Once again...

...I am sitting in a hotel room.  Quasi-drunk off of cognitive dissonance because, so far as I can tell, I have always made the right choices in life yet am never satisfied with the outcomes.  

I'm also a little weirded out because I'm reading "Discarded Science" by John Grant, which purports to discuss scientific theories that have been discarded, yet in actuality presents them with a borderline-serious delivery that is hard to distinguish from the tone used when describing actual reality.  

So yeah, the idea of Venus originating as a comet spewed forth from Jupiter's massive (and non-existant) supervolcanoes, only to bounce around the solar system and subsequently causing all of the otherwise inexplicable Biblical miracles (flood, parting of red sea, etc.) seems a lot more plausible when delivered in a calm and reassuring tone.

Chuck is dead.  Long live Chuck!

Today I stood on top of progress and economic development from 50 years ago.  Abandoned mine strip pits.  Sheer-sided sinkholes stuck betwixt slag-berms.  Fifty years of trees and honeysuckle working to reclaim it all for modern life, with ticks, birds, turtles, a dozen species of frogs, deer, and at least one very startled garter snake as the beneficiaries.  Yet all about to be undone so that we can dig a new pit and fill it in with broken concrete and metal.  

Yes, and I definitely feel the appropriate place to put our trash is in the holes we leave in the mountains from which we dragged the coal in the first place.  I'm just not sure why we're throwing away metal and concrete.  Which one of the three R's are we forgetting here?

It's all of them isn't it?  Why is this so hard?  Or, to put it more appropriately, why is this so easy to get wrong?

Because we give up.  You can't find a kid under 12 who will tell you he wants to kill the world when he grows up.  You can't find a person under 21 who thinks "I can't do it better!"  And I don't know anyone over the age of 30 who hasn't sold out at least some of what he/she believes and dreams.  The reality is that it is so easy to just put up the white picket fence that matches the neighbor's one.  And then, you know, not eating meat is such a hassle when you go visit your farming family...how many times do you want to explain why you're eating cheese ("It's like heroin, I can't stop") and not eating beef ("Environmentally stupid.").  

Giving up isn't hard to do, its easy, and once you do, you can really make some money.  Where am I supposed to put these ideals when I decide to cash in?  Will they fit in a shoebox at the back of the closet, hidden next to other forgotten items that no longer seem to serve as anything but a reminder of what isn't?  They certainly seem to have diminished in size and importance.  

Yadda yadda yadda.  I spent my evening meal sitting in a resturant called On the Route, the 'Route' being the Mother Road, Route 66.  There I consumed an entirely delicious and not as healthy as I'd hoped dinner that made me think of how surprisingly easy it is to make something fantastic:  Just stick it in oil.  Which is how I ended up eating fried potato salad.  If you think french fries and a 'mustard sauce' doesn't sound fantastic, well, join the club.  My story is that the waitress insisted on it since I asked "What do I have to try here?"  And I assure you, she was totally right.  But that meant I spent over an hour on the treadmill afterwards....in addition to the other hour I was going to spend on it anyway.

The reality is that today I got to observe a part of the world almost nobody has ever seen.  I got to watch a sunset unimpeded by monstrosities or trees.  I stopped at the side of the road, and was rewarded by seeing a wood chuck.  How lucky am I to get to discover new things all the time?  I stopped by the side of the road today to vent my frustration with being cooped up in a car, and saw through a cluster of trees two blue herons working their way upstream through a riffle catching fish.  

I'm exhausted a lot.  And more and more I just don't care.