Verdant thoughts

The sun in my eyes, I flip the visor down. No effect. I tilt my head to one side and discover that, in addition to successfully positioning the rear view mirror between myself and the sun, it relieves the morning tension pent up in my neck. I slowly roll my shoulders back and forth as I listen to the radio.

Committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.

Verdant? Green. I can't help but feel that this is a very ostentatious word to use. The word hangs in the air. How does a company BUILD a more green world? Plant an acorn? Plant a field more likely. I think about this for a moment. Can you plant a field? A better question is, perhaps, can a corporation? I think about this again, would they? Finally I ask myself the question that has been bugging me the whole time: What is this commercial talking about? Terraforming?

I picture settlers slowly rolling across the South Dakota prairie, the tall grass springing back beneath the weight of the wagon wheel to conceal the path behind them. There is no where to go but forward. The past is behind us.

I have this idea about a novel. A weather machine is invented to deliberately modify the atmosphere, temperature or ecology is bent to the will of man to make the world a better place to live. “Committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.” I imagine it like an Arthur C. Clark novel, Childhood’s End perhaps. Where too late you realize that by manipulating the weather you are manipulating the fundamental laws of nature. People are affected at some core level. Change begins to happen.

Clark's Novel deals with the evolutionary changes to mankind, manipulated by another species, the Overlords, to transform mankind into fodder for the Overmind, a cosmic mind amalgamated from ancient galactic civilizations, freed from the limitations of ordinary matter. The Overlords are not themselves capable of joining the Overmind, but the Overmind has charged them with the duty of fostering humanity's transition to a higher plane of existence and merger with the Overmind, mankind's offspring evolved to a higher existence, requiring neither a body nor a place, so ends mankind's childhood.

Problematic. So if you manipulate the weather and discover that mankind is tied to existence, bound by the same laws that control the weather, and you break these laws, how is that manifested in humanity? Out of control birth and death rates? Overpopulation? Brain powers or brain Tumors? I find myself getting discouraged and I haven't event written the first sentence. No one is going to read this book.

I turn my attention to the road. I find myself driving a lot. It occurs to me that this is time spent alone. Is this modern alienation? How much time are we really alone? For that matter how are we ever really with someone else? When we are in the same room? When we are talking? When someone else listens? This idea of separation grows in my head.

I begin to feel lonely. I think about the girls. About S. putting on D.’s old Tigger costume. How cute she looked. I think about all of the costumes D. has ever worn. How they have changed. How she has grown. I think about the excitement that has been growing for the past few days. The allure of candy, the chance to don a costume and go out into the world, to team up with friends and family members and go out on this kind of scavenger hunt. I find myself smiling. The answer comes simply: When we play together.

I pull into the parking lot. The little medians between the rows of the parking spaces have been bulldozed clean. Velvety layers of freshly mown grass have been peeled back to reveal layers of dry earth mixed with bits of construction debris: chunks of cement, nails, twisted plastic. Hidden by the pallets of sod that had been lain down, the flotsam has been exposed for unknown purposes. Making a more verdant world no doubt.

Something has happened in Candyland, the king and his castle are no longer where they are supposed to be. “Oh cheer up!” says the ever hopeful Gramma nut, who lives in the peanut brittle house. Gramma believes that a very special little girl and boy can find the king and his castle at the end of the rainbow trail- if they look hard enough!