Month: January 2022

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book recently published by the Pulitzer-prize winning author, Anthony Doerr. Anthony lives in Boise, Idaho, the same town where I live. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a work of art, the likes of which I have never ever read before. I said that about Tony Doerr’s book, All the Light We Cannot See, for which he won the Pulitzer, until I read Cloud Cuckoo Land. If even possible, I wouldn’t be surprised if he received his second Pulitzer for this giant accomplishment.  

The following entries are partially posted on Facebook. I will add to them as I see fit or the need arises or I get hordes beating down my door for more writing or Tony Doerr takes me to court.

January 25, 2022

4:30 a.m. I think I’m reading the greatest book ever written, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Boise’s own Anthony Doerr. I’m not entirely joking. I know Christians will take offense to that statement, so I’m willing to hear their case. I’ve also read the next two greatest books, All the Light We Cannot See, also by Tony Doerr, and The Overstory, by Richard Powers.

    The are 1,348,265 reasons why my wife and I love Cloud Cuckoo Land but the one that hits home the most, for me, is that Doerr builds the strongest fictional case I’ve ever read for the Earth being a super-organism, or the Gaia hypothesis, and for saving the only home we have ever and will ever have. Richard Powers does a great job of that, too, but not as comprehensively. If you are the crying type, which I’m not because I’m a real man, this book will move you to tears. I could write pages about this book, and I will but not here-fortunately for you. I can hear my wife sighing from the bedroom and it’s 4:30 a.m.

P.S. Don’t be put off by its size (622 pgs.) because its beauty grows. Actually, I find I’m wanting to go slow, and savor it. Every page is a work of art.

January 27, 2022
    4:30 a.m. This is when my incredibly creative juices are spewing out on the floor around me. Look out, Tony Doerr! No, I can’t sleep because I’m reading CCL (only used by those who know Tony intimately and in his will) and thinking that Tony is actually God or maybe he is the guy we’ve all been waiting for to return from that place in the sky. CCL II, maybe ???? I do know this much: I am reading a miracle, maybe even the 8th Wonder of the World.

    It’s like my second favorite author and second greatest author of all time and now a certifiable saint, Edward Abbey, wrote in his introduction to “Desert Solitaire,” his magnum opus. “In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot—throw it a something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?” Abbey wrote that in a bar in Hoboken in 1967. Eat your hearts out, I have a 1st edition.

Facebook response: This is from a now-past friend who disagrees with me regarding Abbey’s sainthood. He wrote:

“A saint? He was a crabby, pretentious, jerk that thought he had a monopoly on how to nature was to be enjoyed….and turned his nose up and scorned those that chose to do it differently….yuck. But I love you Dave….”

I want to print his name for the world to know what a warped and sick individual he is. He has a huge, beautiful house overlooking a golf course and the mountains, and I told him in no uncertain terms that if he wants my friendship back he needs to give my wife his house. We shall see just how much he loves me! If he doesn’t give her the house, his name will posted so that Abbey’s and my groupies can hound him till his dying days.

January 29, 2022

5:10 a.m. I’m still savoring Cloud Cuckoo Land (CCL; acronym only used by Tony’s mates) but I’m near the end. My wife said to me the other day, “Why are you sharing this with all your yokel friends? Why don’t you put your journal entries into your ridiculous blog and then a book and make a lot of money like my friend, Anthony.” She lies. She saw him at a talk once with hundreds of other people and now he’s her friend. Maybe she’s right; I need the money.

Money could buy me a BMW M5, 0 – 60 in 3.1 seconds. And then, Tony willing, a lot of fast and loose women. Tony and I live in the same town and I’m hoping this will catch his attention and we can become IPA drinking buddies.

This book is the closest I’ve ever come to a miracle. How one mind can wrap around all the information required for CCL is a mystery to me. This book would have taken me, a near-genius myself, six millennia to write. And according to Tony, Armageddon is just around the corner. I’m not positive about that because I’m not quite finished, but that’s my best guess.

January 31, 2022

4:15 a.m. I’m nearing the end of CCL and I want it to end, and I don’t want it to end. I don’t want it to end because I’m afraid of the ending but at the same time because each page is so beautiful, such a work of art. I’m reading a Mona Lisa. I want it to end because I need to be put out of a certain amount of misery. I will have to go back to facing the real world and what we have ahead of us.

As I read CCL, I keep thinking about my three grandsons in Seattle. The oldest is 10 and the twins are 7. I’m 79. I call them the Seattle 3. I also keep thinking of Ed Abbey and his prognosis that we have a bloody rock in our hands, and we need to throw it at something big and glassy.  Is that bloody rock CCL? Did Abbey predict in 1967 that Tony Doerr was going to publish CCL in 2021? Stay tuned.

All of my professional and retired life as a university ecologist, since the mid-70s, sometime after the first Earth Day (4/22/1970), I’ve been trying to get the message to students and through editorials and essays, that we are in deep in shit and getting deeper. It wasn’t until the early 1980s when I received two summer research fellowships at NASA Johnson Space Center and found out about James Hansen, the then director of Goddard Space Flight Center, that the reality of climate change really smacked me upside the head. I consider Jim Hansen the “canary in the mineshaft” for climate change. His research at Goddard was ominous as Hell. At JSC and through the 80s, I was able to write professional papers about climate change. I wrote about the impacts of climate change on Earth using NOAA meteorological satellite data.

Let’s say for sake of argument, I live until I’m 89 – 2032, one more decade. The Seattle 3 will be 20 and 17. By that time, the four of us will have witnessed a world moving increasingly rapidly in the direction of Hell on Earth. Tony Doerr describes that world in the final pages of his epic. Jim Hansen describes in it in his book, The Storms of My Grandchildren. Hansen thinks we could end up many centuries from now, like Venus. Venus is a mega-greenhouse with an atmosphere of 96% carbon dioxide, an atmospheric pressure 92 times that of Earth and a surface temperature of 880 degrees F. This is above the melting point of lead. Meanwhile back at the ranch in 2033, the planet will be wobbling on its axis. Climate refugees will be migrating anywhere they can stay alive, and we probably will be warring over resources. Cities will be starting to move inland or up. Preparation for Doomsday will finally be in full swing. Why did I and the remaining 7.9 billion fellow Riders of Blue and Green Mega-Marble hand them such a legacy? Why, as Abbey says, did we hand them a tombstone?

February 1, 2022

6:00 a.m. I actually slept in this morning. That makes me giddy with happiness because yesterday, after waking up at 2:30 a.m., by noon I was a zombie. I still had to endure a 2:30 p.m. visit to my chiropractor. I made it, and then slept for 2 hours.

I finished it. Just a few minutes ago. As I’ve said before, if I weren’t a real man with 12-pack abs, buns of steel and the guns of Arnold Swarzenegger, I would be sobbing. From happiness or sadness, who’s to say. Maybe a little of both.

I’m not sure I have enough superlatives in my vocabulary to say what I think of this book. Good superlatives, that is. If Tony Doerr isn’t God, then who is? To be politically correct, God may not be genius of a man but could be a woman, an LBPTQIA, a little person, or a person of color. Or a dog? Tony is definitely a white male because I saw him give a talk and studied his book jacket picture. Furthermore, he’s bald. I’m not certain whether he’s a WASP but I do know that he was raised in Cleveland, and I was raised in Columbus and I’m a WASP, but I’m not bald. Yet. But it looks like Tony shaves his head because it’s too perfect and he’s too young to have a natural cue ball. The differences between Tony and me are obvious and many. I got C’s and a few D’s throughout my academic career and Tony probably ended up teaching his first-grade classmates. In no way could Tony be a normal guy and I’m reasonably normal if you only ask me.

I wish everyone in the world could read CCL but I’m thinking that may not be possible. If they could, I think it could change the way all of us look at Mother Earth. We just might get our act together and dump our dependency on fossil fuels by 2023. Ha! As I’ve said before, CCL is a confirmation of the James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. Mother Earth is a superorganism. End of story. After reading CCL, I am doubtless that is fact. Not fake fact. Fact. Read my lips, Mr. Fox News. Read my lips, Hitler wannabe, Mr. Orange Haired Orange Faced Buffoon (in the future, you have my permission to use the acronym, OHOFB, if you wanna write it on toilet paper squares just before you use them).

I will not even hint at the ending. Let’s just say that I dumped my stash of carfentanil, threw away the razor blades and a single Fred Meyer extra-strength plastic bag. Oh, and the noose and wobbly chair. All gone. TMI, Dave, TMI!! I’ve replaced all that negative shit with a new set of binoculars, a turntable to play my collection of five 33&1/3rds and zero 45s, and fifteen scratchy-as-hell 78s from my early youth that I can’t play on this new turntable anyway. Just beat it. Or rather, just READ IT!

*Author’s Note: It should be obvious that this journal is pretty much stream-of-consciousness writing. I proofread each entry maybe once, maybe twice and eliminated any nasty references to family and friends but left in any to politicians, who are the scourge of the Earth because they are destroying it all by themselves. Politicians are lower than lawyers and whale shit on the bottom of the ocean.

This is a very brief fiction piece about a night nurse who is called into the hospital in the middle of the night to assist in an operation. As it turns out, the surgeon needed to operate on a man who ate Barbie doll heads and had developed an obstructed small intestine. The nurse was able to see the shapes of the Barbie heads through the thin-walled small intestine.

The story was entered in a fiction writing contest where the requirement was to write a piece that was exactly 101 words in length. I lost.

“For breakfast he ate Barbie. For lunch he ate Ken. For dinner he ate his Mexican amiga, Carmelita. He liked diversity. In the darkness, he sat straining on the porcelain bus, as he called it, and nothing happened. Like the day before and the day before that and the day before that. He woke at midnight, his gut an inflating basketball, his body soaked.

Even though she was the ER night nurse, she vomited the next morning. Bobbing in the fetid porcelain pool, she saw Barbie, Ken, and Carmelita staring teary-eyed back at her. It had been her worst night ever.”

(*Note: This is my shortest and fastest to post in history. Seriously. But, only after I had my coffee and after I visited the ah, hmmmm, yes, right, that place. And, with only one, maybe two, proofreads, which everyone assumes anyway, I dumped this and have moved on. The few writers in my league would call that stream-of-unconsciousness writing).

    I’m not a religious man (not yet anyway) but if I was, I’d still answer the title question with an emphatic, resounding, earthquaking, blood curdling, fart blasting, hernia making, “YES!” Perhaps it would be more acceptable and religiously correct and get me off some hook somewhere, to ask, “Is Biden A God?” That way Biden has a lot more company to share the fame and blame with. A few of the gods I know personally include Zeus, Paul McCartney, Tony Doerr, me, etc. I would still answer, “YES!”

    I’ll answer why he is amongst us elite with a few questions. Do bad things happen to good people? Was becoming president a bad thing that happened to a good person? Are the gods mortal? Are the gods moral? Do the gods have bad days? Are the gods good looking? Are the gods all men? Do the gods still look good in tights? Are the gods trying to make the world a better place?

    Of course, the answer to all those questions is, yes. Why yes? If you were asked if you could part the Red Sea now, today, your answer might go something like this, “No, of course not. Do you think I’m God or Jesus? But maybe tomorrow after I have my therapy session, I could try.” If I asked you if you thought Joe Biden could part the Red Sea, you might say, “Yeah, of course, he’s POTUS. What’s the Red Sea?” That is exactly what we are asking Joe Biden to NOT do. The Red Sea (a seriously cool metaphor for Congress and the country) is already parted and in between the two sides is an expanding desert, a no man’s (or woman’s) land where no one dares to tread. Except the Munchkin & Cinema Dancers (they specialize in dips and tippy toeing across hot sand). One side wants power to keep the all the power, while the other side Uhhhh, Ahhhhh, is not sure, hmmmmm, trying to do something good, yes, hmmmmm, yes, no, lose the power, etc.

   When I hear someone say that Joe Biden is past his prime, is a cognitively deficient old fool, and he needs to move on to Greener Pastures Home for the Potentially Disenchanted, I say (or think very, very quietly to myself if the person is tatooed and big), “Joe Biden is one of the gods just by being where he is. If you want his job, then go for it in 2024, but meanwhile, shut the hell up and do your part to unpart the Red Sea.”