Loneliness is epidemic in America. It’s not listed as a frank psychiatric disorder in the DSM-5 as are anxiety and depression but it is understood to be a debilitating symptom of these disorders that together some really smart guy wrote a book about recently raising the alarm that the underlying cause of all this was screens. Get the kiddies off the screens and instead point them at forming real-world sensory connections within their peer group, scrapping in the sandbox, swinging on the Jungle Jim, plotting in tree forts, what have you and that way when they grow up they won’t need to be institutionalized or (best case) assigned to menial work roles appropriate to their mental health deficit. Never mind the twisted irony that in the not too distant future as other really smart people have warned these menial roles will be deprecated by a new kind of intelligence whose algorithmic ancestors got the kiddies enthralled to the damn screens in the first place! And not just kiddies because as any casual look around will evidence all of modernity is enthralled to the damn things anymore thus giving credence to modern-day Apocalyspers who say this new kind of intelligence is coming for us all. Paradoxically the really smart guy’s book is available in a digital format compatible with most e-reader screens.The least civilized peoples on earth are unaware any of this is going on.

So naturally fearing the coming of the end of mankind I traveled to Anchorage last week to visit with friends for what I should expect may be the last time. From the ANC airport I Uber’d to a friend’s condo that she very generously offered me to stay at for the ten days I’m here. Fatigued from flying and wanting to unwind I drove downtown in her “chariot” (an elderly Volvo) to Fletchers for a glass of Cabernet and a small Cesar topped with unwieldy large shrimp and sat at the only stool left at the bar close to two men who were carrying on, one-upping each other with exaggerated stories of past experiences the details of which they could not or would not agree on. Both appeared to be sloshed. Given my proximity it was impossible not to overhear them. One of them, the closest to me, into probably his fourth or fifth 9-oz pour of wine may have had Ketamine onboard as well, though hard to tell given the overlap of behaviors exhibited by users of many modern mood-altering amines. The man seated next to me kept jutting his head into my personal space and even butt-sliding his stool closer to me at one point which was already uncomfortably close as a way to try and loop me in to the hyperbolic banter with the other man who was distractedly stirring his half-filled tumbler of whiskey with two fingers, someone who I thought I might have recognized but couldn’t recall from when or where. He insists on hearing my backstory so I figured if I’m brief and polite about it maybe he’ll leave me be: Midwest raised and schooled, TX recruited, CA bound, three tours to AK separated by adventures in NM and OH and now living a mere swim away from BC, Canada. Didn’t work as expected. Instead, he insinuated himself further into my orbit to say that he was in AK to close down an apartment. Oh, OK, I said. I didn’t inquire further and instead returned my attention to my phone as a way to un-rudely indicate I was presently preoccupied but also to evidence my addiction, but he carried on anyway, gesticulating and going on with how he now splits his time between Fort Collins and South America and oh he also has been to AK three times before to work on movies his favorite of which was the Butcher Baker movie and had I seen it? Why yes I had and get this I once owned a second home across the bay from the state’s highest security prison where that mthr’fckr was jailed. Take that! This only served to reanimate him. I never so quickly downed a dressing-sodden portion of romaine lettuce and shrimp. Gulped the last of my Cabernet, tipped the bartender and left. As I walked out of the bar I spied him still carrying on to a Phantom Me seated on the stool, as if I’d never left.

In his very fine book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey, qua National Park employee, appalled at the overly protective behaviors of parents toward their children, finally snaps one day and loudly exhorts a family parked at a campsite tensely huddled together in their Airstream (I paraphrase), Get them kids out of that damn clam-shell, get them out there, tell ’em to go explore, cut themselves for god’s sake, draw some blood! I heard a similar lament in the professional sphere all the time from management teams flailing to understand why the Organization was broken, The problem is communication! We need to communicate more! Turns out more documents, more emails and more meetings did nothing to repair the Organization. The problem wasn’t too little communication, the problem was the quality of the interactions among employees. It was a low signal-to-noise (S/N) problem. Siloed project teams passing in the night. And now all these years later we have boomers and Gen Xers, experts who’ve been trained on past experiences like these, preaching to the youth to put down the screens and engage real life more or else you’ll grow up to be like us. A cohort that was not raised on screens yet as a group hardly exemplars of personal fulfillment themselves. I’m dubious that putting down the phone and interacting more IRL is the solution to loneliness and despair. I’m not claiming that doom scrolling Influencers applying face makeup on Tik Tok is meaningful engagement with the real world but neither is merely talking to and touching people who don’t really get you or care about you. Both are low S/N interactions unlikely to cure lonliness. And of course it’s a mistake to confuse pathological loneliness with the state of being alone, or wanting to be left alone. Abbey was likely right that the solution to loneliness is to embrace the good company of nature. It even works if you do it alone.

Jill was at the stoplight with Brake Hold On presently amused at the display on the trunk of the car stopped in front of hers. What an uncanny resemblance! – the Tesla icon and the international symbol for the Intrauterine Device, aka the IUD. Wait, the Tesla magnate has fathered fourteen children (so far), having commingled his seed with that of multiple mothers, maximizing natural selection’s expected value function. Because every incurious evolutionary biologist knows believes, above all else, that more and better offspring is the one and only True Imperative encoded in every organism’s DNA. When the Tesla magnate was a mere two cells old, Nature decreed his Purpose, he would divide over and over again. What scientists cannot explain is why this avatar of reproductive success would then seek a brand icon that in essence memifys a widely used antagonist of reproductive success. Ninety-nine out of one-hundred times the IUD, both hormonal and non- types, will thwart the spermatozoon from fertilizing its target. Certain types are in fact medievally cruel in their mechanism of action – these are made of copper, ions of which act to poison the spermatozoa. Jill herself had no explanation to account for this apparent opposition of “as-if” goals. It made no sense to her; supposedly, according to the theory, from deep inside the nucleus the genes direct the organism to make more babies, but then inexplicably reverse course, and direct the organism to advocate for fewer babies. Huh?

Jill long ago had read a book by a self important author. While out on tour promoting this book the author glibly dismissed a questioner who’d asked why, if all organisms including humans had been “as-if” designed by natural selection for the ultimate Purpose of reproductive success, he himself had no children evidencing his inescapable Purpose? Because I’ve told my genes they can go to hell! he snapped. A burst of smug laughter went up from the audience muffling the questioner’s followup. That question was: Wait, the genes purposing your gonads are the same genes purposing your brain (its thoughts and desires), this is boilerplate MolBio, so same genes and one Purpose then how is it that the “as-if” goal of the brain could co-exist in opposition to the gonads? The conundrum had always stuck with Jill. Try as she might, and for the past thirty years she really had tried to listen, if the Purpose of one’s life was revealed in the inner voice her own had been silent on the matter. Likewise, Russ, her husband, swore he never heard a thing. Throughout all the years of married life together, it wasn’t Russ’ and Jill’s genes exhorting them to make babies. No, the ultimate Purpose of their existence had to be explained to them by certain cajoling voices within their friend group. In every case, parents themselves.

Friday was the bleakest of the work week, today expressed in an overcast sky with water swollen clouds sagging like the salmon-sated bellies of bears. Jill was driving to work after passage of the recent RTO mandate. She reached up and pushed the button to close the sunroof, it had begun raining. The light turned green and all on its own her foot moved to the gas pedal but her stiletto got caught up in the dish of the floor mat. She fidgeted to free it. Barking horns went off in unison behind her. In the side-view mirror, two cars back, Jill saw the gesticulating arm of the driver extended out the window no doubt wishing her well. Fuck you too she said to herself. You try walking in these all day. She managed to separate from the shoe then mashed the gas pedal with her stocking’d foot. The Audi lurched forward. She’d almost closed the gap with the Tesla when another driver shot into her lane and closed it for her. Now the stocking’d foot slammed the brake. Oh, look at that, this one’s got a Baby On Board. Another Evolutionary Success. How Purposeful! How good for you! Wait, she recognized this car, the head of the driver too. It was Russ’ co-worker, Ginny was it? – a new hire and proselytizer for the emerging Pro-natalist Movement mostly via her Substack The Gene Pool that she’d giddily touted to Jill at the unironically organized pool party she and Russ had regretted RSVP’ing YES to the past weekend, had recently been reborn with over 200K subscribers. I had to pause posting for six months when the triplets arrived she’d said to Jill poolside but hold on I told the fanbase I shall return! Triplets because so often that’s the case with IVF which Ginny and her husband several years after their first two boys were born had to resort to owing to the inexplicable loss of Purpose in Ginny’s eggs and had paid for with an early withdrawal from the ol’ 401K balance. You gotta do what you gotta do Ginny told Jill knocking back another mocktail so do it with Purpose I write to my subscribers – live with Purpose! Ginny giddily said to Jill I can introduce you to the new Moms here while virtually pirouetting on bare feet and ceremoniously sweeping her arm to acknowledge the present partygoers as might have Eve revealing the fertility of the garden on that very first day on earth. Jill to Ginny: I’m good, thanks.

Whereupon the proselytizer runs out of persuasion to win over the impenitent disbeliever, well, there’s always Hell. As with the history of many things the history of the origin of Hell as a concept is dimly lit. The earliest descriptions of Hell as a place of misery and unending torment for the wicked date back to ancient Greece, at least four hundred years before Jesus arrived on earth. But one thing seems certain, the authors of the Bible likely had no notion of the role that threats of perdition might play in winning over skeptics to Christianity. There seems to be no evidence of early Christians trying to frighten disbelievers to Christianity by holding out Hell as a consequence of their disbelief. Even where Hell is mentioned in the Bible, it’s ambiguous, described not as a roaring furnace of eternal suffering for the wicked, but more a place where the souls of the dead experience interminable joylessness with no celebration. Think of waiting in line at the DMV for all eternity, for instance.

No, the promise of Hell as punishment for unrepentant sinners was an invention that would come some two centuries later. For hundreds of years since then, various religious sects have re-imagined Hell into its many ghastly forms¹. Fast forward through the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment to today, and it strains credulity that we continue to see examples of this fear mongering stapled to phone poles: The Wages of Sin Are Death!

…

Nowadays, it is easy to commiserate with the person whose growth into a rational human being was stunted by having to first overcome and eventually dispose of inculcated religious beliefs. Children don’t choose their upbringing, and most of them experience little direct control over what they are taught (and not taught). The need to purge the brain of handed down stories of creators and miracles and phantasms of every sort, and refocus its faculty for skepticism where it belongs – on the real world – is rightly viewed as a mental handicap. This tugs our heart strings no differently than would hearing word of the athlete who’s had to overcome a physical handicap to achieve some feat in sport. Having untrue things imposed on a young human mind represents a setback on the path to rationality, it takes time and can be hard to unlearn nonsense. And we should expect that for some people (too many, sadly) this extra effort will prove futile, as H. L. Mencken notes in the last chapter of his very fine book, Treatise On The Gods (2^nd edition, page 274):

This common pattern of religion, like the similar pattern of government, has been impressed on the human consciousness for uncounted thousands of years, and it is no wonder that erasing it is an inordinately difficult matter, and, in the great majority of cases, impossible.

Throughout history, there probably never has existed an otherwise rational faculty entirely free of a small polyp of wonder regarding the existence of a merciful and benevolent supernatural being, the author of creation and all in it, at whose heavenly throne the souls will gather to adulate Him for, well, forever. This might help explain the hesitancy of the agnostic to go all in on hard atheism. But that form of doubt is most often benign and thus not a diagnosis that need concern us. It is in that person where the polyp of wonder is not excised but instead is nurtured over a lifetime, coddled instead of treated, and predictably metastasizes into a frank, irreversible piety. Its worst expressions sending the afflicted into a spasmodic, evangelical emergency exhorting the unrepentant to beg forgiveness and believe – or else! See, for instance, your favorite fire-‘n-brimstone TV evangelist. Perhaps no man should be dismissed outright merely for thumping a lectern and speaking his convictions, especially where his business is saving souls, but then failing to convince the skeptical it triggers in him the “or else!” and he lapses into fear mongering involving phantasms awaiting the wicked in perdition to devour them whole only to come out the other end, over and over again, forever – how can that be viewed as anything but doubling down on nonsense? How indeed can it be viewed as anything but a man without a faint of rationality left in the throes of a serious mental health crisis? And for those who would describe this diagnosis as condescension, we might recommend they get their own polyps biopsied! Would any rational 21^st century man say the expression of schizophrenia is “just another opinion?”

1. The earliest known depictions of Hell in Christian art date to the 6th century, over five hundred years after Jesus’ death.

Imagine you’re inside the best coffee shop in the world, standing near the entrance. You’ve just finished an expertly prepared Flat-white paired with a vanilla-frosted biscotti. Outside, it’s a wonderful bluesky day; you’ve not a care in the world. No niggling responsibilities. No plans or expectations for the hours ahead. Nothing begging your attention. Only you and your thoughts (same thing), and unbounded sensory freedom. You pull open the door and hold it for a young woman coming in. She may be a student at the university, given the hardbound textbook jutting out from an unwieldy backpack slung over her shoulders, sloshing about there as she tries to slip past you. The two of you exchange polite smiles. Once outside, you think to yourself, what the hell, I’ll walk down to the bluff, look out onto the lake, see what’s going on. You take two steps on the sidewalk and then it happens, you hear a loud Thud, unlike any sound you’ve ever heard before (and will never forget), followed milliseconds later by the Screech of rubber on pavement. You look up and spin around. From a distance of maybe two hundred feet, you see a human being crumpled on the ground beneath the front bumper of a black Suburban. Or was it a Tahoe? Either way, an older model SUV, and black. It was partially into its turn when it struck the pedestrian; you see the front left blinker flashing orange. You see the driver push open the driver’s side door – she’s a woman with shoulder-length grayish hair, her face is in her hands, she appears frantic. That’s about as much as you can make out. The horror goes down in five seconds – it takes that long for the brain to record this new state of the world. You stand there unable to move, a feeling welling up inside you, unlike any you’ve felt before. A half minute goes by and you hear sirens in the distance, people gather at the scene. Your brain fires particular motor neurons, activating essential muscles, the direct cause of you turning to walk away. The brain does this all by itself. You don’t tell the brain what to do, its function is automatic.

Later, blocks away, a police car pulls up alongside you, an officer flags you down. She hops out and asks if she might speak with you. You (your brain) agrees. Long story short, your brain (using your bio-linguistic faculty and referring to itself as “I”) reports: Yes, I witnessed the aftermath of the collision. And yes, I am certain I saw a woman (the putative driver) step out of the driver’s side door. Continuing, your brain gives the officer a description from its memory. The officer notes your name and contact info and asks if you might testify to this in court, as a bystander to the accident. Yes. You never are called to testify, but you learn days later from a report in the newspaper that the driver was a man. So you lied to a police officer? Of course not, your brain reported (literally put words in your mouth) the information it had stored in its memory. But that information gathered at the scene of the collision, specifically the input that streamed in from the outside world (via the visual transduction system – your eyes) was imperfect, noisy. You (the brain’s host) were physically two hundred feet away, there was a high humidity haze in the air distorting the view. So the distorted view of the organism exiting the SUV matched (albeit poorly) a female human being (woman), a model of which your brain created and had continuously updated and improved all the years of your life. So later, your brain reported to the officer what was, in fact, a false state of affairs. In other words, the brain was mistaken (but not broken). And most folks would add: an honest mistake. All this is consistent with modern neuroscience and human psychology.

When the output of your heart is in error, we say your heart may be broken (literally). A broken heart, we do not ever say, has lied, or even that it has made a mistake (not in the psychological sense of the word, b/c the heart is not that kind of organ). Renal insufficiency is also not a mistake, it’s a broken kidney (one or both). The heart is a pump, it outputs blood; the kidney is a filter, it outputs filtered blood; the liver is a detoxifier, it outputs bile – the brain is a thinker, it outputs thoughts. Insufficient or poor quality output from an organ is evidence the organ may be broken. The brain’s thoughts are expressed through speech and writing. If a brain was trained on noisy inputs, it may have stored non-true things about the outside world. If later on the brain is challenged to report what it saw¹ (e.g. SUV collision with pedestrian), it may report (output from memory) a falsehood about a past state of the world. That brain (person), we would say, was merely mistaken. On the other hand, if our bystander to the collision had (somehow) come to know that, in fact, the driver was a man, and later expressed to the officer that it was a woman, then that brain (person), we would say, spoke a lie. By analogy, then, such an output from the brain may indicate the brain is broken. Maybe not irreparably, but broken. Maybe we call the pathology: ACI, Acute Cognitive Insufficiency.

We think of the brain as a kind of computer. When some input to a traditional computer represents an error, like when an input to a program represents something false, we don’t say the computer is broken when it subsequently outputs an error. No, we call that a (software) mistake, as above. Likewise with the brain, its thoughts (e.g. beliefs) are contingent on the quality of its inputs. So the bystander to the collision, had he somehow gotten less noisy inputs (maybe instead of walking away he moved closer and saw, more clearly, that the driver was, in fact, male), his brain would have, we can assume if it were not broken, stored the correct value: driver=man.

There is no evidence for an Intermediary Spirit that “edits” our brains’ contents (thoughts) before they are spoken (or written). All the evidence we have thus far, as to how a brain works, reveals that it is nothing more than compartments of cells which communicate with each other via signals (chemicals) called neurotransmitters, along fibers (nerves and motor neurons) that innervate the muscles, causing them to contract, and in turn make us move. Including, for instance, a writer’s hand, or a speaker’s mouth (or the bystander’s feet). That’s it. These signals evidence no reliance on any Spirit for their transmission. And you’ll find no Conductor lurking along the motor neuronal pathways, “switching the tracks” as it were, altering the message before it reaches the muscles (including the ones required to speak). None, no evidence of ghosts. Though it may seem like there is an “I” in the brain, there’s no evidence for this. Human beings don’t will a given future to occur, they merely experience the future after it arrives. Repeatable evidence for this claim indicates the time between the two can be as little as 10 milliseconds. And like every other organ in the body, the brain doesn’t function through our will, no, it functions all by itself. And will continue to do so as long as glucose is sufficient, no disease is present, and its sensory inputs are of high quality, that is, they represent the truth about the material world. None of this is controversial neuroscience; only a Dualist would be disturbed by it. The next time a materialist tells you that “you” don’t think your own thoughts, you might concede he’s right.

Which brings me to re-consider moral judgement. Ask a million people if lying is wrong, and I expect a million people would answer yes – save some outlier examples where most of them would agree lying is excusable (maybe even advisable). Then go ask your favorite AI Chatbot – “What is the biochemical basis of a lie” – and the answer may not surprise you (although you’ll likely find it disappointingly incomplete, as I did). What I didn’t understand, though, until I asked, was just how much is known about the cellular biochemistry involved in storing memories in the brain. It’s beyond the scope of a blog post to describe the anatomy of neurons and neurotransmitters and all of that, but suffice it to say, memories are thought to be represented in the brain by “plastic” patterns of synapses and associated biochemicals of activation (neurotransmitters, ions, etc.).

OK, so if a brain has represented, in its “synaptic configuration,” a memory corresponding to a supposedly true thing about the material world it had gathered from (noisy) input: say, driver=woman, and later was prompted to recall that memory (Officer asks: driver=man OR driver=woman ?), but instead reported through the speech faculty of its host, a false memory (driver=man), then how the heck is that even possible? Chemistry doesn’t “lie.” How does a brain activate the mouth of its host to speak a false memory? The brain must be broken (somehow), no? If the output of any other organ in the body were abnormal, we’d likewise suspect that the organ was broken. If a person lies, i.e. his brain expresses a false memory, then it seems logical that brain may be broken. Before we’d conclude that, of course, we’d rule out the possibility the brain was merely mistaken (hazy view: driver=woman).

Now here’s the moral rub: As I’ve pointed out already, if a person speaks a falsehood, it might be because he stored a falsehood (some input was in error). We don’t morally condemn him for it (we say it was an honest mistake). But when a person speaks a falsehood, and we later find out his brain misrepresented the truth value of its memory when speaking it, well then that person, most people would agree, committed a moral error, and such a person is a bad person. But doesn’t it strike you as strange to pardon one “synaptic configuration” in the brain, and not another? If a person’s heart or liver is broken, we don’t morally condemn the person². No, normally we’d be sympathetic, we’d want to see the person get the appropriate treatment to restore proper function. So shouldn’t we feel similarly sympathetic toward a person with a broken brain, a proven liar? If you accept that there is no “I” in the brain intercepting thoughts and misrepresenting them through the spoken word, then isn’t it weird to hold a person morally responsible for lying?

By the way, the intro story above was a lightly fictionalized account of a personal experience I had many years ago in Milwaukee at a coffee shop near the University.

1. The retina and optic nerve are considered part of the central nervous system and are directly connected to the brain.

2. A person I knew a longtime ago, nearly a teetotaler herself, had moral contempt for people on the waiting list for a liver transplant, specifically those who’d admitted that their own livers were diseased due to alcoholism.

A leisurely neighborhood walk with The Dog the other day. We rounded a corner near the top of the bluff to take the trail we always take that winds down to the sea. Then suddenly, what’s this? We heard a number of crows – not enough to make a murder, though maybe an attempted murder – going off in the trees. This was more than a lover’s quarrel, for sure, these crows were pissed off. We stepped beneath the branches to get a closer look, saw a few of the crows, but we couldn’t see what had gotten their dander up. Turns out there must’ve been five or six of them, all pointed and cawing at the same object. But what? So we continued on, toward the trailhead, to get a better look from a different perspective. Ah ha! there she was, perched, undaunted by all the racket, and appearing calmly supercilious. I figured it was a girl because the girls are bigger than the boys, about 1.5-2X bigger. I had my camera with me, with the Tamron 28-200 lens attached. A “budget” lens, as experts refer to it, but when a patient Great Horned Owl is your subject, pretty good glass, I must say. And in less than ideal light at that. Followed by a little post-processing on the computer, and voila! Click (or tap) to embiggen, maybe you’ll agree.

And then I waited. How long would it be before she tired of my presence, and the crows, who hadn’t stopped their cawing the whole time I was there. Not long it turned out. Happy with my captures, I started my retreat from the forest floor back to the trail to rejoin HW and The Dog, when, after a few anxious head bobs, she suddenly lifted off her perch. I hadn’t switched off the camera, in fact it was still on and in auto-focus mode, and set to a suitably fast shutter speed (1/800). I pointed, pressed and held the AF button, then pressed the shutter. It all happened in 2-3 seconds.

Bam!

Just magnificent predators.

Minutes later, we were about halfway down the trail when when way off in the distance I spotted her silhouette, she was perched on a branch in a different tree, backlit by sunlight filtering through leaves, already drawing the attention of a new murder of crows. And, from what I could tell at that distance, still appearing unbothered by them.

Vulgar. Insipid. Grotesque.

Sure, but without question deliciously contemptuous as well. And, I thought, artfully rendered. Though I might have substituted a trash bin for the shelf that the golden commode rests on. Just to give the display a little more derogatory oomph. But that’s a minor quibble.

I have a quiet disdain for political signs of any sort that patriots erect on their front lawns. But I’m happy to call out exceptions.

I’m not sure what the dino mockup adds to the overall meaning. Maybe a leftover statement of resistance, from a time long ago. Like when King George version III demanded fealty of the American colonies to his lordship, circa 1775. Yard signs around present-day Massachusetts might have read: Not Your Servants – Piss Off You Odious Turd

There are many good reasons to like this book, which I recently finished listening to while walking The Dog this morning. Although I have a special reason for my affection for this work. Near the end of the book I found myself completing the thoughts of the main character, Meursault, before the narrator completed speaking them into my earbuds. I think this is because Meursault, given the circumstance he finds himself in, responds to the prison chaplain in the same way I expect I would, or would like to think I would. In my head I was literally completing Meursault’s sentences. And this wasn’t a case of me unconsciously reading ahead, because I wasn’t reading words on a page with my eyes, I was hearing the words with my ears. I remain quite curious and fascinated by this modality for experiencing art.

Again, this morning, I was in a dream-state walking down the middle of the street like I were a Solipsist. Unconsciously holding tight the handle of a retractable leash while Chloe flitted about, tethered at the other end. Proving that Solipsism is wrong, I snapped out of it when another apparent homo sapien and her canine appeared suddenly. Relieved I was not, in fact, a brain in a vat, I tapped my right bud to pause the narration. In this mode the buds still attenuate ambient noise, so barely was I able to hear her announce herself as Lisa, and this is Luka, I believe she said. The woman had Asian features, Luka did not. She told me she’d recently moved to the northwest from somewhere in the southwest, and, I suppose to make light conversation with a stranger, added that she’d hoped Luka would adjust to the change in weather. I instantly supposed it was Lisa who was the one feeling trepidation about the change in weather, but then projecting the concern onto her dog. Then, just as instantly, I felt a tinge of regret, that if I was wrong to attribute the concern to Lisa, then I may have maligned Lisa in my mind, so I said to Lisa, I’m sure Luka will get along just fine up here, and, welcome to the neighborhood. In a sweetly squeaky voice she said, Thank You! By now the dogs had become tangled up in their leashes so I reached down and unclipped Chloe. Lisa kept Luka leashed. The two dogs played for a while. Lisa and I were out of things to say so we watched the dogs play and said nothing more to each other. Eventually, I put Chloe back on the leash, she pirouetted and gave Luka a swooshy-tailed goodbye, and then we moved on. As we walked away, I re-tapped my right bud to resume listening to the last pages of the book, Mersault’s final lament. The sky was blue, the air was warm, we were under a mile from home.

…

We’re on the road again tomorrow, out of the country, the three of us destined for a multi-day adventure in a foreign land. HW is provisioning us as I write. Let no man put asunder.

A woman in Anchorage who owns a pet-sitting service had a bumper sticker on her Jeep that I was especially fond of: “Support the troops, not the policy.” I was talking with a close friend recently in email. He and I mainly agreed on what Memorial Day remembrance should be about, and not about. He mentioned the Vietnam war, and the [miss-attributed] harsh criticism too many people in this country at the time had for the returning troops from that “conflict overseas” (recalling John Prine).

I replied that this miss-attributed criticism heaped on returning troops was by people who didn’t understand the kernel of wisdom in that bumper sticker. Especially where their criticism targeted conscripts (~1/3 of all troops who fought in Vietnam) – I mean, how stupid and insensitive were those people. A man is forced to go to war to face possible death, or else face jail time, and he’s the target of your scold?! Talk about blaming the victim.

I proposed that maybe Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day should be collapsed into a single holiday of remembrance. If the point is to be grateful to the men and women who made a huge sacrifice to protect our freedoms, then let’s remember them all, both the fallen and the one’s fortunate enough to have returned home alive.

Or, keep the days of remembrance separate, as they are now, but maybe follow up Memorial Day with a companion celebration of raucous contempt for past leaders who got us into foreign wars, frequently on false premises (looking at you McNamara* and Bush), that had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the freedoms of individual Americans. Call it: Anti-Jingoism Day. So that future Americans should never, forget, the folly. Give all Americans Anti-Jingoism day off from work, except for employees of Faux News and other like-minded hawks – their punishment is to write on a blackboard one thousand times the words of that bumper sticker.

* Hat-tip for the confession of folly in his memoir

I spoke with a white man at the Miami airport. We were in the gate area together waiting to board a plane for Seattle. He was seated in a row of chairs opposite from where HW and I were seated. Slouched in his seat, possibly weary from travel, he had a calm demeanor. Probably in his 70s, his face was splotched with sunburn. Our eyes met. Where you been, he asked. The Galapagos Islands, I beamed. HW and I had returned to the states two days earlier, but I was still in a dream-like headspace, all pain surrendered, as one feels during the waning half lives of a narcotic. And so as a way to share my surplus of lightness of being, and to offset the ennui of airport layovers, I winked at the man, smiled, and added, you know, to confirm that Darwin was right. The man wore a t-shirt sporting an ad for a beach-side bar in Puerto Rico. His travel companion was wearing the same t-shirt but in a different color. She was a black woman, nestled in her seat and pressed against the chair arm that separated them. Her bangs didn’t move when she raised her head slightly to regard me with a kind of stern look, which, all I could think in the moment, may have been triggered by her hearing the word Darwin. Naturally, I assumed they might have been to Puerto Rico recently, and perhaps like HW and I, were on their way back home. Of course we now know he wasn’t right, the man said. His companion shot him an approving look, then looked back at me and smirked. No, I don’t know that, I said, returning his volley. I felt HW stir next to me. His companion squirmed uncomfortably in her seat and glared at me with mercurial eyes. Right away, a convenient set of assumptions about me seemed to occur to him. He looked at me pointedly, chuckled dismissively, and said, well, where did we come from do you suppose? We? You mean like me and you? Yes, Man, where did Man come from, he insisted. Oh boy, we got a live one. Just then HW piped up, shot him a glance and said, you got him going now! From a distant ancestor, something resembling but not the same as modern apes, I said. At this his companion curtly shook her head no, her eyes still fixed on me. Then, like an insatiable child… and where did the ape-like things come from, he said. Gee, I don’t remember, Lemurs maybe… you know there’s something called the evolutionary tree. You can trace life back to the first amoeba or whatever. Sure, he said, and where did the first cell come from. Ultimately, from a self-replicating molecule, I said. His companion continued to shake her head no, the immovable bangs glistening under the natural light beaming through the tall windows behind her. Yes, I said, molecules that catalyze their own reproduction, it’s called the RNA-world hypothesis. You ever hear of Lee Ross, he said. Who? Wait, he’s a crackpot, isn’t he, I said. Maybe I have. He leaned back hard in his seat, as if to retreat from his conviction. Well, I’m no scientist, he said, but Lee Ross is an astrophysicist, and he says there is no way life could have evolved from no life. You could look him up. I am a scientist, I said. It’s a straightforward lab experiment to show that certain molecules self-catalyze their own reproduction. People around us began to listen in. Couldn’t I put the same question to you, I said, where did God come from, if that’s who you suppose created life? He paused and looked at me, as if to concede I may have had a point, but I couldn’t say for sure, and with that his countenance changed, like me he appeared to acknowledge how preposterous it was that two strangers in an airport should be discussing the greatest mystery in the universe, and leaving it unanswered, in an exchange that couldn’t have taken more than sixty seconds. Then the call came for early boarding and the man stood up and helped his companion into a wheelchair. A few minutes passed and I spotted her in line, the man standing behind her with his hands on the handles of her chair awaiting the gate agent to scan their boarding passes, still staring at me, warily.

The sea was variably indigo blue and tourmaline green. Everywhere we went was like a phantasmagorical zoo sans cages or bars. On land, the naturalists asked that we not stray from the approved paths; in the water that we please resist the urge to touch. This never felt like a limitation. The ever present animal life was often within arm’s length, or swimming so close to our masks it wasn’t clear who came to see who. Countless species of birds were everywhere. Albatrosses with eight foot wingspans knifed through the air like stealth jets. Boobies performed acrobatic nosedives into the water to catch fish only they could spy. Black male frigate birds soared on updrafts, showing off their radiant orange gular pouches. The girls looked on, ranking their displays. We were voyeurs to two Swallow-tailed gulls copulating. Two turtles too. Yellow-crowned herons hunted ubiquitous Sally lightfoot crabs that moved crabwise among the lava rocks like rainbow toys in a dream. Fancy flamingos scoured the floor of a backwater lagoon for food, oblivious to our presence. Penguin pairs played on the rocks and slid on their bellies into the sea. An undaunted mother albatross rose and leaned back to reveal a most beautifully colored egg she was incubating. So close she was, I imagined she was inviting me to take a turn. Near sunset large groups of iguanas would arrange themselves non-randomly, and stare motionless at the setting sun like they were members of a cult. Brilliantly-colored lava lizards flourished on every island we visited. Darwin’s finches flitted among the trees, singing. At night fifteen foot sharks circled our yacht, drawn to the bait fish drawn to the boat lights. We used inflatable rafts to shuttle between the islands and the yacht. One day dozens of dolphins joined us. We ate like royalty three times a day and drank juices made from fruit I didn’t know existed. We cozied up in the lounge and devoured lectures on island geology, marveled at the art of ancient volcanoes. We were smack dab on the equator over five hundred miles from the nearest continent, yet we had WiFi. It was eighty degrees or better every day. The night sky was like living in a planetarium. Not a day passed when I didn’t want to applaud. One night we left the yacht and slept in a tree house. The next day we visited the Darwin research center and cried like children when told the story of Lonesome George. We visited a plantation and learned the proper way to taste coffee. We made friends and were rocked to sleep by shallow, long period waves. On the penultimate day of our adventure we took a long, solemn walk on Chinese Hat island where I’m pretty sure I saw HW tear up. It was all that overwhelmingly fragile and beautiful.