Just an ordinary guy, thinking it through

Someone explained to me recently
that the optics of the Hubbel telescope,
purportedly kept busy looking at galaxies
and planets and other light-hearted things,
were so keen that if it were turned around
to view us, it could read a dime in our backyard.

I am not sure why it would do that but,
then again, I am careless about conspiracies.
But just to test the theory, I put a dime
out in our backyard, in good light.
I suppose I should not be surprised
if I receive a post card from the F.B.I.,
or maybe Donald Trump, in case our backyard
is not early on the list of backyard dimes
the government in interested in,
that explains that we owe tax on that dime.

Stranger things have happened, I guess,
if one is to believe the baloney that people want to believe
about us being in a struggle against the wickedness of our own government.
As I see it--and I am probably not complicated enough to understand
just how evil government is: I am one of those guys who grew up
thinking government was good for building public schools and roads,
for protecting wilderness and children and food,
to say nothing of providing police and fire and military protection.

I don't believe that Hubbel/dime/sneaking-peeks-into-back-yard stuff,
but I think I will leave the dime there and see if, someday soon,
it will go missing. That will conclusively prove that I am wrong,
and that either government is a vast takeover of freedom and privacy,
or that we have pack rats in the desert.

Pack rats in the desert! What a wild idea!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson: it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work. Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog