Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Genetically modified yappy little dogs

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(2013)

Before everyone goes bonkers with end of the world scenarios about genetically modified foods, this whole “genetic pollution” concept seems kind of ridiculous to me, because genetic pollution has been occurring for as long as agriculture has existed. Wheat itself is an artificial invention, and corn, and rice, and so are most citrus fruits and a lot of green vegetables. Potatoes were genetically modified. The marijuana that people smoke is genetically modified. It’s just that these were all modified using carefully controlled Mendelian genetics as opposed to altering the genes themselves. Farmers would look for genetic mutations–mutant grains, mutant  tubers, mutant cabbages–and using mutant offspring of those mutants, and then mutant offspring of those mutants, invented wheat, potatoes, Brussels sprouts. When you pick up a bag of variously colored and shaped potatoes, you’re looking at mutant varieties of an original potato. They are mutants in every sense of the word. As mutated as the cast of Freaks, or a Shetland pony, or a two-headed sheep. As mutated as the latest version of the Ebola virus. Something got messed up when the genes duplicated and voila, a purple potato. And in almost every historical case, especially in the grains, these genetically modified plants–these mutants–polluted already existing gene pools that they were capable of inter-breeding with, or simply out competed the native plants, with often ecologically devastating consequences. The verdant hillsides of Southern California in the spring did not exist before the introduction of Spanish farming, herding and viticulture.  It was a completely different landscape then. This sort of man-made genetic pollution goes back ten thousand years at least. These plants altered through Mendelian genetics as opposed to laboratory modifications have had profound impacts from the very beginning  of civilization, even before. Everywhere humanity has introduced agriculture it has fundamentally changed the plant life around it. This is nothing new. The only difference now is that geneticists can go in and selectively alter the chromosomes of plants and bring about specific characteristics artificially rather than letting mutations occur naturally. But keep in mind that naturally occurring mutations can also be tightly controlled. Ask any one who grows hydroponic pot, or raises guppies even. But then if that very process of artificial gene modification scares you, well, nothing I can argue will alter that. You’re just a little freaked out by science, I think.  A lot of people are. It’s nothing new.

I’m not saying that Monsanto should be allowed to lobby themselves all kinds of protections. I’m not saying that Monsanto isn’t an octopus worthy of a Frank Norris novel*. Not at all. But those are issues of corruption, monopolization and anti-small business policies. If that is your issue, well more power to you. But this fear of genetically modified food itself is bizarre when virtually everything you deal with in your daily life that is organically based–i.e., not made of mineral or wild wood–is the result of genetic modification at some point in human history. And I mean everything. Everything you wear, everything you eat, just about everything man-made you touch that is not stone or metal or perhaps carbon-based is somehow a product of genetic engineering. Even the damn cat.

Incidentally, it strikes me as incredibly ironic that the same people who adamantly opposed the Bush Administration’s ban on stem cell research are so opposed to genetic engineering in plants. They are the same thing. Just one is people, the other plants.

Now if you want to see a really creepy display of genetic engineering, creepier than any wheat, get thee down to a dog show. My god, those mutant creatures used to be wolves. Wolves. That yappy little chihuahua? A wolf. Creeps me out every time.
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* In fact, Norris’s 1901 classic The Octopus–a tale of independent wheat farmers struggling against the corrupt and monopolistic Southern Pacific Railroad–was to be the first volume of a trilogy called The Epic of Wheat.

You are what you type

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(2013)

I keep seeing posts from people ranting and raving about NSA spying…which is worth ranting and raving about, except that they are doing their ranting and raving on Facebook. Not that there’s any other way to rant and rave anymore (unless you can tweet and rave it in 140 characters). But there’s the irony… The Facebook collective community seem to believe deep down that Facebook is essentially a social network, but actually Facebook is the world’s greatest personal information gathering machine ever. Hence its colossal financial value. And no matter how much you think the NSA knows about you, Facebook and everyone who data mines its collected data know much more about you. Every single time you do anything on Facebook, even reading this very paragraph (this was originally a post), is additional data for Facebook that can be data mined by anyone. You are already being spied on. I don’t believe the NSA is actually spying on you through your computer..I believe that all they are doing is accessing the Facebook database and all the other databases that you have poured information into through registration, profile information, key words, liking and not liking, surveys, tags, online purchases, online browsing, online banking, online photos, comments, searches, MapQuest info, emailing, texting, you name it. There is scarcely a keystroke you make on your keyboard that does not show up in someone’s database. Data mining is one of the most sophisticated technologies the Internet industry has yet developed, and it only gets more sophisticated and refined. If any of you saw a profile of yourself based on the data obtained through  your internet usage you would be astounded at how much like you it is. And as far as the Internet is concerned, that profile is more you than you are.

Even if not everything I said here is happening right now, it almost certainly and imminently will be. The technology is so advanced. There will soon be a time when every commercial you see on your cable TV, every ad you see online when you open a website, and even junk snail mail and sales and fundraising calls will be personalized per a profile developed through extremely sophisticated data mining of your registration and online activity. It’s already started. The Obama campaign’s data mining was so sophisticated the Romney campaign had no idea what hit them. There ain’t a marketer in the country that failed to notice that one.

It seems to me that when you all entered the virtual world of the Internet, you gave up your selves. Not your corporeal self, but your virtual self. And your virtual self is far more important right now than your real self. You are what you type. And Facebook, the NSA and anyone else who has access to you online knows it. Including every law enforcement organization that has access to the internet. That is how they spy on you. They don’t have to ask you a damn thing. You already told them. And those are the entities that can reach right through the Internet and pick up your corporeal self and toss it in jail, or at least keep it off airliners. Your corporeal self may never hurt anybody, threaten anybody, or be anything but nice, but your digital self may have done something suspicious, somehow. And it’s too late to do anything about it now.

Sleep well.

Ontology

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(2014)

Ontology.

There’s that word again. No idea what it means. So I took a quick look at the Wikipedia entry. Ontology, it explained, is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality.

Oh. Heavy.

Then I closed the window.

But it wouldn’t close. The frame hung there.  I clicked the little x in the corner. Nothing. Again. Still nothing. Then I pulled up the Task Manager. It showed no applications running. None. But the Wikipedia ontology page was there. I could see it. The philosophical study, it still said, of the nature of being, existence or reality.

Yet  the task manager said it could not be there.

Wow.  Weird.

So I turned off the computer. All that being, existence and reality went poof.  I sat there staring at a blank screen.

Then I powered up the computer. It whirred and plinked and blinked and offered me a choice. I could go to my home page, or return to my original session.

I chose the latter.

The wikipedia page reappeared.  Ontology, it explained, is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality. But was the page really there? I clicked the little x in the corner, and it vanished. Poof.

Gone.

Ontology.

Fear of clowns

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(2012)

Coulrophobia–the fear of clowns–kind of explained. According to “How Clowns Became Terrifying” in the Atlantic, it’s John Wayne Gacy’s fault. It’s also an adult thing…most children still find them funny, as anyone who’s been to a circus can attest, and The Atlantic post cites a study here about the same. Grown ups, though, weird things that they are, get themselves all freaked out by a guy in a bozo outfit. They really get into it too, trying to out freak each other. You can see that on Facebook all the time. Someone posts a clown picture, and commenters begin one upping each other in how freaked out they are. To those of us unafflicted with the phobia (not to mention the drama queenery) it seems ridiculous. But people love their phobias, and don’t like to part with them. And face it, there aren’t as many phobias as there used to be. We once lived in a web of phobias, Freud validating and explaining every one of them. They were badges of pride, those phobias. People spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on their therapist’s couch bragging about them. Bob Newhart helping Mr. Peterson overcome his fear of geese. Woody Allen’s endless analyst jokes. Alas, Freud went the way of phrenology and people stopped bragging about their personal collection of fears. They became silly, all those phobias did, embarrassing. Decadent even. Though the fall of Freud did have one benefit for phobiacs…you can now be scared of something, irrationally scared, without it being a symptom of deep seated sexual problems. No more latent auto sexual mother loving homoerotic phallic vulvoid fantasies having something to do with hating your father. Today you can tell someone you’re deathly afraid of clowns and they won’t wonder what kind of sicko you are. They won’t shoo away the children. The end of Freudian analysis freed phobias from all that subconscious moral turpitude. Indeed, you can feel free to wonder about those who are not deathly afraid of clowns. Catch us snickering at Bozo and shoo away the kids. After all, John Wayne Gacy was a clown and he was sick as they come.

Looking back, clowns were probably at their peak in the fifties and sixties during the baby boom. Bozo, Clarabel, Hobo Kelly. Red Skelton’s clown paintings. But now, after several decades of a declining birth rate, it’s an adult world, and if adults are willing to let themselves be weirded out by a guy in a clown suit, they’ll make sure their kids are weirded out too. Or worry about them if they aren’t. Thus are superstitions made and passed on. Sometimes I wonder if the fear of clowns is some of the ptomaine remaining from the day care sex abuse hysteria in the 1980’s. That was horrible stuff, and I remember thinking from day one that it was all bullshit. The reason was that I had just read Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor–Downfall of an Autocrat. It’s a helluva book, about the fall of Haile Selassie but one story really stuck with me. In villages in parts of rural Ethiopia, when things were going bad, witchcraft was suspected. But who was the witch? They had to find the witch. A shaman chose a child, put him in something like a hypnotic spell and set him loose in the village. The child would wander about in a trance then suddenly grab the leg of a horrified adult. The child had found the witch. A very ugly death followed. The McMartin Pre-School Trial seem to unroll the same way. No matter how crazy and extreme the children’s claims were, they were almost universally believed. It was 1983, the beginning of the Reagan years, and it was like we were being plunged into primitive superstition. Scarcely a rational word was heard for weeks after that. And it spread across the country, reaching its apogee in Kern County where law enforcement degenerated into medievalism. Dozens of people jailed for what used to be called witchcraft.  The trials and prosecution were terrifying. There was no escape. No one lifted a finger to help. And when, years later, every case was eventually thrown out of court and the innocents released, not an apology was given. Irrationality means never having to say you’re sorry.

Which is what I find so fundamentally disturbing about the fear of clowns. You see, it makes no sense whatsoever. It is irrational as you can possibly be. In England people seeing clowns entertain have had break downs. They literally had to be hospitalized. Why? Because they saw a clown. But why? Because clowns are scary. But why are clowns scary? Because they are. That’s always the answer, because they are. And that’s irrationality. And irrationality is catching. Its spreads between people, and it spreads within the mind. Once you have opened yourself up to the hysterical fear of a guy in clown make up, a fear that has no logical basis whatsoever, then you have opened yourself up to all kinds of hysteria. And hysteria is only harmless for a little while. It can turn into hate really fast. The McMartin case came out of nowhere and set off a national obsession that destroyed lives. When irrationality goes viral somebody’s gonna get hurt. And that’s what creeps me out about the impassioned defenses you see and hear about the fear of clowns. They make no sense. None whatsoever. And they are too edgy to be funny. These people are genuinely scared. The more they think about clowns, the more intense they become. Imagine them in a mob. That seems so absurd. For now anyway. But you’ve seen this clown fear thing growing. Fast. Imagine it keeps growing. What if people are still freaked out by clowns a generation from now. Where does it stop? How do you stop it? How do you try to reason with something that makes no sense whatsoever?  Will a bizarre fear of clowns morph into a bizarre fear of anything else? Anyone else? What happens to hysterias in a social  media world? Where do they stop? Who is next? Is it all harmless? Or does it morph from kinky Woody Allen monologues into Kern County trying teachers for satanic child abuse? Freud meets the Old Testament and justice goes out the window. When irrational minds harden they can be terrifying. And that was before the social media. We have yet to see how the internet affects all of this, though without the internet very few of you would see a picture of Bozo and think private awful thoughts.

It’s strange how many cynical, agnostic, skeptical, intelligent people profess to being freaked out by clowns. The Satanic preschool stories of the eighties were believed by the gullible, by bigots, by those who had tossed rationality out the window when they’d become reborn Christians.  But this fear of clowns thing, it afflicts the hip and sophisticated. The people you would think would know better. But maybe they miss the irrational fears the rest of the public enjoys. They may not believe in demons or ghosts or Satan, but they believe in clowns.

Emmett Kelly scaring the hell out of you.

Emmett Kelly scaring the hell out of you.

 

Telepathy

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(2014)

So my wife is watching Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Victor Buono is telepathically bossing Charlton Heston around. Charlton Heston hears Victor Buono’s thoughts, Victor Buono can hear Charlton Heston’s thoughts. Victor Buono makes a Bette Davis joke, Charlton Heston god damns him all to hell. Then I see this story in Huffington Post…People Talk Brain to Brain For the First Time Ever. “We were able to directly and non-invasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write,”  said Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone. Apparently a brain in India thought “Hola” to a brain in France, and the brain in France thought “Ciao” right back at him. One of those Watson, my friend, I need you kind of things. Pretty cool. And so Beneath the Planet of the Apes is real. Or the telepathy part is anyway, though maybe not the silly costumes. The future is already here, apparently with or without Roddy McDowell in an ape suit. Though that was another movie..

Victor Buono reading your thoughts.

Victor Buono can read your thoughts.

Apes with extraordinary cognitive abilities

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Once you realize that every single human being there is has inside their skulls the most complex thing that we know of in the entire universe, it gets a little weird. There are over 7 billion of these brains out there right now, all over the planet, each vastly more complex than the universe it exists in (which, after all, is mostly empty space.) Dig these numbers: a human brain has about 86 million neurons, and roughly ten times that many glial cells, or upwards of a billion. Each of these neurons fires five to fifty times a second and each of these neurons has up to ten thousand connections with other neurons. The estimates for the total numbers of synapses (i.e. the connections) between our neurons run from 100 trillion to 1,000 trillion (or one quadrillion). These synapses connect via dendrites (little filaments that grow from the surface of a neuron) and there are more dendrites than are used by neuron at any given time, so the potential number of connections could be one million billion (or one quintillion). That difference between that maximum total number of actual synapses (one quadrillion) and potential synapses (one quintillion), means the brain hasn’t come close to maximizing its capacity. And it means that the brain will continue to grow in complexity (and size). The human brain currently uses but a tiny fraction of its synaptic capacity. There simply isn’t enough to think about yet to fill it up.

83% of your brain is cerebral cortex, the thing that makes you you and people people. That cerebral cortex has grown at an astonishing speed evolutionary-wise. In just a couple million years it has expanded from chimp size to what it is now. Indeed it has grown so fast that it developed the folds you see in a brain in a jar, in order to maximize the number of neurons that could be crammed in the area available inside the skull. These folds increase surface area inside a limited space (or skull size), which increases the amount of neurons and synaptic connections between them. The size of our skull is limited by the dimensions of the human female’s birth canal. Indeed, the difficulty of human birth is due entirely to the size of the homo sapien sapien cerebral cortex. Were the woman’s pelvis able to widen further (it can’t, or at least natural selection isn’t capable of widening it at the same rate as a continuously expanding skull size)–or were it detachable like a snakes jaw (it isn’t), the human skull might be even larger, since apparently skull size is one of the things that can change quickly in our species through time (look at a collection of us and our predecessors to compare.)

Now about those billion glial cells. There’s ten times as many of them because they are much smaller than neurons. We used to think all these glia simply held neurons in place–it is vital that neurons remain in place to keep the synapses firing correctly, since synapses are not actually linked together but are just close enough for an electro-chemical charge to cross between them. Glial cells also help to provide the neurons with nutrition, like oxygen or the minerals such as potassium used in neurotransmission, which neurons exhaust quickly. And glia also helps with repairs and supplies the myelin which, like the rubber around a wire, shields the current running from one neuron to another via each synapse. But now it’s known that much of the brains incredible plasticity is due to glial cells, and they are used in communication (and even breathing) and who knows what else. Glial cells, like everything else about the brain, just keep revealing more complexity.

And the complexity of all this is so vast that we are incapable of actually visualizing it. We fall back on huge numbers like quadrillion and quintillion, or compare it to the relative paucity of complexity in the known universe. What we have in our own skulls, and is our very essence, we can barely understand. But every person you see has something in their heads that is more astonishing than the entire known universe. I can tell you that without truly comprehending it myself, because it is not comprehendable. We can understand it as a fact, an abstraction, but not actually appreciate just what it means. Like how we know what infinity is, but we can’t truly comprehend what it is. Our brains have myriad capabilities beyond our capacity to understand, because our brains are smarter than we are intelligent. Basically we are apes with extraordinary cognitive abilities, but still apes.

Fleas

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[c. 1998]

The good news is that ground squirrel fleas are pretty species specific and you get bit by standing close to a vast ground squirrel colony and snapping pictures of the little devils to try out the autofocus of your new camera. The bad news is that if you are stupid enough to do so, you’ll itch to learn everything there is to know about ground squirrel fleas. Or any kind of fleas.

Your dog fleas are probably cat fleas. Human fleas are no longer that popular anymore, and with youngsters waxing pubic hair off with abandon, their little nature preserves are on the endangered list, at least in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has always been hip to fleas. As has all of California. The Spanish certainly were. Pulgas–fleas–pops up all over the map in this state. There was a whole Rancho de los Pulgas up in the Bay Area, one of the original Spanish land grants. Rich people live there now, making big money from little circuits no bigger than a flea. Not far away, ground squirrels host fleas that still carry the bubonic plague.

As scary as that name sounds, it is not the same plague that swept through Europe in the 1300s. That was a rat driven plague, the plague spreading to the human population because rats infected by the bacteria (Yersinia pestis) died and forced the rodent fleas to bite people, something they no doubt found distasteful but in a famine any host will do.

I don’t know who the fleas bit after all their human hosts died. Maybe no one, and they starved to death in little flea droves, hence ending the plague. It’s interesting that some parts of Europe were untouched by plague. Poland was spared almost entirely. But in other places–especially along the northern Mediterranean coast–the land was swept clean of humanity. You never know about fleas.

Think of it… Fleas had been feeding off rats happily for ages when somehow they became infected with the Yersinia pestis bacteria which, transferred from the flea’s stomach to the bloodstream of the rat, promptly killed the rat. Then the fleas, starving, leapt onto the next most common mammal, people, and killed them off. That left the fleas hostless and at the mercy of the frigid European winters. Death came quickly. And when fleas died, Yersinia pestis died with it.  The Black Plague was a disaster for everyone involved. People, rats, fleas and bacteria, everybody. Not a good business model.

Without doing any research at all, and in the true spirit of the Internet, I wonder what triggered this whole catastrophe. Maybe Yersinia pestis had been in rat guts for ages, but there’d been a genetic mutation–bacteria mutate at an astonishing rate–that suddenly rendered one gnarly. The flea it occupied then killed its rat host. Oops. The flea jumped ship. Another rat died. Meanwhile said flea was reproducing with the usual abandon, each baby flea carrying the mutated Yersinia pestis, and each killing its rat host. Every time a rat died the flea had to find another rat, and on and on. Soon rats are dying all over the place. Then people. I should mention that In people the plague could turn pneumonic, that is spread simply by coughing, no flea bite required at all, like a bubonic flu*. Then the thing really took off. All because some gene mutated just once in a Yersinia pestis . Again, I profess no expertise in this whatsoever. But this is the internet.

Or it could have been a parasite. I don’t mean the flea as a parasite, but something parasitizing the flea, a parasite within a parasite. Parasites make their hosts do strange things. Even a parasite with a bacterium for a host. Or maybe it was a virus that caused a change in the DNA of Yersinia pestis which rendered it fatal to rats and people. Again, this is baseless extrapolation, but this is the internet, and the weirdness of nature is fun to think about. But enough of this.

I think about fleas and I think about plague and am filled with terror. Then I remember that one of the Rothschilds, with all her money, was the greatest flea-ologist ever. Ever. She wasn’t even an entomologist (or more specifically, a siphonapterist), she just had a thing about fleas. Imagine her vast but tiny little collection. Imagine a Rothschild, with all her money, bounding after a flea bounding. The rich are different from you and I.

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* I’m leaving out the rarer septicemic variant, as it is simply too ghastly to think about.

Deep time

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(No idea when I wrote most of this….)

Next time you go up the 5 through the Grapevine, and come to the place where Highway 138 comes in, you’re crossing the San Andreas Fault. Fault zone, really. It’s fairly wide. You can see it on the highway itself, which is in permanent repair–shifting earth makes for busted up concrete. And you can see it in the land itself…take a look at that rippled terrain. It smooths out again as you go towards Gorman. And south of there is just steep hills and canyons/valleys. But right there at the junction you can see how the terrain is being pulled apart and pushed together as the plates grinds past one another. And dig the intense folding in the exposed layers of rock. Hard to imagine the force that can warp and bend solid rock like that. People and everything we are are nothing compared to that sort of force. If you’ve ever been through a serious earthquake you know what I mean. That feeling of being very small and squishy and fragile as huge forces erupt under our feet. And then there’s the whole deep time thing. Our lifetimes barely measure a century, pile up those centuries and you’ve got a hundred, maybe two hundred thousand years and, I’m sorry to say, that’s about as far as human time goes. If you want real recorded history, then you’ve got only a few thousand years. Big things happen in a few thousand years, big human things, civilizations rise and fall. But all those things are nothing in deep time. Just a finger snap. A flicker. A match flaring and going out again. A human lifespan is a nanosecond of deep time. A million years is a small integer in deep time. But the earth happens in deep time. The plates move in deep time. Continents drift in deep time. Rarely does human time and deep time intersect, though when they do it is with terrifying suddenness. The world shakes and big beautiful concrete ribbon freeway exchanges collapse.

You’ll notice that the folding along the rest of the drive is more linear…it still dips and curves, but it appears to be under much less compression, and hasn’t fragmented. I love how you go from the Pacific Plate to the North American Plate right there. The North American plate is some ancient rock, man. Going way back. In the very center–the American Midwest–it’s what they call a craton, a really ancient slab of continent. Flat, with thousands of feet of soil on top. In California the North American plate is what they call orogenic, all tore up and mussed up and stretched and pulled and broken from the plates sliding past one another. All our beautiful California topography and localized ecosystems and microclimates are the result. I think, if I remember my revisionist geology right, that the stuff on the Pacific Plate side is probably all kinds of islands and the like compressed into a mess as the Pacific plate pushed east. So southern California is a conglomerate of junk all moving northeast at a remarkably fast (tectonically speaking) three to four inches a year, while the North American plate is land that has been there a billion years through the comings and goings of various supercontinents. It’s moving, too–the entire surface of the globe is moving and will till the planet’s insides grow cold–but it moves at a comparative crawl and in a southwestern direction. The two massive plates grind past each other. Sometimes they stick in places, and when they unstick all hell breaks loose. That’s what happened to San Francisco in 1906…the plates came unstuck.

If it weren’t for earthquakes and the occasional panic when someone points out a fault running through the middle of Hollywood (perfectly visible to geologists) people would never see the evidence of slowly moving earth all around them. You’d never notice it here in Los Angeles, too many distractions, too many things to do, too many buildings and streets and parking lots and whatever cover it all up. There are faults running every which way through the Los Angeles basin–I’m sitting right on top of the Elysian Park Fault as I type–but people kind of pretend they aren’t there. And though potentially dangerous, these are all just little things compared to the San Andreas. Faults in this town are the result of all kinds of local pressures–basically the Pacific Plate being squeezed up against the North American and everything getting scrunched up and cracking like plaster on a slowly buckling wall–but the San Andreas is the big time, two plates coming together. The earth’s core is so hot that the mantle around it has liquid properties and the crust, the stuff we live on, sort of floats atop it, plates wafting in currents,  pushed by the mantle emerging from great fissures in the ocean floor and forming new crust. The plates are shoved into each other. Sometimes one pushes on top of the other and the loser is subducted back down into the mantle. Earthquakes of terrifying power can occur then, bigger than San Francisco’s even–Anchorage was virtually destroyed by one like that in 1963. Japanese civilization sits precariously atop another such subduction zone. Luckily here in California the plates exist in relative peace, pushing past each other. A little rough, but nothing tectonically existential. I know this may seem relative if you live in, say, San Francisco or Santa Cruz or the Coachella Valley or even Gorman. A 7.5 or so earthquake is just as scary to think about as a 9.5. You’ll still lose all the fine china. But the street won’t suddenly drop twenty feet.

Up the Grapevine you can see the effects of all this movement. You can see it because that whole pass is pretty much beyond the reach of civilization. Miles and miles of beautiful nothing and the occasional ranch house or empty farm or inevitable McDonalds. There’s all that land there, all those hills and bluffs and cliffs revealing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even, in spots, millions of years of slow geologic history. You can see the forces at work. But only a frame at a time. Our entire lifespans are only a few feet in geologic time. If you live to be eighty years old and live in Los Angeles the land will have moved north with you on it maybe eight feet. Two hundred human lives laid end to end would see the Pacific Plate move northwest less than a mile. That’s it. And though relatively fast in tectonic terms, it’s not much progress. Just about nothing. Meaningless even. People will come through the Grapevine a thousand years from now and see all those rocks, and the rocks will be in the same place, pretty much, as when I last looked. A few landslides will shift things around, some flash floods. Otherwise, though, you’d never know anything had moved at all. A thousand years from now (and one hundred and twenty five feet from here) you and I will be long forgotten. That is just a hint of geologic time. That is the deep time we flit about in, changing nothing.

The San Andreas Fault...dig the layers there. They were originally laid down horizontal and quite flat. Now they've been compressed and rolled into a strudel. How much time are we seeing there, a million years? More?

The San Andreas Fault…dig the layers there. They were originally laid down horizontal and quite flat. Now they’ve been compressed and rolled into a strudel. How much time are we seeing there, a million years? More?

The earth beneath our feet

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(This was a quick Facebook post and is a bit of a mess but I’ll leave it as is….)

In wonderfully telegraphic prose, a comrade posted “earthquake in japan now. pacific rim is heating up. cali needs to be ready?”

A ha. Rocks. Earthquakes. The very earth beneath our feet. After myself, my other favorite subject. I actually decided against a career in geology for a career in punk rock, epilepsy and writing about me.  Say a’a, the doctor said, and out flowed this:

About 90% (I began) of the world’s earthquakes happen in the Pacific Rim’s Ring of Fire, so it’s shaking all the time. There’s no connection between California and Japanese quakes, though. Our quakes happen because the eastern spreading portion of the Pacific plate (and a smaller connected plate) are being pulled under the North American plate, while Japanese quakes happen because Japan sits where the western spreading portion of the Pacific plate is being pulled under the plate that eastern Siberia is on. The fault zones are unconnected.

In California the plates are sort of moving past one another, the Pacific plate sliding beneath the North American plate at an angle, while in Japan the plates together slam head on. Subduction is not a pretty process. Geology, mostly, is violence in slow motion, a few inches a year. Those undulating layers you see in California road cuts are layers once horizontal subjected to immense pressures. The bend slowly. Sometimes, though, you see layers shattered, as if they exploded. That’s because often they did. You might be looking at the frozen remains of earthquakes. Rock busts into fragments and the surface above shakes. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot. The San Andreas Fault is where two tectonic plates slide past each other at about an inch and a half per year. Sometimes they catch and remain stuck till enough pressure builds up that they uncatch and destroy San Francisco. But there is vastly more energy to be released when plates collide directly than when they slide past each other, hence the frequency and power of Japanese quakes. Japan actually is the result of two (or is it three, I can’t remember) plates being dragged under (or subducted) beneath two other much larger plates. In Japan you have these two or three separate collisions (not just the one I alluded to in an earlier paragraph, keeping things simple), and each collision is vast and inexorable, and all that friction and compression and crunching and pushing causes nearly incessant earthquakes of sometimes unbelievable power and destructiveness. Indeed, Japan itself is a result of these collisions, with sea bed forced upward and vast amounts of the liquid rock mantle being released from cracks in the crust through volcanos. Geologically it’s a helluva mess, volatile and unstable and virtually quivering and literally quaking with pent up seismic energy.  Just be thankful, Californians, that we have nothing even remotely similar to this. (They do in Alaska, which is how Anchorage was leveled in 1964, the Pacific Plate suddenly lurching violently and shoving itself beneath the North American Plate, leaving one side of the street thirty feet higher than the other.) The San Andreas may pop off every couple generations. Japan has giant quakes every couple years. They handle them with aplomb. Their buildings don’t fall down. Port au Prince Tokyo is not. It’s not even Fillmore.

As for the devastating Nepali quakes these past several days, those are the result of India slowly crashing into Asia for the past 50 million years. It’s weird to think that in that span of time there have probably been a million huge quakes in what is now the Himalayas, just like these last two. A million quakes raising the earth six inches each time is what created the Himalayas. The top of Mount Everest was at the bottom of a shallow sea a half billion years ago. The rocks way up there are full of fossil crinoids. Imagine how many earthquakes it took to raise them 30,000 feet into the air.

Next time you pass through a roadcut, take a look at the rocks exposed. The violence in those bent and twisted layers is incredible. So much power moving a couple millimeters a year. The earth moves in millions of years. We are nothing, our entire lifespan a geologic nanosecond, like we aren’t even here.

Still, I love rocks.

A roadcut on the I-40 outside Kingman AZ, with a layers of sediments as horizontal as when they were deposited being split in two by a young fault. Come back in a few million years see what it looks like.

A roadcut on the I-40 outside Kingman AZ, with layers of sediments as horizontal as when they were deposited, now being split in two by a young fault. Come back in a few million years to see what it looks like.

Last sentence

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I didn’t start working as a print journalist until 2004. I quit in 2011. Watching print journalism’s disintegration from ringside seats was incredible. Writing for one of the nation’s leading alternative weeklies as alternative weeklies found their raison d’etre disappearing was almost surreal, the medium seemed to go from important to unimportant in months. At the same time I had a front row seat to watching radio begin to disappear, as jazz radio seemed to suffer the worst first. I saw first hand in a particularly brutal way how online journalism is disintegrating–I can’t write about that under fear of being sued, however. I have watched the recording industry fall apart for years. I’ve seen live paid performances disappear. I’ve seen photography destroyed. And now, since I’ve been blogging (just because I write incessantly, not as a professional move) I am watching blogging itself drowning in its own words. There are so many words, they’ve suffocated readers, turned the blogosphere anoxic. The Internet undermines everything. When everything is free and instantly accessible, no one will pay for anything. Pay to read, pay to listen, pay to view, or pay to run ads. Even if it not everything is free or accessible, something else just as good (or good enough, anyway) is free and instantly accessible so there’s no point. And there is really nothing that can be done about this. There is no working revenue model, as they say. Nobody gets paid. Words especially are rendered cheap as air.

The only revenue model anymore seems to be page hits. Every time a viewer clicks a link, a couple pennies change hands. So the only thing of any genuine financial significance on a website are links. Writing becomes nothing but content, stuff to fill the pages around the ads. Whether that writing is good or not is not of any significance at all. As long as it drives people to those ads, as long as it gets people to click the link. Music is no longer of particular importance in western civilization. It’s nice, but it’s not essential. And writing is quickly following. It’s nice to see good writing, but it’s no longer anything people really care about. It’s rather irrelevant. It’s time consuming. It certainly has no way to pay for itself. Writers made a dollar a word once because people once read all the words. If you wrote a five hundred word piece, they read all five hundred words. If you were a really good writer they demanded more. Now people read the first couple lines. Maybe the first paragraph. Sometimes the second paragraph. Sometimes they’d skip to the last paragraph to read how it comes out. They don’t with that bother anymore. Whatever they need to know has to be in the first paragraph or they will never know. And if no ones reads more than a few dozen words of a five hundred word piece, it is no longer worth a dollar a word. In fact, you’ll be lucky to get a dime a word.

It’s a weird time. There are few famous writers anymore, and almost no famous journalists. Everybody is a writer today, and the bar has been set so low by blogs and sponsored content that the very concept of good writing is becoming obsolete. Perhaps it is obsolete already, as people do not read enough of any single piece for the quality to matter. Writers have been trained by centuries of tradition to build up to the big finish, that memorable final line. But no one reads that far now. Everything past the first couple lines is probably wasted. It’s weird to think that of all the writing there is on the internet, only a tiny fraction of percent ever gets read. That is trillions of word wasted. Interesting prospect, that, in evolutionary terms. Our brains have, over the past five thousand years, developed this extraordinary talent for writing language. This is a really new thing. Mass literacy is only two centuries old (beginning in the United States and spreading globally since) and has had a profound impact on humans as a society and humans as a species. Cultures that can read and write thrive, those that can’t disappear. Languages without a written form will disappear quickly once a language with a written form moves in. Literacy has in a very brief time transformed the human world in many ways as profoundly as the evolution of spoken language itself. Yet suddenly almost nothing we use written language for is ever read. I suspect that much of the prose that has been written in this past decade has never seen by a pair of eyes. It is written, posted online in some form or another, and ignored. Texts, of course, are almost invariably read, but texting is more like speech than written language. But of all the writing on all those billions of websites? How much of that is ever read by anybody? Even individual page views mean in almost every case that only a couple sentences were read, nearly always at the top of the page. Most everything else on the page is little read and quite likely unread. Imagine if nearly all the words ever uttered were never heard. That’s what is happening with written language now, with nearly all the words being written never being read. Yet human beings are probably writing more now than we ever will again. This is the absolute apogee of the written word. There is writing everywhere, incredible amounts of it. But if no one is reading it, why is it being written? Language evolved as an ability to communicate. We talk to pass on information, basically. Written language evolved for the same reason. Yet now, in I would guess is most of the time, no information is being transmitted by written language because no one is reading what someone wrote. Semiotically written language is failing most of the time. You need to have a reader. Without readers, writing doesn’t have much of a useful function. Evolution, whether genetic or memetic, does not abide the unused for long. Frills fall by the wayside, forgotten. Nearly all writing is in that category now, useless and forgotten. There is simply no reason for it to exist at all.

In twenty years, perhaps in a decade, there will be less writers and less words. The trillions of words on the internet now will slow to a relative trickle. Everyone writes now because there used to be a profession called writing. There isn’t much of one now. Kids will not grow up to be writers when there are no readers. We will still read, and still write. But writing like we do it now, in books and stories and articles, that is probably ending. Perhaps the only ones of you who would adamantly disagree with that prediction are the handful who have gotten to this last sentence.

last line great gatsby