Cleaning dog poop off the floor is a rarity these days.
She knows better, an exercise in anxiety more than a need, but it was the thunder and the rain, those mystery entities of dark night sky that had her barking out the window at 5 AM.
I knew she was having a hard morning by the way she was curled up on my slippers this morning instead of on her fluffy blue bed, like usual and by the way she clung to me, as I made breakfast, watching me with her big, sad eyes, and that little bit of tremble around her ears.
Finding her mess, I lowered my voice, deep, she came to me, and I asked her, "Did you do this?" and she slinked away like a scolded child, watched me working with plastic bag and spray cleaner.
Disposing of the mess, I called her to me, and we made friends with a "gimme five" and a "shake" and a little bit of a belly rub.
Working from home is great, but it's so nice to have a reason to get out one day a week and do something different. Today is a beautiful day, and I can't wait to get out and ride my bike to the library.
I have a standing appointment every Wednesday afternoon at Lincoln Library. I tutor after work on those days, and I find myself really looking forward to my time in the library. The guy I tutor is always a lot of fun to be around. He has a great, optimistic attitude, and he's curious about everything. One week we're reading about the solar system and the next week we're reading about the history of Afghanistan. He is really interested in everything, which makes my job easy. He picks something he wants to read, and we start working on it.
I love being in the library. Maybe it's because I grew up without a library, but I just love having all those rows and rows of books all around. I usually arrive a few minutes early so I can return books, browse the stacks, look at movies, or any of the other super-awesome things there are to do in the library. This week I'm returning Bukowski'sCome on In, Gregory Corso'sMindfield, and a great book of historical poetry by George Keithley called Song in a Strange Land. I've really enjoyed all three, and I may renew the Keithley book. I loved his The Donner Party.
This past Saturday, Aubrey and I made the drive to Collinsville, Illinois to explore Cahokia Mounds. For those of you who don't know, Cahokia Mounds is the site of a once-thriving Native American city. From 650 to 1400 CE, Cahokia Mounds boasted a population at its peak of between 20,000 and 40,000 people. The city was massive and spread out over an area rivaling that of modern day metropolitan St. Louis. Not only that, but there is archaeological evidence that the Mississipians who populated the site used city planning techniques to lay out the city and to deal with "urban" problems like overcrowding, disease, and waste removal.
An artist's depiction of the Cahokia Mounds site circa 1000 CE
Additionally, the major metropolitan site located near modern day Collinsville, was a first-tier site. There were other second and third-tier sites associated to this city center, which equate to modern suburbs. These second and third-tier sites were important for trade, crop production, and communication. At one time the entire Mississipian culture spread from the Mississippi River east to the Atlantic Ocean and as far South as the Gulf of Mexico.
I remember going to Cahokia Mounds as a kid, but I really didn't appreciate it back then. I think my family squeezed a walk to the top of Monk's Mound in between breakfast at the Waffle House in Collinsville and an afternoon at the racetrack down the road. I remember walking to the top of the mound, and not really knowing what it was, just thinking it was a hill.
This time around, I went in with a deeper appreciation of the cultural and historical significance of the site. So often, we read or see television programs about the great cultures of the ancient world. We are hammered ad nauseum with shows and stories about Egyptians, Aztecs, Mayans, ancient Indians, and ancient Chinese, but rarely do we see any coverage of the mound-building people of what is today the United States.
Maybe the earthen structures at Cahokia Mounds are not as magnificent as the limestone blocks used to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu, or of the dry stone construction used at Macchu Picchu, but the Mississippians showed true problem-solving and ingenuity in their ability to utilize the resources of the Mississippi River valley to build epic structures. The Mississippians made due with what they had, which was a variety of soil types, including clay. They were craftspeople, who leveled the surfaces of their mounds with absolute precision. They even leveled acres and acres of flat land so they would have flat plazas upon which to trade, celebrate, worship, and play games.
The people of "Cahokia," also practiced astronomy, as evidenced by the ring of wooden posts, today called Woodhenge. Woodhenge was used to mark solstices, equinoxes, and to monitor other astronomical events.
view from the top of Monk's Mound, see St. Louis in the background
There is so much evidence in Cahokia Mounds of a civilized and flourishing community. In fact, the first urban center in "modern" North America to reach the population of Cahokia Mounds at its height was Philadelphia when Philadelphia crossed the 40,000 mark around 1800. Think about that for a minute.
The only problem we found in Cahokia Mounds is that it appears there's very little money going to the site, which is a problem I don't see being solved anytime soon. The "state of the art" interpretation center feels often outdated, and occasionally just old. Despite the fact that Cahokia Mounds is only one of 20 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States, it doesn't seem to have much of a budget at all. Entry is a voluntary donation of $4 per person or $10 per family, which we gladly paid.
Essentially, the entire historical site is a do-it-yourself affair. This wasn't a big deal to us. We bought one of the $1 tour guide books and walked the trails by ourselves. It was a beautiful day, and Aubrey took a ton of pictures. In order to get from site to site, you are advised to get in your car and drive. This seemed silly to us. We enjoy walking, and it was a nice day. Walking from the interpretive center and the Twin Mounds self-guided tour to Monk's Mound wasn't a big deal. But walking a mile on the shoulder of the highway to reach Woodhenge was less than ideal. There were not many sidewalks or walking trails that were convenient to all locations. Additionally, there only seemed to be a small number of staff people at the interpretive center, and none on our around the rest of the site to answer questions or to give information. The site does offer twice-daily one-hour guided tours, but I think these tours are strictly around the twin mounds area and not the entire site.
I don't mean to complain. We did have a great day, and I think the folks working at the site are doing the best they possibly can with the resources available to them. I'd just love to see the situation improve for them and for the viewing public.
I'd highly recommend Cahokia Mounds for anyone looking for something to do in the St. Louis area. Have a picnic, walk around the site, learn some sweet ancient history.
I leave you with a short video I found at Veoh. It's a pretty cool overview of the area.
In some ways, in lots of ways, we spend our whole lives in airplanes swirling over our memories, looking down, puzzling over those myriad experiences we unrolled with careful precision or threw to the world willy-nilly, wondering why or how, now, we were ever able to pull ourselves through?
We fly alone, frowning at "Oh my, I can't believe I used to . . ." or "Did I really look like that?!" or crying at the time she broke your heart and despite all your inner strength and all your intelligent ramblings on pride and the transmigration of soul all you could feel was the sadness that seemed to materialize from every molecule of your being and all you could do was lay down on the steps like a big dead bear and weep real wet tears.
Or laughing at the time you, trying to look so cool for them, tripped sprawling out, falling on the floor as you walked into the grocery store bumping your chin hard in front of all those people who couldn't help laughing.
Or embracing the time you chased fireflies alone in the yard, while everyone sat around the picnic table, smoking and throwing scuttlebutt.
Or trying to forget the quiet days you sat alone, in that little room, feeling pressed to do more or at least something else but powerless to do anything at all.
Circling overhead like a fragile little bird, you reflect, puzzling over this landscape you've created and molded, and transformed, like a god, absorbing it, before its all over.
As the plane, circling and circling ever tighter, descends, prepares to bounce softly to a landing or throw itself sharply landward, you reflect.
You reflect.
The flight will soon end, the journey will soon cease, and there will be no one left to remember all these beautiful memories; these beautiful memories will evaporate into exinction.
Remember that old garage? The one we had when we lived in the blue trailer across from the school with its dirt floor and unfinished walls?
I remember spending long days and even longer nights in there, Dad, with you and the guys, swapping out transmissions, or putting on your newly chromed headers, or cherrypicking whole motors, the whole time BTO tapes playing over and over again or sometimes Lynyrd Skynyrd or Tom Petty, and learning things that school and friends and television had not yet taught me.
I'd sit in the corner flipping through your old black and white Conan comic books while you and the guys sweated and tinkered over the nuts and bolts of a '67 'Cuda or a '65 GTO, hoping to have them ready for the next big cruise or car show.
Remember the time that stray dog, a little brown, pesky thing came into the garage while you were on your back, torso under the car, tweaking the shifting linkage and started humping your leg, and you did your best to shake him off, but he just kept coming back for more, and you finally yelled, "Goddamn dog!" and climbed out from under the car, to run him off, and then we both started laughing?
Or what about the time you got so mad that the Barracuda wouldn't start that you threw a ball-peen hammer through the windshield of that old dirty Aries that you loved to drive around so much, that copper-colored zombie of a car, with the sagging ceiling liner, and the ripped seats with the foam squeezing through and the rust holes along the fenders; that car that embarrassed the hell out of me when I rode to town with you and felt like everyone was staring at us?
I was just reading about Terence McKenna's Time Wave Zero theory last week. While it's hard to explain (a good intro video is here), McKenna developed a mathematical formula that theoretically calculates the ebb and flow of "novelty" in the universe. Using the mysterious King Wen sequence of the ancient I Ching as a starting point, McKenna derived his mathematical formula around the concept that there is teleological (a purpose-driven) attractor at the end of time and that as time draws nearer and nearer to this end, the interconnectedness of places/beings/events become more and more interrelated.
McKenna himself states that the theory is so bizarre that it's difficult to believe. And it is bizarre. For one, it's hard to get your mind around novelty theory. The Time Wave Zero graph, as plotted by McKenna and his computer software designed specifically for computing TWZ, the graph is fractal in nature. Additionally, it grinds against so many of the modern theories of time and the physics of our universe. We've learned that time and the universe will continue expanding at least until some distant point in the future when it won't matter to us anyway.
I'm skeptical, mostly because the end of the time wave zero sequence coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, the notorious "doomsday" date we've all heard so much about. This alone makes me skeptical. In some ways it's interesting, and I think McKenna argued that this was evidence that the ancient Mayans, the ancient Chinese, and all the other cultures that predicted a 2012 end of time had a knowledge of the universe that we currently lack. For me, it seems a bit "opportunistic" that the end of Time Wave Zero theory lands on 2012, with what appears to me a bit of tweaking by McKenna.
But . . . I'm intrigued. As an artifact of Time Wave Zero, it is proposed that there are historical resonances that are repeated as time spirals closer and tighter to the end. Imagine time as a spiral. Long ago, the spiral was big and loose. It took a long time to go around the circle once. So, one turn around the outside of the spiral takes X number of years. The next time around the spiral, the circle required to reach the beginning point is smaller, and the historical events coincide with events from the first time around, everything takes less time. It's more condensed. According to McKenna, 1942 kicked off a 67 year period in which the previous 4,000 years or so are being lived out in a very concentrated manner. And next we will embark on a time period up until 2012, that the whole spiral of history will be condensed again until at the end all novel events of all history will be played out simultaneously in absolute chaos. Which, according to theory, will occur on or around my birthday in 2012. (That's right, my birthday is December 21)
Huh? It's so hard to believe. Plus, McKenna's reputation is a little questionable. I like listening to the guy talk. He's obviously brilliant, and he strikes me as an excellent thinker. But, he was known to explore the mind-opening properties of hallucinogenics from around the world, especially South American herbal varieties. Much of his early thought on Time Wave Zero, came while under the influence of psychotropic drugs. For me, that makes his claims unreliable. But there's something about the frenetic forward movement of our global population that makes Time Wave zero ring true.
But it's still fascinating. I can't let it go.
I saw this video this morning on YouTube, discussing the "exponential times" in which we currently live. It seems that everything around us is advancing exponentially. Does this support McKenna's theory of Time Wave Zero? I don't know. The skeptic in me says, "No." I think we just live in extraordinary times. Times in which technology and information are being created and advanced at rates never seen before in human history.
These theories are a lot of fun to ponder, but I don't think we'll have any way to know until it's over. And then it won't matter. So enjoy today, I guess.
I write tests. For a living. I'm probably the best test writer you're ever going to meet. Who knows? I may be the best test writer in the whole world. I may be the Tiger Woods of test writing. How will anyone ever know?
On the side, I work on other creative projects, ranging from a nonfiction book manuscript to a goofy public access show.
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