The Grasshopper Sunday Edition, June 18, 2023: Don’t Mess With Mother Nature

Too late

Photo by Augustine Wong on Unsplash

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”​

— Glenn Gould​ (hat tip to Tim Ferriss)

After quite a bit of rain this week, the sun is returning and with it that smoke from Canadian wildfires burning north of here. It’s not clear whether it will be high up or closer to the ground, which is the point when they started telling even healthy people to stay inside.

As you may know if you have been reading The Grasshopper for a while, I am not particularly fond of dystopian fiction. Reality is dystopian enough these days, though writing about real events in real time is very different than fiction, especially speculative fiction.

But, boy are we in a dystopian place these days.

I would like to be writing more climate-related stories but the positive ones are not easy to find, especially as the weather is front and center all over the country. And so is the constant propaganda from the fossil fuel lobby.

Recently an industry group from the propane business have been running extremely misleading ads that open up with a line about moving towards a sustainable future. However, the spokesperson immediately qualifies that getting there will take many years and trillions of dollars, throwing cold water on anything positive. Then he tells us how wonderful propane is without mentioning it is not clean power, not even close.

This slick ad uses all the tropes they typically trot out. First, a positive message about sustainability that we need to achieve but not for a very long time and at huge cost. Then fact-free claims about a petroleum product.

Remember, anything that burns releases carbon. But people believe this stuff when they are constantly exposed to what are essentially lies. I’ve written a lot of ad copy and it’s easy to see the factual gaps in this stuff.

The reality is that we are moving very rapidly towards a much more sustainable near future. But the ad agency people who make this garbage should look at their kids and grandkids and rethink their willingness to take this dirty money, dished out by an industry that has been gouging us for the past few years while they collect unprecedented profits.

Sorry for the rant. But I guess I got my desire to write about climate out of my system for now.

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Dad Day

It’s Father’s Day, a holiday I don’t remember celebrating much- it wasn’t my family or my father’s thing to celebrate these days, which always felt like reasons to spend money buying gifts or rounds of golf. But my dad passed fifteen years ago and somehow I found myself reading reminiscences of fathers from past issues of the New Yorker which showed up in my inbox.

One was of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, by his son, and it was a poignant portrait of a man who only came alive when on stage. Another was writer Ann Patchett writing of not one, but three fathers, all very different. So, of course, I have been thinking of my father who I always think of as a kind, gentle man who could also be very charming. I miss him in the small ways we really miss people.

My mother, Mary Ann, is still alive and will turn ninety-two in a few weeks. Somehow she still lives in the house where we grew up, watches TV, reads incessantly, and retains her eccentricness without any apparent intellectual loss, excepting a little forgetfulness. I’m not anywhere near 92 but I can relate to the forgetfulness.

I have a theory that says that if you make it past ninety and retain your wits, you are likely to live a long time beyond that. My maternal grandfather, who I never met, lived to 96, my paternal grandmother to the same age, and her sister, my great aunt, lived to an astounding 107. So there’s hope that I might crank out a few more books.

Last night I found myself watching the US Open at ten o’clock pm, an anomaly made possible because it is being played in LA. Watching golf is a kind of meditation for me, though I’m not sure where it started. I’m not all that sporty. 

Writing is a way of constructing memories that never existed until a writer made them out of thin air. It is a fascination of mine and my first novel is called The Rememberers. It deals with the unreliability of memory. My second novel, Trespass Strike, also has its share of memory references as the protagonist works to leave her past behind after the suicide of her husband.

So, my mind is on the past this early Sunday afternoon. But it is a perfect day outside and I need to get away from this device and go make some memories.

Did you write today?

Martin Edic, son of Kenneth Raymond Edic. Miss you dad.

851 words

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