老外 @Expat1975@qoto.org

Now here's something you might find interesting - in mainland China, there is no voicemail.

Here are some numbers to ponder:

The dinosaurs ruled the earth for 165 million years.

They went extinct 65 million years ago.

The first humans came about somewhere around 200 thousand years ago.

Human 'civilization' is about 6 thousand years old.

A lot of people talk about how humans will destroy the planet, which from the human perspective, I guess, is correct. If so, we will be one species in the sixth mass extinction event. (That humans think they can 'save' the planet or 'destroy' it is beyond absurd. They may make it uninhabitable for themselves, but can't even come close. The asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs was the equivalent of a million nuclear weapons detonating, at once, in the Gulf of Mexico.)

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

Excepting something catastrophic beyond its history, this planet is about halfway through how long it will last in total.

In a strange way, these numbers give me comfort.

Watching this #movie

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/valkyrie-2008

Johnny Depp making grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron.

MACBRUBER!!!!

The elderwomen sat on pontoons when they told the stories. I was a girl then, but I still remember a lot. They dressed in their shawls and waited until night to tell us. It said something about how serious it was, without them having to say it. They were very old. I remember their fingers – long boned and purple blood running through them in the moonlight. The elderwomen’s skinny legs dipped into the black water of night.

They spoke of their youth, of something we would have taken as myth had our parents not have emphasized how important it was to listen. Not to believe, not to take faith in, but to listen. Listen to the ways of the old world.

The elderwomen said the world was once land, almost half of it. They spoke of things we could only imagine. Earth for miles. Stones among the dirt in such frequency that you could pick one up whenever you wanted. The elderwomen said that dry plankton, which they called grass when they were girls, grew upon the land like rain falls. That there was enough of this dry plankton that you could walk forever and feel it prick up between your toes.

All of the elderwomen died before I was ten. We tied them down and sent them to the bottom, but their stories float back up more and more now. More and more now because I believe what they said.

#readmystuff #fiction

Lawrence Holmes wasn’t a man to be nervous but he was that day. Lawrence was a hero of the Second Battle of the Marne, or so the story went. He had served in the Great War with supposed distinction and had learned, as men do, that the vaguer he kept the story, the more mysterious it became on its own. Truth was, old Lawrence was just running letters in the War for the men of the Illinois 16th and, when the battle kicked off, stayed way to the side. Then, once the shelling and the gas started, stayed way to the rear. Still though, old Lawrence figured he was due the mystery. Some of his friends died, carried down the line on stretchers with missing arms or the sickly look of men gassed.

There were things about this day that reminded him of some of those over in France. One was the bleakness of the landscape. Though Access Road 17 held no pockmarks of explosions or blackened cut-in-half trunks of trees, the bleak Illinois landscape could pull a fellow back. The dustbowl had cut through something harsh this land. Gave it a hollowed-out feel. The sun never did cut right, the whole two weeks he’d had this mail outfit job. And the little car they gave him, with that little engine rattling right in front of his knees, did remind him a little of the ambulances from the war.

But none of this was making Lawrence nervous, really.

What made his knees shake a little more than was necessary even with the rickety engine was the next mailbox. It was half a mile up the road. He could see it there shimmering in the not-too-bright sun, airborne dirt obscuring it like a cloud of fresh mustard gas in the afternoon.

He’d been warned. About the widow who lived near there. About Alma Berta Jones, AKA Ma Jones.

Lawrence remembered the lessons that had kept him alive. Hurry but don’t go to fast. Be worried but don’t let it affect you overly so. Make damn sure that you go just slow enough that you don’t have to do nothing twice.

He slid the package in the mailbox and raised the flag with his left hand. Then he closed the lid with a shaky right. Hopped back in his little machine and puttered off down the road. The little cart only got up to 20 miles per hour, but it felt a damn fine 20 per.

He checked the little rearview mirror rather than turn around, and never saw the widow. Only saw the road stretching longer a little more each second, a growing buffer.

Lawrence smiled a bit and pulled his flask from inside the heavy wool coat he was required to wear even in the summer, during the Depression, out on this new incarnation of wasteland.

He wouldn’t have to come back this way for a week and, as Lawrence well knew, people died all the time.

Always the time...

They said it was the wind that hollowed out the creek that twisted and turned and chugged its way through Stonefield, but they were wrong. It was history. In the Jiangshan Plains ten thousand years before were the first people. They ate bugs off leaves and had kids and died and made camp by the edge of the creek. Caught fish there. It was a miracle that in a hundred generations there was never a war. The centuries, though, bore witness to a million battles.

#readmystuff #hubei #china

Jim Harrison #JimHarrison

Charles Bukowski #bukowski

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