April fools

2025 has been a barrage of April Fool's Days with absolutely no let up. If you've ever spent a day rolling around in the roiling waves of pounding surf - it's that sensation held in your blood and body - long after, as you drift off in the safety of dreamtime. 

In a tropical ocean the water is body temperature warm - you can stay in it for hours quite enjoyably. Cocooned in the soothing saline broth and froth - as the sun bakes overhead and water washes away all soreness. Bobbing on the tide as bubbles prickle and pop all around. 

Dulling sounds, lulling senses, floating thoughts, sloshing time. Catastrophe and chaos pushed off and pended. 

America in siege

I don't believe in coincidences. Yesterday's breach of the Capitol is a day that will go down in infamy. That it happened on the Feast of the Epiphany is a true revelation. 

A victorious Trump in 2016 was terrible enough but this loser Trump is choosing to exit in as vile a way as he is capable of. Heaven forbid he be the sacrificial lamb to a slaughter of his own instigation. 

Our nation owes much to these courageous Senate aides who kept electoral votes safe.

"Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country." ~ Neal Gabler, 2016

to live and die in the Anthropocene

“This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force." - Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene by ROY SCRANTON

There’s a word for this new era we live in - the Anthropocene. 

The first snow of the year fell here in New York City today. While half way around the world the Philippines was just flattened by what we are calling the worst storm known to man - two categories higher in intensity than Sandy and a hundred miles swifter.

Family and friends are safe and sound - not so with my hometown, Bacolod City. Though by no means the hardest hit neither was it spared. It has been declared a disaster area, with 5,000 homes wiped out all along the coast. 

Too many areas remain isolated - even choppers cannot make it to most of the hardest hit places. Too many villages wiped out. People there walk endlessly - in search of food and drinking water - intent to keep dry and bury their dead. 

Now the vigil begins. Challenging to send love and support from so far away and not cave with the rising death counts and horror stories of chaos and corruption. 

Because we live here and love the place we are the most invested.

The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, food and energy markets - or even to our “way of life” - though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable.

The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our own humanity and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millennium/s - it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we inhabit now. 

The Buddhist Christian in me takes comfort that when we die, we are not bound by the same physical laws of time and place anyway.