, it’s so dry and lifeless.  Except for the underground creatures and the birds, the poor birds who drowned in the desert.

Craig is rummaging around in the outback again, this time with a sculptor who’s interested in geology and a large, unlikely rock.

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Photo: Brian Wolfe

 

 

 

 

The Way the Earth Shapes Us

By: | May 4, 2018

I lay under a boulder not long ago with a sculptor. The rock must have been 20 tons or more, balanced on a sandstone pedestal hardly bigger than the crook of my elbow. The actual points of contact between the boulder and its support had been winnowed by the wind down to almost nothing. The rock above protected to rock below, which supported the rock above; a geologic symbiosis. We marveled at the notion the boulder might fall, and which way it would go, tipping over and missing us by inches as we scrambled backwards, or a straight down on us like a pancake.

The sculptor was John Grade, a Seattle artist I’d been corresponding with for the last decade and a half. (His name is pronounced grah-dee.)We sent each other letters and curious objects we’d found, a curled rusted piece of metal, an abandoned, pear-shaped wasp nest. He’s a sculptor of natural forms, somewhere between Andy Goldworthy and Lee Bontecou. Lately he’s been rendering pingos, spending time on foot in remote Arctic landscapes, armed for bear, studying these giant, blistered ice forms pushed up through the tundra, some 60 feet tall. This summer, he’ll build his version of a pingo in the Anchorage Museum. He told me people will be able to enter the massive object. They’ll walk through its icy interior, able to see the invisible construction, while he mills with them, plainclothes, unnoticed, listening to their reactions. Continue reading →

The ocean mummies

By: | May 3, 2018

The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe saw in pelvises and skulls the curves of desert hills. But the Atacama is more naked still than the Southwestern deserts she loved. “When you think of desert, probably you think of Sonora or Chihuahua,” a Chilean biologist recently told me—the vast, brutal deserts of northern Mexico. “They are forests compared to Atacama.”

Pause and listen for a moment: Where does the sound you hear arise? In most places, it comes from life and water. Voices and the growl of cars. The burble of rain and rivers. The rustle of leaves. In the Atacama, what sound there is comes from wind. What life there is goes underground: Spiders lizards birds, finding homes in the cool dark of holes. When Rudulfo Amando Philippi, a German naturalist, made a famous expedition across this desert in the mid-19th century, he improvised by sheltering in the shadow of his mule.

But at night, the Atacama does have a song, and it comes from the sea to the west, on the other side of the mountains. Continue reading →