Interiors

Living in the reconstruction has begun to wear on me.  At first, it was fun, like camping in the house, only with electricity and indoor plumbing.  Now our campsite is feeling cramped and dirty.

We moved into this house 5 years ago, with many of the repair projects not yet done.  Our kitchen was supposed to be temporary.  People asked me how I could live without a dishwasher or an automatic ice maker, but I've spent more of my adult life without those things than with them.  I used to joke, "Oh, I'm just pretending like we're stationed in some exotic outpost."

I know that our exotic outpost will get worse before it gets better--that's a bit wearing too.

Let me record some other aspects of recent life:

--Last night, I dreamed I was in the last months of pregnancy, and that I hadn't created a nursery or bought diapers or read What to Expect When You're Expecting.  It doesn't take a trained psychiatrist to analyze that dream!

--Yesterday a much younger colleague at work said, "He commented on my jacket and said something about Sergeant Pepper.  Who is Sergeant Pepper?"

I said, "You've never heard of that Beatles song?"  And then I sang a bit of it.  He said no.  I felt very old. 

Later in the day, we looked up the song, and the album cover was there with the YouTube recording.  I pointed out the similarities between his jacket with its mandarin collar and longer length and the jackets of the 4 Beatles.  I said, "Yours is less psychedelic though."

As we chatted, I had a memory of getting the 1978 album of the same name, with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton covering the same songs.  I haven't thought about that album in a long time.

--As I've been reading Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, I've wondered why these time periods of the planet aren't familiar to me yet.  Don't I spend a lot of time reading about these mass extinctions?  But when I stopped to think about it, I realized I really only return to this topic once a year at the most.

It has been interesting to read the book and realize how different the planet has been at different points.  It will be different again, and this time, humans are functioning as the triggering event.  We are the asteroid that hastened the end of the dinosaurs.  We are the giant trees that changed the atmosphere which led to the Permian extinction--but am I remembering the correct extinction?  I've already returned the book back to the library.

--As I listen to coverage of the California wildfires, it does feel like the end times.  But humans have often felt this way.  At my theology blog, I wrote a post about the atomic explosion that destroyed Nagasaki on this day.  I think of all the ways we've envisioned the apocalypse, from pale riders on pale horses to a mushroom cloud. What will the twenty-first century choose as its apocalyptic icon?

Now I need to take my walk--the day begins!