Other than substituting a saltier four letter word with the soft gauzy nothing “Stuff” there is truth to this unexceptional saying. (Moon dust will show up later in this post)
I lead today’s posts with this saying because I have half a dozen things – “stuff” – to do today, most of no great consequence. I know that sounds fatalistic but I am hardly a fatalist. Had I been I would not have run for political office 15 times. Neither would I have helped lead the charge against a dim witted school building boondoggle. I know that in four billion or so years our sun will wink out and I know that that leaves Earth 16 future stretches of a quarter billion years (about the length of time that dinosaurs “ruled” the planet) for other genera of animals to rise and fall after man should he succumb to his stupidities and extinct him/herself.
If you presume that extinction is immediate as Christian fundamentalists do then the Earth still has roughly 400 five-million-year stretches (5 mill being the length of time modern humans have existed) to follow our imminent demise – Praise the Lord!
So here is a short list of the “stuff” I hope to accomplish today:
1. carefully read five or more emails from an acquaintance who promised to give me extensive details about a subject I find very interesting. I got the first of the emails last night and realized I would want to read them carefully and possibly respond with email of my own.
2. Post some observations about the movie “Man in a gray flannel suit” which I finally saw last night on The Movie Channel.
3. Work for two hours at the Damiano Soup Kitchen this afternoon serving food. I’ve been doing that off an on since Ronald Reagan was President.
4. Set up a Pay Pal Account so people can contribute to my campaign on line.
5. Write a withering post criticizing the leaders of the Duluth School District for letting our credit rating slip to less than mediocre. This is based on today’s grim story in the DNT about Moody’s reappraisal of our finances.
6. Get a big file box and start filing campaign related papers into it so that my campaign doesn’t become too disorganized.
7. Continue wading through the 2/3rds of the loose paper piles that have accumulated over the summer and spring. It consists of mostly low level information that I couldn’t bring myself to toss out but which needs review before I either recycle the paper or file the data away.
8. Continue reading the equally thick piles of newspapers that I set aside to review more carefully before clipping them for filing.
9. Put today’s Not Eudora Column into my old Snowbizz webpage and link to it so it can be read as well online as well as in today’s Reader Weekly. (In fact I’ll take a brief break from writing this post to do just that)
Today I have already done a little bit of work.
1. I watered the sod I laid between my house and my neighbor’s house.
2. I read the newspaper.
3. I attempted a fix of my recycling glut. Two weeks ago my daughter forgot to set out a full to the brim container of recyclables for pick up. That meant I needed to find room for additional recycling for the following two weeks and I ended up taking it to my daughter’s house and put it in her bin till she had no room. Her crammed full bin still has a week to go before pick up so I went over to her house today and emptied a foot thick pile of cardboard to give her some room and put it in a cardboard box which I will set beside my recycling. Once my recycling is picked up today I’ll be able to put the recyclables in my house into my bin and there is enough room now in my daughter’s bin for her to cram a little more in until her’s is emptied next week. Whew! That’s a lot of explanation for a tiny little aggravation.
Why do I post such trivia? It seems to build readership. I post some “stuff” about my life to: 1. demonstrate that I’m pretty ordinary. 2. to prove that I’m pretty busy and not a complete loafer. 3. prove that I have a sense of humor about myself 4. and provide relief from the often distressing stuff I frequently post on the blog.
As I’ve explained before my favorite magician is Harry Anderson who shows his audiences how his magic works and then proceeds to use what he’s shown them to completely fake them out. It must work for blogs too because readers keep coming back to read what I write.
I just checked out my blog statistics a bit ago and in the first half of this month I’ve gotten almost as many visitors as I did in all of June – over 4,500. This time it has been without the aid of the curious foreign audiences which for some mysterious reason dropped by early this summer. There was a boost at the beginning of the month that I’m guessing was prompted by tourists picking up the last Reader Weekly who probably googled my URL on their cell phones. it was a four-day phenomenon that coincided with the four days surrounding the weekend.
The big story of the past few days has been the rioting and blood shed in Egypt. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it and it almost goes without saying that the puny problems of our foolish School Board pales beside this. Its worth noting that the bloodshed was prompted by people whose votes were stolen from them. In that it has much in common with our local furor over the Red Plan. Those who rooted for the Red Plan and condemned the voteless project’s detractors should think on this. A lot of discord could be avoided if this was taken into consideration. Living by Keith Dixon’s “I’ll ask for forgiveness rather than permmission” philosophy of life has its perils. It led to years of protests, 40 kids in our high school classes and another downgrade of our bond rating.
I began by writing about the future of the Earth and a conversation with a Christian fundamentalist twenty years ago.
I had sculpted three huge dinosaurs in my yard out of snow the year before I called a locksmith to replace the locks on my home’s doors. The dinosaurs were on his mind. As I recall he was of the opinion that humans had walked on Earth with them owing to his notions about the Bible’s timeline. I said something about science and he gave me his take on the folly of scientists.
Apparently before the moon launches of the 1960’s he had taken to heart the wild speculations of some scientists about what we would find on the moon. Some had theorized that the moon would be covered by hundreds and thousands of feet of dust that had accumulated there over millions of years in the absence of an atmosphere. He told me that when Neil Armstrong and company landed on the hard surface of the Moon he realized how fallible scientists were and no longer paid them much attention.
Sounds like today’s Republican Party. I’ve visited his shop many times through the years and he always has Rush Limbaugh on the Radio.
As I said I’m not a fatalist. Life is sweet, or can be. Finding a purpose in life, or making one, makes life just that much sweeter. I’ll die long before humankind winks out and my fate is not much more important in the long run than the red ants I ran over backing out of the garage yesterday as they came scurrying back to their nest with smaller captured black ants in their mandibles which they were going to enslave.
For myself I’ve determined that to make my life sweeter I must do my best to make a sweet life possible for my children and grandchildren and what I hope will be a long succession of my descendants who are quite likely to evolve way past today’s version of humanity as they travel on to every corner of our galaxy.
But, before that happens I have many days ahead of me to make up lists of stuff for me to do. If I’m lucky and live to be one hundred that will give me another 14,400 days. Getting the Duluth School district out of debt is on that list. Only the voters can spare me messing around with that task by handing the chore to some other candidate. Its their choice and as long as they can exercise their right to cast that vote I won’t need to riot in the streets.
