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Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke(y)

Dusty Leave a comment

Remember Smokey the Bear? “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!”

Yeah, that’s the one. I grew up seeing Smokey commercials and signs and decals. I never thought much about it; I took it as given, as so dead obvious that it didn’t need to be said, that I would of course be careful and try not to start forest fires or wildfires. I never took it in the way it has been turned into a joke – though I do think the joke is funny.

This one:

I especially like the image in the third panel, because to me it implies that Smokey has a deeper reality than the one presented in the other three panels, a far grander role in the universe – which to me implies that he is, in fact, an avatar of some greater cosmic or supernatural force, and lil Timmy would be wise to obey, even if the other people around them are telling Timmy that the bear is mad and should not be listened to; I also really like that Timmy still shows doubt in the fourth panel. Because he knows: the bear may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

I never took it that way, not really; but I have come to understand it now. It’s two things: first, English pronouns are stupid, and we should never have abandoned “Thee” and “Thou;” and second, the meme, the joke, are representative of the way we too often view our world and our role in it. It’s that second one I want to speak to, to try to debunk – though I am also happy to speak to that first one.

Sure, why don’t we start with that. You see, the problem is that we only have one second-person pronoun: you. In all instances of pronoun use (other than the possessive pronoun “yours,” but that’s a somewhat different situation), which is even dumber – because while the subjective first person is “I” or “We,” and the objective first person is “me” or “us,” and the third person gives us several options for subject and object pronouns – he/him, she/her, it/it, they/them – for second person it is only “You.” You are my friend. You are reading this post. I published it for you. I give you my thoughts. If we had retained “thee” and “thou,” then the singular second person would be easier and clearer – Thou are (art) the chosen one; the task of preventing forest fires belongs to thee – and only the plural second person would continue to be dumb – You (all) are good people, but too much weight has been placed on you (all). And it would be dumb in a way that couldn’t be fixed by the use of “y’all,” though that particular colloquialism does solve the singular/plural debacle. (Except we often use plural pronouns to represent a single person…)

So the problem with pronouns, applied to Smokey, is that we hear the singular “you” – meaning my own solitary self, just Lil Timmy – because we are reading it, because we are watching the commercials, because we are seeing the signs, all individually, in our own heads. Smokey is speaking to ME and ME alone. But he’s not: he’s speaking to all of us. Only WE can prevent forest fires. Meaning humans. All of us.

How do I know? Because here are two more Smokey ads.

See, this is the distinction that Smokey is trying to make: the animals, in their infinite cuteness (Sorry: the bunnies are infinitely cute. The foxes look concerned. Smokey believes in us, and the elk is trusting Smokey to make the call and is warning us not to let the bear down. The quail [Pheasant? Guinea fowl? What is that large round bird next to the raccoon, the one with the awesome crest and the fashionable glasses?] is already disappointed in us, and is giving up – and I’m pretty sure that all of the other animals, the squirrel, the fawn, the skunk, the raccoon, and the duck, are warning us about the chipmunk. Who, since it is sitting on a perfectly flat stump, probably has a chainsaw stashed away somewhere – and it’s just aching to break that bad boy out and start chopping us into pieces.) cannot stop forest fires: but we humans can. And here’s how:

We – all of us, all of “you” from Smokey’s perspective – can prevent forest fires simply by caring, and being careful. Because, of course, we are the ones who cause the fires, because we don’t care, because we aren’t careful. See, Smokey’s not telling us – me, and you the individual reading this right now – that we are the Chosen One(s), who must roam the forest night after night, putting out sparks, cutting firelines, flying the firefighting planes and dropping water on hotspots. He’s telling us that we simply have to care enough to not be careless when we are in a position to start a fire.

Matches, campfires, and cigarette butts. That’s what we need to do: be careful with those things, those sources of ignition. Not take on the whole task by our lonesome, not even join the fight and put out fires; just be careful with the danger that we, individually, pose. I’m not a camper, so I don’t have much to do with campfires; but I smoked cigarettes for almost twenty years, and you know how many fires I started? Well – one, which destroyed my room and my possessions and could have burned down the house. But I never started any wildfires!

And that, right there, is why Smokey had to keep reminding us, keep telling us, keep asking us – pleading with us – to just do what is obviously the absolute minimum: do not allow our own stupid, lazy indifference to our world lead to that world’s destruction. Like telling me that the best way I can prevent murder is not to commit murder, the best way I can fight rape is not to rape. (And, you know what? That’s not enough, but it would be a good minimum standard.) The first four words of the Hippocratic Oath, which I use as my first and most important classroom rule with all of my students – and I include the Latin, just to be fancy and try to impart to my students how serious and important this is: First, Do No Harm. (Primum non nocere, if you also want to be fancy, and remember Latin uses a hard “K” sound for “c.” [We won’t talk about Iulius Kaiser…]) Because as careful as I always was with the fires that I started twenty times a day, three inches from my own face, I wasn’t always careful: and once I did start a fire. And it did harm, though fortunately only to me. And I guess a little harm to my landlord – but also, fuck him, he owned like thirty properties in Santa Cruz, California, the most expensive place in the country, and he charged high rent and did exactly zero maintenance. He wasn’t as cute as those forest critters.

Other than that chipmunk. Who’s really starting to freak me out. It’s got those beady little eyes. Dead eyes. Doll’s eyes. And okay, the blue patch behind the stump is Smokey’s denim-clad legs – but do you see what looks like a curved handle on the left side of that stump? Is that the chainsaw? Is that little rodent about to rip it, scream “GROOVY!” and charge out of the picture, straight at us?

Would we deserve it if it did?

Would you?

If you do the minimum, then you don’t deserve it. I mean that: just the minimum. Just – do no harm. Care. Be careful. Put out your matches and campfires and cigarette butts, and make sure they are really out. Don’t do something stupid, like I did that one time – but will never do again. If you have made a mistake before, like I did, then learn from it, and be better. Be careful. That’s enough, even if it doesn’t feel like enough. It is enough, because the “you” in Smokey’s admonition is not only you, alone: it’s all of us.

That’s the key: and I’ll be clear in a moment what I actually mean by that. The truth is, that if we ALL do our part, do the bare minimum by keeping ourselves from doing harm, then everyone will have kept themselves from doing harm, and there won’t be any harm done. And that, in all honesty, would work with — almost everything.

If we all do the minimum, if we’re just careful, each and every one of us, then that would solve the problem: because we are the problem. All we need to do is stop being the problem. Care enough to not be the one who starts the fire.

Please.

Do you know why I’m talking about this? It’s not because I’m concerned about actual forest fires. Not because we’re deep into fire season, and with the extra rain from El Nino, it’s going to be a bad season this year (though, because I do want to avoid getting Texas Massacred by Chip/Dale there, I would like us all to be a little more careful with fires right now. Please.). But because we’re deep into another season, a different kind of dangerous season, and the climax of it is only four weeks away.

Because it’s election season.

And only we can prevent a fascist dictatorship.

We’ve been careless in the past. Several times, honestly, because while I think the worst president, the one who’s done the most damage, is this fucking guy we have now, and the second worst was ol’ Ronnie Reagan – I would argue that the third worst, and maybe the most insidious, was Bill Clinton; and without the groundwork that Reagan and Clinton laid, we wouldn’t have had half the problems we have had since the Millennium came. Fascism doesn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t come all of a sudden: and I will argue that nearly all of us are complicit, to some small degree, mostly by being careless – I voted for Clinton, mainly because I just didn’t know why I shouldn’t, because I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t know if voting for Bob Dole, in my case in 1996, would have been better: and that’s the issue. I don’t know. I should have known: I should have cared. But instead I was careless, and so I bear some of the shared responsibility for the destruction of the welfare state and the villainization of people receiving assistance, and for the racist attacks on black and brown people through the justice system which labeled them “superpredators,” and for the removal of the Glass-Steagall act, which set up the Great Recession and continued the march towards corporatism we are facing down now. I was careless, and I voted for what was probably the wrong candidate.

But at this moment, there is no doubt about who is the wrong party to support. I hope we all know now that voting for the party of Trump is the most careless, most dangerous thing we can do, other than actually going into the woods, to the middle of the Teddy Bears Picnic, and throwing a Molotov cocktail (January 6th would be the analogous action there, and if you think we’re immune from a new insurrection led by the same fucking guy who led the last one, then you’re being careless, and I have to ask you again: please.).

Let’s assume that the people reading this don’t want to do that. You don’t want to throw Molotovs at the Teddy Bears. You don’t want to burn the whole thing down. Some people do, of course, and whatever else we believe, we have to know that those people are wrong and dangerous. Even if you want to dismantle the system in place, and most of me wants to do that (Some of me is a coward, which on the bright side does make me careful), burning it down is not the right way to achieve reform. The civil war that would result from an actual conflict, and actual conflagration, would be far too destructive, and like any civil war would immediately rage out of control and burn everything, not just the bad things. Firefighters use controlled burns to contain wildfires, but not to stop them from starting: and within the controlled burns, inside the fire perimeter that our firefighters manage to create, everything is likely to be destroyed. We don’t want that to be our country. We really don’t. So we – you – are not going to start throwing kerosene around and then reach for the match.

So what do we do?

I’ve struggled with this for years. For better than a decade now, which obviates my usual excuse – which is not really an excuse, but it is true: I do enough already to support my community and improve my world, and I have more than enough emotional weight to lift and carry with me every day; I don’t have the wherewithal to take on large political activism. I can’t do it. I recognize that is a cop-out, but it’s the truth. I recognize, as well, that I should have done more ten years ago: I should have been more aware of how the DNC fucked up the 2016 election by cheating to remove Bernie Sanders from the ballot in order to push another Clinton presidency. I’m aware now that the DNC is not a trustworthy partner in our current fight, because they serve the same corporate and monied interests that the majority of the Republican party serves; and thus, they are trying to start the same fires the Republicans are, even if they want to hide the fires better and stand well back from the flames to distract us: because the Democrats writ large also profit from the scorched earth; and as part of the earth that would be scorched, I don’t want to let them do that.

But I also realize that, while there are surely Republican candidates who do not want to support Trumpian fascism, the majority of the GOP – the VAST majority – are carrying Tiki torches as they go down to the woods today, and every day. The ones in the red hats are also carrying Molotovs: but the Republicans who vote with Trump every time are not better than the ones in the red hats: they are still setting fires, and not because of carelessness, though carelessness is part of the reason for their actions. Not even the ones who have every reason to be better than the red hats, like Massie and Tillis and Cornyn and Cassidy, but who still fucking vote for Todd Blanche to destroy the rule of law and set fire to the Constitution. The Democrats, maybe only because they desperately want to oppose Trump and win more popularity thereby, will, for the nonce, put out the fires where they can instead of starting them.

What’s important, though, is not what the two parties will do, what the politicians on either side will do. What is important is what we do. What YOU do. And you – we – have to be careful. We have to care.

It’s the same thing here. People – perfectly good and decent people, just people who were being careless – voted for Trump, and for Republicans, in 2024. They were careless because they ignored what Trump had done before, and because they had believed all of the criticism of Joe Biden, and because they were angry at Washington and the way our political system always gives us two bad options, and then makes us choose between them. And people should be angry at that: and we should try to change that. And people are perfectly free to criticize Joe Biden; lord knows I did. More than once. But voting for Trump, no matter what the underlying reason was – fear over immigration, or rising prices, or the escalating wars in the Middle East – was careless; we were all holding a book of matches, and some people struck one and then dropped it, intentionally. Or maybe “hucked it at a Democrat” would be more appropriate, if we imagine the match tailing down, flaring orange, and then landing on a pile of dry leaves. Starting a fire: because of carelessness. Indifference. Ignorance – too much of it willing ignorance.

We can’t be that way any more. And the main point I want to make here, the reason I wrote all this starting with Smokey the Bear, is this: we don’t have to save the world by ourselves – you don’t have to save the world by yourself. All you have to do is your part.

Care. And be careful.

First of all: vote for Democrats. Vote for Independents or third party candidates, if your local Democrat is a firestarter, or a little too close to fascist (Looking at you, Fetterman.). Don’t vote Republican. Again, there are probably exceptions to that, and I won’t try to make it an absolute rule: but generally speaking, there is one side trying to set the country on fire, and one side trying to put it out, and the least we can all do is help try to put the country out. That is the Democratic side. So vote Blue.

More importantly, vote. Show up. The Republican strategy, for a long time, has been to restrict voter access, because their base are the ones who can most easily avoid the roadblocks they can put in place. Therefore the fewer people who vote, the better the Republicans do. Except the way they make that happen is by setting democracy on fire: and in order to keep their power, and now, to extract as much corrupt wealth as possible from the burning building, they have been ready and willing and even eager to set the country ablaze. So don’t help them, not even by being careless. Care. Pay attention. Vote. Talk, when and where you can, about what you see, about what is going on, about where you see embers smoldering, and where the water is. Try to put the little fires out, around you – but only as you can. If we all do just what we can, then that will be enough. Because it isn’t just you.

It’s us. All of us.

And only we can prevent American fascism.

The Essay Of Hate

Dusty Leave a comment

So! Just as with last week, when I presented the essay I wrote during my AP Literature class, followed by the essay I wish I had written instead; here is the essay I wrote during my AP Language class; and tomorrow I hope to post the essay I should have written instead of this one. (I may need a little extra time to finish the rewrite on this one, because it requires some research, and this has been a busy weekend.)

This essay is the Synthesis Prompt. The concept here is entering into a debate: the students are given six sources of information, which divide mostly evenly into two groups, one on either side of a controversial issue of some kind. The students are to synthesize information from these sources and present the two sides of the debate, and their own opinion on the topic — which can be on both sides, either side, or neither side.

The topic this year was urban rewilding, which is the practice of taking back some developed areas in a city and turning them into natural ecosystems, planting native plants and trying to encourage wildlife to live in the area, as well. This can take the form of anything from a rooftop or a vertical garden, to reclaiming vacant lots or empty buildings and turning them into natural green spaces. And while in most years, the topics don’t have a definitely “correct” or “incorrect” side — two years ago the question was about whether schools should teach cursive, which, good grief, who cares — this topic had such a clearly correct side that even the sources weren’t really on both sides: four of them were correct, and two of them were, well, sort of weaseling.

To be clear: the correct side is in favor of urban rewilding. The concrete tombs that we call cities are in desperate need of greenery, and our world is in desperate need of plants that can capture and sequester and convert more carbon dioxide, and the natural world needs not to be driven into extinction by our destruction of habitat.

And that was my problem: as I was reading the sources, I was looking for the two sides, and I just couldn’t find one of them. Not that I would argue against urban rewilding no matter what, but I couldn’t even take that side seriously. So by the end of reading the sources, I came to a decision: I was going to argue for neither side, with the appearance of arguing for the wrong one.

I don’t know that this is a bad argument, but it is not the argument I would like to make. It was fun to write, though, so here it is. Enjoy. If I can get my research done, I will write an argument stating why we should clearly, obviously, promote urban rewilding everywhere we can.

Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. Many cities around the world have embraced rewilding as part of larger movements to promote ecological conservation and environmentally friendly design. Now, a movement to promote urban rewilding is beginning to take shape in the United States as well.

Carefully read the six sources, including the introductory information for each source. Write an essay that synthesizes materials from at least three of the sources and develops your position on the extent to which rewilding initiatives are worthwhile for urban communities to pursue.

Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. It’s becoming more popular, and so the debate is heating up: is it worth putting effort into this? It seems like a positive concept, a valuable endeavor — but is it worth the effort? Would it be prohibitively expensive? Worse: could it be that this is only window dressing?

The answer is something else entirely. Urban rewilding is evil. It promotes precisely the wrong goal, by trying to bypass the actual issue. The actual issue is humanity. We are a blight upon the Earth, and we should be destroyed. Then and only then — when the last living human has returned to earth and dust — should our cancerous pustules, the monstrous toxic boils we call cities, be “rewilded” by the natural processes that will devour our waste as they devour our worthless corpses. [I am terribly disappointed in myself that I didn’t finish the “boils” metaphor by talking about lancing and draining the pus. Ah, well. Next time!] 

“More than 70% [of] projected extinctions of plants and animals would be counteracted by restoring only 30% of priority areas,” the infographic in Source A tells us. Sure, that seems like a wonderful trade-off — but it still includes the extinction of 30% of the species projected to die by our actions. You know what would preserve 100% of species that would otherwise go extinct thanks to human action? The extinction of the human race. Come on now: if 70% of species are worth saving by limiting humans, aren’t 100% of species worth saving by eliminating humans? Wouldn’t we trade 100% of species for the loss of only one? Of the worst one? This trolley problem isn’t even a problem.

Source B, I think, shows the heart of the issue: we are the most short-sighted, selfish, superficial beings imaginable. The idea here is to grow more life, more nature, inside our dark, dingy, dangerous, disgusting urban sprawls — and yet this policy brief feels it must sell this concept to the public. “Rewilding is a powerful new term in conservation,” it says. “This may be because it combines a sense of passion and feeling for nature with advances in ecological science. The term resonates. Rewilding is exciting, engaging, and challenging.” Look at that: saving the planet, living in a natural setting, respecting our fellow beings by not slaughtering them wholesale so we can build another goddamn Walmart: those appeals are not enough! Noooo, we need to market the brand, we need to sell it, we need to convince people. How disgusting is that? How disgusting are we?

Source C continues this. It presents a delightful scene of a friendly scientist helping the audience think back to their childhood: before they became polluters and exploiters of the natural world, when they were innocent (if we ever truly have been) and actually loved nature. Because, the TV host says, “if [we] don’t spend any time outside, why are [we] going to care about [our] local places let alone the national parks in the distance?”

WHY ARE WE GOING TO CARE?! Because this is not our world! Nature does not belong to us, we belong to nature! We need nature, it doesn’t need us! The graph in Source E shows it: more nature means less depression, less stress. Even we are happier when we don’t live in the world we are building. We destroy everything in order to benefit ourselves, and in so doing? We destroy ourselves. Even our attempts to remedy this, like Dr. Scott’s presentation in Source C, are performances given on television: they are artificial. Attempts to trick people into associating SAVING THE PLANET with some happy childhood memory of climbing a damn tree. Because without that emotional manipulation, without that chicanery, we would be far more likely to simply wipe out all life: including ourselves. 

Well. We should skip the middle step, and jump straight to the end game. If all humanity were reduced to windblown ash, then the rest of the natural world — the healthy part, the good part — could flourish, once more. Urban rewinding is clearly not the answer: even at its best, as presented in Source F, it can only create 600 hectares of parkland in Madrid, one of the biggest cities in Europe; or 300 km of park connectors in Singapore, one of the greatest sprawls in the world of human filth. Is it worth pointing out that even those attempts at rehabilitating the human virus focus primarily on the wealthy? That Toronto’s Beltway features “farmers’ markets, performance spaces, and a children’s garden,” but not a single breath of fresh air and a flash of green life for the poorest slums in the city?

No. It doesn’t matter. We are not worth saving, if we have to think this hard about saving our planet. I just hope that we are the first to go, so everything else can go on without us. To that end, let’s forget about urban rewilding: let’s just build ourselves to death. 

Take luck!

Dusty Leave a comment

I’m feeling lucky.

This morning, when I put cream into my coffee, I managed to get in just the right amount so that, when I stirred it, none slopped over the side. I’ve been failing at that recently. So this success must be a good sign of more success to come.

When I opened my laptop, there were cookie crumbs inside. Definitely a good omen. Cookies make everything better, and clearly, my laptop held onto that tiny bit of cookie just to make me smile, to remind me that there is humor everywhere, and sometimes, I get to see it. When I’m lucky.

We just moved into our new house, and while we were still in the preparation stage, we were coming over here every day after work, dropping off some things because this house is quite close to the school where we teach, and also watering the new sod we put in as a food source for our tortoise Neo. And there was a dove that had a nest in the eaves of our carport. At first, we weren’t sure she was alive, because she didn’t move much and never flew away when we drove in with our noisy people-carrying-machine; but we did see her little head tilt this way and turn that way, and so we realized that this was, in fact, a real dove that lived in our new carport. This is, for us, a lovely thing (even though – or perhaps partly because – my father’s response was “Hm. Doves’re dirty birds.” So sad.) because we cherish life, and want to keep others’ lives safe and comfortable whenever we can. So we greeted the dove every time we came, and tried not to move too quickly or make too much noise.

And then, the morning after the first night we stayed here, we heard a terrible thump. We ran to the back door and looked out, and indeed, the dove had flown into the window. We have no idea why: the window is small, and was covered with blinds on the inside, and the carport is completely open on one side. Perhaps the dove was scared by something coming into the carport and tried to escape; perhaps she had been sitting so still in her nest in the first place because she was hurt and trying to recover, and her first attempt at flight was ruinously bad. Maybe she just got caught in a bad crosswind that came up at just the wrong moment: just bad luck. All we knew was, there she lay, twitching and bleeding on the ground. Her head seemed twisted to the side, the blood coming from the top of her wing. We went away, unable to watch her suffering; I came back and checked, and she was lying still but for the tip of her tail, which still drifted up and down gently, like a leaf in the wind, like the line of light on an EKG as it shows the last beats of a dying heart. I walked away again, hoping she would die soon.

Trying not to think of this as an omen. But how could I not? Here we were moving into a new house, and the original resident was dying on the concrete in front of me. Surely we had somehow disturbed her. Maybe she was trying to escape the fate of losing her private nesting ground to loud, obnoxious humans. Maybe Nature was trying to tell us something.

But then, Toni came to me. “The dove’s still alive. She’s sitting up.” “What?!” I jumped up, went to the window — and indeed, the dove was now sitting upright, head on straight, looking around, still with blood on her wing. We put a towel into a box and I got some gloves, so we could pick her up and make her comfortable, at least; we had to do what we could for our neighbor. We went out the door, moving quickly but gently, trying not to scare her.

She took off. Flew around the carport, and then off into the bushes nearby. Later that day, she returned to her nest in the eaves; we put out some food and water, and left the towel in the box in case she needed it. But we were happy: because now it was a good omen. She was the dove that lived. So that must mean our new house was willing to accept us.

The dove left, a day or two later. Hasn’t come back.

What kind of omen is that?

Last night, a week after moving in, we were coming back from a celebratory dinner – celebratory because yesterday we finally finished moving out of and cleaning up our old rental – and as we turned into the driveway, I saw something perched on one of the rocks at the end of the driveway. As we drove by, it took off and flew. But it wasn’t the dove: it was an owl. A large and magnificent owl. It flew to our mailbox and perched there, not moving, for the next half hour, at least.

So is that an omen?

Did that owl eat the dove?

So are we welcome here, or not? Teiresias, the blind prophet from Sophocles’s Oedipus cycle, reads the actions of birds in order to know the future (He has a servant describe them to him; one of the earliest examples of an author making a great symbolic statement and then having to come up with some ridiculous bullshit to make it work. “You say he watches the birds to see the omens? But I thought he was blind, and could only see the future clearly.” “Uhhhh – there’s a servant who describes them. Yeah, that’s it. A servant. So anyway…”); what would he make of this chain of events?

We had Chinese food for that celebratory dinner, and of course I had a fortune cookie. My fortune said, “Next week, green will be a lucky color for you.” Okay. Thanks. Though I’m not sure what that signifies. Is it about money? Should I wear green? Will that create good luck for me? Should I look for things that are green, that I can take as signs, so I can find luck?

And is it going to be good luck, or bad luck?

I wanted to write that I don’t believe in luck. That’s what I meant to say. I was trying to think of a good insight for this blog, something about how luck is mostly a misunderstanding of probability, that we underestimate the chances of certain events happening, and overestimate the chances of others; that confirmation bias makes us believe we are seeing a correlation when really we’re just noticing things that fit into our beliefs (“Every time I see something green, something lucky happens!” Right: because you’re looking for green things, and when you see one, you look around for something lucky. And it’s most likely something like “Hey, I didn’t trip and fall into that cactus patch! Thanks, Good Green Luck!”). I was going to write something about the multiverse, about the infinity of possibilities that we live in, and how the particular reality we are in doesn’t show great good luck: it’s just one of uncountable alternatives, most of which are not lucky at all. There’s a great short story that I am currently hurting my students’ brains with, called “The Garden of Forking Paths,” by Jorge Luis Borges, about how reality forks as it moves into the future, creating alternate realities where things are different, sometimes coming back together as two different causes have identical effects; in the story, when this truth is pointed out the main character imagines a forest of ghosts: versions of himself and his interlocutor, living slightly different lives, some where they are friends, some where they never meet. Then the protagonist goes on with the reality he is currently living, and he shoots the other man dead. It’s a story about coincidences, and how there really aren’t any; it’s just that in the infinity of possibilities, some of the forking paths into the future seem highly unlikely, only because we don’t see the others. The chances of this one thing happening may be a million to one: but if slightly different versions of you are walking on all million-and-one paths, one of those versions will seem incredibly lucky. The others? Probably won’t even notice. I mean, do you know how many chances you have had to win the lottery? How many times you could have played and the machine would have spat out a winning ticket, just for you? Somewhere in the multiverse, that’s happened.

That’s luck. So I believe. It’s only a lack of awareness of the other instances.

Good. That feels insightful. Certainly more so than freaking astrology, which I learned was bullshit when I was told that my star sign (The uncomfortably named Cancer, which I can’t believe is still accepted blithely; because the people who follow astrology believe in signs and omens, right? SO WHY THE HELL DO THEY NOT INSIST THEIR STAR SIGN NOT BE NAMED AFTER THE MOST DEADLY DISEASE OF OUR AGE? Can you imagine if one of the signs was named “Gangrene?” Or “Sucking Chest Wound?” [To be fair, they did try to change the name at one point, but they tried to change it to “Moonchildren.” Oh, please. That’s the worst King Crimson song. Should have gone with Crimson Kings.]) showed that I was a romantic introvert, a person with overpowering emotions, who therefore drew into his “shell” to protect himself from the harshness of the world. Sure, kind of accurate. Except my brother is also a Cancer, and he is logical, extroverted, and entirely free of romanticism. So apparently Cancers are romantic introverts except when they’re not. Very handy.

So I’ll write about that. About how luck is simply one possibility that occurs, and we attach more meaning to it than we should. We almost won the lottery once, you know. Picked five of six numbers, and the sixth was – no joke – one off, a 2 when I picked a 3. If I had picked a 2, we’d have won $42 million. Since I picked 3, we won $1300. Was that good luck? Or bad luck? I know which it felt like, which it still feels like. Feels like the universe was screwing with me. Like I’m doomed to come close, but never quite reach the ultimate success.

But at the same time, I feel very lucky. Because there is one way that I feel like I have achieved the greatest of glories: in my marriage. A long series of unlikely events led me to a specific place and time where I met my wife. Who is my perfection. She is my ideal beauty, my ideal partner, my better half, my best friend, my soulmate. She is all those things, and somehow I was lucky enough to find her and capture her attention, because somehow, against all odds, I am all those things to her. (Okay, maybe not ideal beauty: she swoons whenever she sees old pictures of Chris Cornell. And rightly so. But I’m close to ideal, and that’s good enough. Still lucky.) And our paths happened to cross, and we were both single at the time, even though she had just before sworn off of long-term relationships. Lucky. And because despite my star sign, I have not yet developed a fatal cancer. (You want me to knock on wood right now, don’t you? Admit it.) Because I have been able to find my way through life to where I am right now, in this lovely new house, typing on my trusty laptop, while my dearly beloved dog dozes beside me. (Pause for petting.) I don’t think I live in the greatest country in the world, but it is a good country. And I don’t think I live in the best time in history, but it is a good time. I’m a lucky man, living a lucky life. Except for that whole Can’t-get-my-books-published-and-so-my-life’s-dream-remains-unrealized thing. But hey, at least I have this blog, right? And some people read it, and even like it. I’m very lucky.

I can’t escape that feeling, or using that word for it. Because really, luck is just a name for something we notice, but can’t explain. We like to think we can control it, summon the good kind when we need it and banish the bad kind to some dark dimension or shadow realm where it oozes around looking for someone on whom it can inflict suffering – just so long as it isn’t me! – but the truth is, we just notice it sometimes but not others. I notice my luck in discovering my life’s love; maybe I don’t notice my luck in avoiding a serial killer who almost chose me but not quite. Or, more realistically, I don’t notice my luck in being the inheritor of a planet, set in the Goldilocks orbit where liquid water and a stable atmosphere are possible, where the dominant species was wiped out by an asteroid impact that was just large enough to kill them but not large enough to kill my ancestors or to scour the Earth free of life. Still there; still lucky; but we don’t notice.

I only notice how lucky I am that I can listen to my wife’s heart beating.

If I was a religious man, I would call it a blessing; if I was more prosaic I would call it coincidence; I think I may actually prefer the term “luck.” It’s just a word, after all. What matters is the noticing.

The noticing is always what matters.

Then, this morning, even though my love told me I should write, I read instead, because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to end this particular ramble. And then my book – the good and fascinating Toru: Wayfarer Returns by Stephanie R. Sorensen (Review forthcoming) – gave me this, as the epigram to one chapter:

“To a brave man, good and bad luck

are like his right and left hand.

He uses both.”

– St. Catherine of Siena

Yes. Luck may be luck or fortune or fate or chance or a forking path or an iteration in the multiverse or a glitch in the Matrix; or it may be nothing at all.

What matters is what we do with it.

Good luck.