The day began very early and very deep in the trenches.

I revised once and delivered twice the lecture on databases. The revision at home over coffee in the dawn. The deliveries at that place where they keep the classrooms. In between the two parts of the job, I dealt in a half-ass way with a third, which was addressing that fact that the assignment I’d passed to them from the big chief, in the other class, on fucking BorgOS, was broken and not able to be completed as planned. You get full points for trying, kids, literally, because the mess was our fault. Ultimately my fault, because it’s my classroom now.

All that done, I made the regular Tuesday stop for fresh burritos, but I was too late. The good ones, the breakfast kind, were all gone already. I got two of the ‘vegetable’ kind anyway. The coming weekend will be about sandwiches instead.

Then I parked, with a good view of the rain clouds coming over the mountain, and made a couple of long phone calls, the personal kind, that couldn’t wait any longer.

Home by dusk, with enough light left to put out all the trash for pickup in the morning.

After a day like that I’m honestly not good for much. If I’m good–I might be good–for a semi-coherent Spill. But before that: distraction. The cold wicked kind. Let’s see what’s on the podcatcher.

It seems … Bill McKibben has a new book out, so he’s on tour all over the place. If you don’t know the name, he was one of the earliest and still one the most sustained activists in the world on the subject of climate change.

I triangulated with his ideas in a paper I wrote for the degree in writing (wrote it twice in fact), a paper which is probably the ‘best’ thing I’ve ever written. A short book. I’ll post it here someday, when I build the infrastructure that allows you to download it for free, but contribute if you want to at the same time.

The narrative thrust of the McKibben parts of the paper was that the guy is a saint, but too much of an optimist, as activists must be, on climate change.

I believed when I wrote it, and believe now, that humanity has cornered itself and is doomed. Specifically that we made a huge and irreversible mistake when we chose to stop being hunters and start being farmers, and then opened shops, and then became professors and other kinds of clerks.

One of the other people I brought in as an evidentiary witness was Chomsky, who was of the opinion that yes, climate change would doom us, but only if a nuclear exchange didn’t first. He was already a professor, when I was still ducking and covering under my kindergarten desk, and I guess that had an effect on him.

I pulled the Fresh Air interview version of McKibben out of the podcatcher first, and listened to it while I terraformed the Planet and made war on the Manifold Usurpers in my haphazard xenophobic way.

It was a pretty surprising interview. His optimism was largely gone. He said, Look: shit’s happening already. There are large parts of the planet where it’s too hot to live now without refrigeration of several kinds. Soon even that won’t work. You might live in the dead zones, but you won’t spend any time outside. Already there’s been a ten percent reduction in the amount of time you can work in the out of doors, all over the planet. Soon that’ll be a thirty percent reduction. And then a hundred percent. The roofs will have to be replaced by robots, not undocumented workers.

(I’m distracted in this moment by thunder out in the dark, and that is the very best distraction of all.)

And speaking of the undocumented ‘crisis’, he continued, why do you think that the waves and the caravans are from central America now, instead of Mexicans? Sure, thug life has turned those countries into social shitholes. But the real reason (he proposed) is that those people are trapped on a narrow strip of land between two oceans. And oceans are taking the first big hits of the change in the climate. They’re warmer of course. They are thirty percent more acidic. They’re rising, as everyone knows. And they generate more catastrophic weather events like hurricanes now.

I don’t know if he’s right about that part; I’m not informed enough.

But I do know that it’s pretty ironic that the Denier-In-Chief, the man who thought the head of Exxon would be the perfect Secretary of State, the guy who put a fossil fuel lobbyist into position of the head of EPA today, has tried to demonize these migrants, when in fact he is now, incredibly enough, the leader of the great Satan itself. The capitalist machine that brought you Peeps, the Howdy Doody Show, and the climate event that will end the species as we know it. For certain. In my mind anyway. I won’t be here for the endgame, darlings, so I don’t have to be any good as a prophet. I just have to prophesy.

Anyway, McKibben is no optimist now either. We more or less agree on the scenario, if not the tactics.

On top of his signature issue, he brought up two more things that might play a serious part in ending us. Short version:

1) Easily available but expensive genetic engineering. Designer babies will write class warfare and income inequality into our genes, creating two separate and unequal kinds of humans in a few generations.

2) Artificial Intelligence. Maybe it’ll go wrong in the way the Terminator told us, like Steven Hawking also said before he died. Or maybe, said McKibben, you tell a machine that can learn that the only important thing is to efficiently and profitably manufacture paper clips. The first thing the machine learns is how to keep you from turning it off and getting in the way of its hard-coded reason for being. And you end up with a spinning blue and silver sphere in space, made up mainly of trillions of paperclips. And no biology at all.

He didn’t even get into the nuclear thing, being somewhat younger than Chomsky. But surely that still is a fourth way to go out as well.

So we’re fucked.

If you’d have taken my word for it, you’d be open to charges of fatalism and paranoia just like me. But you don’t have to. You can take Bill Mckibben’s word now. If he’s a pessimist, there really is no reason for rational hope.

The other part of my argument in the paper is about: Why? Why was it inevitable that once we stopped hunting and gathering, once we stopped moving, we were doomed? The simple answer is

Greed.

And I don’t mean the moustache-twirling Rex Tillerson kind of corporate greed. Not alone anyway. Yes, Exxon knew all about the end of days in the 1980s, and yes they and their fellow capitalists have been working for decades on manipulating the stupid to believe ridiculous things, and on protecting their own greedy interests while the species burns down around them.

But why did the average person become a farmer in the first place? Why did she stop moving and settle down? Why in a few generations after she settled, was she believing in the divine right of pharaohs and kings and scientist-priests and middle managers, and bowing down to them in an act of self-denial and worship?

Why, for that matter, do I still man the trenches in the dawn, and teach the children about databases even as all the databases and all the species are following the passenger pigeon into the eternal night?

Same answer.

A whiter shade of greed, but still greed.

Her greed to want a better life. For her children. A longer life, a healthier life, a more prosperous life. She sold her birthright of wild freedom for a mess of guaranteed pottage, doled out by her so-called betters.

I sold mine for the promise of a pretty shitty pension.

Not only are we all fucked, we’re all guilty.

The human experiment has failed, and it’s her fault and my fault and your fault. We goofed!

Anyway, after the piece on McKibben, Fresh Air had better news. A band I used to play on the late-night radio, the Mekons, is back and bold with a new album.

The music was pretty good, but the story behind it was better.

They were inspired back to creativity by this very desert that inspires me.

(That’s a bit glib. They recorded the new stuff down in the flat mojave with the joshua trees. I am recording this time in the rolling sonora with the wild pigs. But, poetic license, close enough.)

So there’s lovely haunting deserted femvox. The landscape, says that bandleader, was “inspirational to old pirate punk rockers”.

You know that I don’t play guitar, or play at that kind of identity politics. I’m not going to tell you that I’m a pirate, or a rocker anymore. Maybe a punk in some ways still.

But I listened carefully. They talked about Rimbaud the poet, in the Ethiopian desert in 1883. They reference Lawrence in the Arabian one with his piercing Irish blue eyes.

And in the pertinent words of the reviewer, the album ultimately

“coheres as a series of arguments for the value of restlessness, for ceaseless exploration” .

If only they’d recorded it ten thousand years ago at the dawn of the ‘agricultural revolution’, maybe it would have helped forestall the misstep we all made together at once, the first foot placed on the deadly road of what we so mildly think of as civilization.