No More Popcorn

Today, I am in mourning. My mind is numb and I'm feeling lost. Actually, I think I'm in shock.

Last night, at 2:00 a.m., while I was in blissfully slumber, California switched to Pacific Standard time. This morning, when I dutifully called the Time Lady, so I could re-set my clocks to the correct hour, I learned an awful truth: as of September 19, 2007, the Time Announcement Information Service had been discontinued -- they apologize for any inconvenience. Beep.

I hung up and dialed again. Sure enough, the Time Lady beeps no more. She's been snuffed out. Bumped off. Whacked. Iced. 86ed. Zotzed. She has gone the way of the dinosaurs, Mesopotamia, drive-in theaters, full-service gas stations, milk-men, 8-track tapes, Josie & The Pussycats lunch boxes, Sunshine Golden Raisin Bars, and three-dimensional Cracker Jack prizes (real ones, like imitation gold rings, miniature magnifying glasses and little plastic animal stand-ups, not those crappy stickers and temporary tattoos you get now-a-days). This is just wrong!

The Time Lady has been a constant in my life since I gained the dexterity and cognitive skill to dial "P-O-P-C-O-R-N" on my parents powder-blue, rotary Princess Phone. As kids, we used to listen to her for the better part of an hour, while earnestly monitoring the kitchen clock to see if it was keeping proper time. Life was much simpler then. We were easily amused. Plus we had no TV.

We also used to call the Time Lady and relay what she said to my Mom, working out in the garden. "Maaaaa!" we'd yell from the kitchen door, "It's 3:46 and 20 seconds."

"Thank you, " Mom would reply, as she nipped the spent blossoms off her rose bushes.

"Now, it's 3:46 and 30 seconds."

"Okay, thank you. That's enough."

"Now, it's 3:46 and 40 seconds."

"I said that's enough."

"Now, it's 3:46 and 50 seconds."

"Hang up the phone now!"

When I was 13 and regularly babysitting Seth and Damian -- the two demon spawn who lived across the street -- I used to call the Time Lady and pretend I was speaking to their mother. "Your Mom says you'd better go to bed right now, or she'll feed you to the dog when she gets home," I'd whisper hoarsely at them, with my hand covering the phone's mouthpiece. "She's really mad. Listen..." Then I'd hold the phone out just long enough for them to hear a snatch of Time Lady's voice. Their eyes would expand to saucer size, they'd do one of those Wile E. Coyote leg rotations, then zing down the hall to their bedroom, dive under the covers and stay there for the rest of the night. For the record, Seth and Damian were idiots. They used to eat paint chips and drink water from the gutter. Given their miscreant dispositions and low IQs, I'm certain that they are currently guests of California's penal system.

Once, on a two-week trip to Australia, I got lonely for American accents. So I called the Time Lady just to listen to someone say, "At the tone, Pacific Standard time will be..." instead of "Eat th' town, Paceefeec Steendud toyme wheel buy..." It was so nice. Just like being home, except for the whole upside-down, Southern Hemisphere thing.

What you may not know (I didn't until I Googled it, just now) is that the Time Lady began her career in 1928. Based in Chicago, she and was actually two operators, sitting in front of a clock, reading out the time every 15 seconds. (And I thought my job was boring.) In the 1940s, the Time Lady's job got automated -- the two operators were fired and replaced with a machine playing Jane Barbe's pre-recorded, isochronal recitations. It was a cutting-edge technology and a much needed service for a nation of busily forgetful people with wind-up watches. But over the years, as technology advanced, watches got batteries and AT&T saw calls to the Time Lady fall off. Cell phones and computers made the Time Lady as obsolete as my parent's rotary Princess Phone. The 40-year-old equipment supporting her outlived its intended lifespan and the company that made it stopped supplying parts. California was one of the Time Lady's last bastions. Nevada still has her, but all the other 23 states served by AT&T (now including California) have bid her a fond farewell.

Now, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination. I like all the nifty modern gadgets we have to play with these days. I love my iPod and the 2,572 songs I carry around on it. I love that I could (were I so inclined) listen to it continuously for 6.8 days and never hear the same song twice. I love no longer having to balance pennies on the arm of a record player to listen to hideously scratched LPs. (As an aside, let me say that there is something magical about listening to a scratchy version of Billy Holiday, singing Willow Weap for Me.  Somehow, it rings more true than the immaculate, digitally re-mastered MP3 version.) I also think it is unassailably cool that I can sit on my backyard patio, writing this blog on my laptop, sending a kajillion invisible ones and zeros flying through the air to my wireless modem and heaven knows where from there.

Yes, technology and progress are good things. But there are certain niceties of old that I am sad to see tossed by the wayside -- little bygone amenities that elevated us above our rough plebeian weft into the more refined silk of social fabric: bathroom signs that read "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" instead of displaying those grotesque little stick figures; office buildings with windows you can open to breath real air; turn-down service in hotels; coat and hat hooks on the outsides of restaurant booths; butchers who cut your meat to order; and the Time Lady. These things made us better people, really. Less grouchy. More punctual.

So on this tragic day, let us bow our heads in a moment of reverent silence and solemnly consider the passing of Time Lady. Let us offer a prayer for the repose of her soul. She was a giving, truthful woman, ever vigilant, never complaining, a latter day town crier. A paragon of constancy and dependability. Never impatient; never rude; always helpful. Known to generations of Americans, she will remain a fond memory of better days and finer things.

Coffee and Abuse

If you ever find yourself in the charmingly obscure hamlet of Myers Flat, just off Highway 101, in Northern California's Humboldt County, I double-dog dare you to patronize The Daily Grind Coffee House -- a cluttered little rodent hole next door to the Four Mori Market & Deli. They boast a "world famous mocha" (Ooo! color me impressed) but neglect to mention that said mocha, as well as all their other drinks, comes with a side order of surliness, a generous dollop of condescension, and sprinkling of disdain.

I have dropped into the Daily Grind three times in as many years and each visit has been singularly unpleasant, yet oddly entertaining in a how-long-you-can-hold-your-finger-in-the-candle-flame kind of way. If your personality is at all inclined toward mischievous depravity, the experience is well worth the detour, I assure you.

My first acquaintance with The Grind was back in the summer of 2005, when I was playing tour guide to my  friend, Hamish -- a large, boisterous, coffee-addicted Scotsman. It was a typical overly-warm July afternoon in the California redwoods and, having just circuited the Founders Grove, we were duly parched and yearning for refreshment. As we drove south, Ham -- who can locate coffee houses faster than an airport beagle can sniff out carry-on salami -- suddenly commanded that I pull off at Myers Flat so we could, in his words, "have a tea." (Brits and their ilk refer to any afternoon repast as "tea." I don't understand it, but I'm prepared to accept it as one of their emblematic quirks, similar to the way we Californians refer to all people as "guys," regardless of their gender.)

Anyway, true to form, Ham ferreted out this funky little establishment that looked promising, despite what I would consider an inordinately thick window display of dream-catchers. A hand-lettered sandwich board propped outside the door proclaimed their aforementioned "world famous mocha" assertion. Beneath that, almost as a afterthought, it read, "and fresh fruit smoothies."  We parked the car and walked in.

Finding ourselves facing an eight-by-five-foot chalk board scrawled with a largely indecipherable list of beverages, we stood for several minutes, brows furrowed, muttering sotto voce questions to each other.

"Does that say 'blackberry-mango smoothie' or 'be merry and go smoking'?"

"I can't tell. What do you think they mean by 'espresso terminoso'?"

"No idea. Maybe drinking it gets you an audience with the Great Bean Maker in the Sky?"

All the while, a sullen, dreadlocked Rastafar-ette sat behind the counter, reading a battered copy of Greenhouse Growers magazine and pointedly ignoring us. Ham braved the first contact with her by requesting one of their Ultimate Iced Lattes.

"Waseyes?" she grunted, not even bothering to look up from her Hydroponics Made Easy article.

"Beg pardon?" asked Ham.

"WhhhaaT SiiiiZzze?" she repeated, glowering at him and enunciating as if speaking to a child.

"Large," said Ham, turning to me with a bit of worry in his eyes.

Rastette flung her magazine onto the counter, heaved an effortful sigh, lifted herself from her bar stool and walked out the front door.

"Was it something I said?" asked Ham.

"Maybe she's going to pick the beans." I retorted.

Peeking out the door, I was just in time to see her bony vegan backside turn into Four Mori's next door. For a full six minutes, Ham and I stood in the shop surveying the accumulated bric-a-brac, not really knowing whether to stay or leave. Our constancy was rewarded when the ill-tempered little cur returned, carting a pint of vanilla ice-cream.

"We don't have a freezer in here," she offered, whereupon Ham and I nodded thoughtfully and uttered mollifying "Um-hums."

Returning to her lair behind the counter, she spent 15 minutes effecting some uncharacteristically complex industry with a coffee grinder and a Cuisinart, ultimately producing a 24-ounce blended latte that appeared to have ground coffee beans mixed into its cool, creamy froth. Ham was ecstatic. He eagerly forked over the $5.50 for his bucket o' caffeine and immediately set himself to sucking frosty slush up the straw and into his sinus cavities. After depositing Ham's money in the till, Rastette slouched back onto her bar stool, retrieved her magazine and regressed into an unsociable sulk.

"I'm sorry," I inquired meekly, "but I was interested in getting a large strawberry-banana smoothie?"

With another loud exhale, she once again arose and exited the establishment. I shrugged a "whatever" to Ham, who by then was panting off his initial attack of brain-freeze, and we waited in silence once more. A few moments later Rastette returned with a basket of strawberries and two bananas. Pulling a large wooden cutting board from under a pile of newspaper, she began to Benihana the fruit with a large meat cleaver. I saw my life flash briefly before me when she swiveled, cleaver raised, and glared menacingly at me. "Did you want that made with yogurt?" she sneered.

"Sure, if that's how you do it," I replied cheerfully, hoping to feign my both my enthusiasm for her smoothie recipe and my endorsement of whatever means most facilitated her speedy completion of my drink. Wrong answer. Rastette smacked the cleaver down onto the counter and rolled her eyes with yet another exaggerated respiratory discharge, wandered out the door. Several minutes later she was back grasping a tub of plain yogurt. It took her still another ten minutes to finish my smoothie. I handed over my $5.50 with an obsequious, "Thank you," which was met by freezing silence.  Leaving her studying an electrical diagram for wiring grow-lights, Ham and I departed, pleasantly sated, though 40 minutes older and $11.00 poorer for our trouble.

My next dalliance at The Grind came a year later, while I was sharing time at my family's Redway summer cabin with my sister, Kit, and her brood. We had driven north to visit Eureka's  Sequoia Park Zoo -- a favorite with her boys -- and on our way back to the cabin, Kit suggested we stop by the Shrine Drive Through Tree's curio shop (also in Myers Flat), to pick up some redwood-themed piece of kitsch for a friend back home. As we pulled off the highway, I pointed out The Daily Grind, jokingly referring to it as the "home of the latte troll."

"I wouldn't mind a latte," announced Kits's husband, Frank, who then tossed over his shoulder, "Do you boys want some smoothies?" Despite my warnings, the consensus was for drinks all around. We parked outside the curio shop and Frank waited with the boys while Kit and I steeled ourselves to the task of beverage procurement.

An hour later, after a torture session not unlike Ham's and mine, we returned with three smoothies, an Ultimate Iced Latte, an iced chai and significantly chaffed egos. The boys were asleep and Frank was getting ready to dial 9-1-1 and request that the Sheriff issue a missing person's report.

The most recent of my Grind ordeals transpired just this past August. I was, again, vacationing at the cabin, but this time with my brother Mark and his family. We had gone for a cruise up the Avenue of the Giants and, on returning, Ellie and Evan (Mark's wife and eldest son) expressed a fervent desire for chai.  Having a chai addiction of my own, I was sympathetic and offered The Daily Grind as a close, albeit regrettable, fixative. We used the same strategy as had Kit and I. Leaving Mark and his two-man demolition team in the car, Ellie and I submitted ourselves for the inevitable abuse.

This time, Rastette was not there to attend us. Instead, we were served (and I used that term loosely) by someone closely resembling Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice character. He was talking with one of the locals when we entered and, for at least five minutes, refused to even acknowledge our presence. When he became sufficiently annoyed that we hadn't had the good grace to simply leave, he turned his head in our direction and barked, "What?!"

"Could I get two iced chais, please," Ellie asked, "one large and one small." Shaking his head in disgust, as if she'd asked him to pick up her dog's poop, Beetlejuice assembled Ellie's drinks with wordless belligerence. When she proffered a $20.00 note in payment for her $8.00 tab, he seemed vexed beyond the limits of human endurance. Dumping her return $12.00 onto the counter, he made a bee-line for the front door, but pulled up when he saw me.

"Did you want something?" he growled.

I was within a millisecond of parrying back a snide, "No, I'm just standing here to watch the maggots hatch," when better judgment stopped me. (It's never a good idea to piss off someone who will be preparing your food.) Instead I politely indicated that I, too, would appreciate a large iced chai, if the provision of such did not detain him from something more important -- like scraping the ingredients for his evening meal out from under his toenails. (Okay, I only said the toenail thing inside my head, but it satisfied, nonetheless.)

My request elicited an ocular rotation and protracted exhalation similar to those I had garnered from Rastette in years past. But I was glad, at least, to see that Beetlejuice was keeping up The Grind's fine tradition of customer disservice. In due time, I handed over my $5.50 and stepped gingerly aside as he again sprinted for the exit, lest we or, heaven forbid, some new walk-in request more drinks of him.

So, by my count, The Daily Grind is O-for-three on likability. And what's more, I found two unfavorable online reviews (one at MerchantCircle.com and the other at Yelp.com) conveying sentiments akin to my own. No doubt the proprietors' acerbic ethos stems from the facts that: 1) their true interests lie with the purveyance of plant matter other than coffee beans; 2) this whole "world famous mocha" thing is merely a front to explain an otherwise implausible seven-figure income; and 3) they would probably be wholly delighted if nobody ever patronized their odious little hovel but rather left them alone to attend to the business of stuffing ganja buds into little salable plastic bags.

All this said, I would still invite you to drop into The Daily Grind, if for no other reason than to rekindle your affection for the brainwashed cyborgs who work at your local Starbucks. At least they smile while they're neglecting your order.  And for a real kick in the pants, I'd recommend the Grind's Ultimate Iced Latte -- but not if you're planning to sleep within, say, 48 hours of having drunk it.

Oh, and while you're there, maybe have a go at ordering a non-fat, half-caff, half-decaff, triple grande, quarter sweet, sugar free, vanilla soy, extra hot, extra foamy, caramel macchiato, with nutmeg. Just to see if you can make their heads explode.

Flying Lessons

It wasn't a dark and stormy night, but something not too dissimilar -- a gray and foggy Friday morning, in downtown Berkeley, in July. Good little worker bee that I am, I had arrived at my cold, un-peopled, seventh-floor office, promptly at 7:30 a.m., hot cup of chai in hand, still not fully awake but nonetheless prepared for a quiet, low-staff-count day, during which I hoped to accomplish a goodly amount of back-burner database programming.

Nestling my rear end into my well worn office chair, I dedicated the first 30 minutes of my day to volleying yesterday evening's accumulated email out of my in-box and into someone else's. Then, switching my brain to geek mode, I double-clicked the Database.From.Hell file in my Stuff.That.Gives.Me.Headaches folder, and waited for the software to launch. Staring blankly at my list of partially defined fields and trying to remember where I had left off three weeks ago, I was startled out of Friday numbness by a messy flutter of gray feathers that careened over the awning above my office's sliding glass door and flopped clumsily onto the terrace just outside.

(Yes, I have an office with a sliding glass door that leads out onto a terrace. It overlooks San Francisco Bay. It is a proper office. It's not a cloth-covered veal pen. And it was hard won. I spent 16 years in cube-land, sucking up to the boss to earn that office. So back off!)

Anyway, back to the bundle of gray feathers on my terrace. It had landed right up against the concrete retaining wall that prevents me from pushing things like moody copy machines and annoying co-workers over the edge. It appeared to be a bird but wasn't moving, so I watched for several moments, breath arrested, for evidence of life. Finally, I saw it bobble and ruffle itself into something that looked very much like an adolescent swallow. He (only a guess) was adorable: a beak that was still a little too big for his face; an amusingly disheveled raiment of semi-mature adult feathers punctuated by stray clumps of baby-bird fluff; and a general demeanor of oblivious naïveté.

And then... Well not much, really. He fluffed is feathers against the morning chill then hunkered against the retaining wall and sat. Occasionally, he glanced from side to side, but mostly he just sat. He was sitting at 8:30 a.m. when I looked up from a convoluted if/then statement to clear my head. He was sitting at 8:52 when I finished the last of my now lukewarm chai and peeled my eyes off the computer monitor long enough to aim as I pitched the empty cup into my garbage can. He was sitting at 9:05 when I got up to use the bathroom. He was sitting at 9:20 when the phone rang and I didn't answer it. And he was sitting at 9:58 when an uncooperative export script got the better of me and I launched my internet browser to take a Neatorama break.

Shortly after 10:00 a.m., the fog pulled back and the sun rose suh that its rays slanted over the roof of our building, onto the bird's back. Within seconds, he had de-fluffed and was issuing random "Cheeps." But still had not moved a millimeter.

"Hmmm..." I wondered, with my brain still slightly stuck in programming mode, "IF (ArrivalType = Crash Land) AND (TimePassed > 120 Minutes) AND (SubsequentBirdMovement = False), THEN (InjuryProbability = High) AND (RescueNeeded = True)."

The bird life in downtown Berkeley is remarkably diverse. Swallows abound, especially near our building where they nest under the concrete ledges. But I've also seen hawks cruising the lofty environs outside my office window, so I feared that the little guy might have been injured in a raptor attack. I temporarily forsook both Neatorama and Database.From.Hell in favor of what promised to be a much more fulfilling enterprise: Operation Swallow Rescue.

Digging through our supply room, I found a smallish box and that I lined with a big, cushy wad of toilet paper from the bathroom. Next, I returned to my office and slowly opened the sliding glass door. My overall plan was to capture Martin (I decided he needed a name), check him for injuries and then, if needed, transport him in the warmth and safety of his TP-lined box to the Lindsay Junior Museum's Wildlife Hospital, where they would nurse him back to health in true Florence Nightingale fashion.

As I stepped out the door, Martin swiveled his head and looked straight at me. "Cheep!" he said, "Cheep, cheep!" Now, I don't speak Swallow, but I'm pretty sure he was asking "When is breakfast?" I took a step closer and he cheeped again, then leaped up and fluttered a short distance toward me, sprawling inelegantly onto the terrace about three feet from where I stood. More cheeping ensued -- not the "Help, I'm being attacked by crazy lady with a box of TP" kind of cheeping, but more the "I've just left my nest and am still a little bit stupid" kind of cheeping.

I approached him slowly, talking in that silly saccharine tone that women use with babies and small dogs. "Hello, little fella. It's okay," I said. "I'm not gonna hurt you." (I'm sure he understood every word and felt enormously reassured.) Once I got close enough, I squatted down, slowly moved my open hand over his back, then gently I encircled his little body in a loose grip. He wriggled a little, but didn't struggle. As I lifted him, his feet caught hold of my thumb and he cheeped again. Bringing him closer to my face, I continued our conversation.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"Cheep," he replied.

"Having a little trouble this morning?"

"Cheep, cheep!"

"Anything I can do to help?"

"Cheep."

I turned him over to check for signs of injury. He didn't appear to be bleeding; his feet and legs looked fine; his tail feathers were a little short, but that probably had to do with his tender age. I gently opened each wing and they too looked well formed and adequately feathered.

"So, what's up?" I asked, turning him back over. "Are you supposed to be out on your own like this? Does your Mom know where you are?"

"Cheep, cheep, cheep!"

I opened my hand to see if he would flee, but he just sat there on my thumb, looking up at me with his wide, dark, trusting eyes. We exchanged pleasantries for a good ten minutes: I inquired after his siblings, asked if he was enjoying the mild July weather, complemented him on his new feathers, probed politely on his Autumn travel plans, and nodded convivially to each of his "Cheep!" responses. Concluding that he was physically sound, I decided I shouldn't detain him further from his business. So I placed him back in the patch of sun and assured him that I'd be "Just inside, if you need anything," then retreated to my office.

Back at my desk, once again wrestling with the recalcitrant export script, I kept an eye on Martin for the next half-hour. I was starting, again, to worry over his continued inactivity, when a sleek, arrow-like silhouette streaked into view, buzzed Martin's head, then alighted atop the retaining wall, just above him. It looked like Martin, only all grown-up. "Ah, this must be Mom," I thought to myself. My verdict was instantly confirmed when the elder swallow discharged a succession of scolding complaints that I'm guessing went something along the lines of, "Where have you been for the past two hours? Didn't I tell you not to cross the street by yourself? Your father and I have been worried sick! We thought you were lying in a ditch somewhere, dead!" Martin, cheeped back in capitulant docility, then, prompted by another of his mother's commands, joined her on top of the retaining wall.

She took off, immediately, swooping and darting in graceful figure-eights against the skyline, then returned to her perch beside Martin and, with the callous bark of a drill sergeant, chirped what I assume was the command: "Do it!" Martin cowered, shuffled his feet, looked side to side, then flung himself into the air with a frantic beating of wings and piloted his way, in clumsy dips and swerves, to the roof of Berkeley City Hall, across the street. His mother followed, whizzing past him, sliding swiftly through the air with one or two spare, staccato wing beats. Again they perched together, again she demonstrated, again he bumbled his way back over to my terrace. I watched, in delighted captivation, as the flying lesson continued for the next several minutes. Slowly but surely, Martin got the hang of it. There was less fluttering and more gliding; less hesitation on take-off; more graceful touch-downs. By the time they flitted away over the roof of my building and out of sight, he was flying very much like a proper swallow.

Later that day, on my way back from lunch, I dropped into the Walgreens on Shattuck Avenue and picked up a Thinking of You card for my Mom. "Thanks," I wrote to her, "for all the hours you spent kneeling in front of me with a smile on your face and your arms extended, as I teetered across the floor toward you, sometimes making it and sometimes plopping unceremoniously onto my diapered little behind. Thanks for holding my bony little frame afloat in the swimming pool and reminding me over and over keep my knees straight while kicking and blow the air out through my nose, while I flailed and splashed water in your face. Thanks for running up and down the street behind my little red bicycle, while I tried to figure out how to stop listing sideways onto the left training wheel and get myself upright. Thanks for holding my hands and walking in front of me while I shuffled and stumbled on my new roller-skates. Thanks for being calm and patient as you sat in the passenger seat of Dad's Chevy Nova, while I navigated us tentatively through the streets of Pleasant Hill, continuously asking 'How's my lane position?' and 'Am I going too fast?' And thanks for not getting exasperated every time I call you with a stupid question about how to be a grown up in this confusing, intimidating, daunting world."

Thanks for all the flying lessons, Mom. I love you.

Notes on a Tomato Plant

There is a tomato plant growing from a pavement seam, next to Track No. 4 of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system's MacArthur station. I noticed it a few weeks ago and now I am altogether fixated on its plight. Every day I check to see: Is it still there? Or did some brutish maintenance worker squirt it with Roundup? What's the tomato count? Have any more of them ripened?

BART is the San Francisco Bay Area's main commuter rail system and the MacArthur station is one of its busiest. At the height of rush hour, hundreds of passengers race pell-mell up and down the station stairs, indiscriminately bashing each other with their messenger bags and wheeled brief cases; ten-car trains rumble through at three-minute intervals on four different tracks. The station stands adjacent to The Maze, the Bay Area's busiest freeway interchange, with six lanes of heavy traffic pounding past on both sides.

And in the middle of this bedlam, inches from the rampaging flow of Richmond-to-San Francisco trains, stands that silly tomato plant. Quiet as you please. Soaking up the sun as if it was rooted in some old lady's window box; just going about its own business, photosynthesizing and producing round globes of succulent fruit without help from anyone. I find that amazing.

This week it was sporting about three bright red tomatoes, with another four or so green ones waiting on the sidelines. Nobody molests it. The fruit, unreachable from the platform, remains unplundered. Before long, the tomatoes will ripen, then fall to the concrete, rot and desiccate; the plant's leaves and stem will brown and shrivel; the loosed, dry seeds will blow about in Autumn's cool breezes and some will find their way into other pavement seams on the station platform. Next year those crevices might issue forth still more tomato plants. And so the cycle will continue, just as nature intended. In a decade, MacArthur station may be nothing but one huge tomato patch.

OK, not really, but that little plant, along with every blade of grass or a bloom of dandelion I see valiantly thrusting itself through a sidewalk crack, reminds me of nature's awesome resilience and dogged persistence.  Despite our best efforts to screw things up, Earth will prevail. As much as we humans contrive, construct, convolute, control and commit all sorts of nastiness on this precious little blue marble we inhabit, when we are gone, the planet will take itself back and miss us not even fractionally. It will wait, patiently and quietly, while we asphyxiate and poison ourselves into oblivion, and then it will repopulate itself with some other species and forget all about us.

The issues we currently face surrounding environmental degradation -- global warming, pollution, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, destruction of ecosystems -- do not threaten our planet. They threaten us: you, me, our kids, the heavy guy next to me on the BART train who's hogging more than his fair share of the seat, his kids... We're not destroying the planet, we're just making it completely unlivable for our kind. I suspect that, after the human race has returned to dust, whatever is left of Earth's organisms will, like weary party hosts, heave a sign of relief and say, "Thank goodness that's over. I thought they would never leave!"

Prevailing paleontological theory maintains that there have been five mass extinctions in Earth's history. None killed fewer than 50% of the planet's organisms. The worst obliterated 90% of all Earth's species. And (surprise, surprise) all five occurred due to climate change. The first of these events -- the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, 439 million years ago -- happened when glaciers froze over the planet's surface causing obvious logistical problems for the predominantly marine-based life forms of the time. Somewhere between 50% and 60% of marine genera died off.

The next extinction -- a bit of a mystery -- ended the Devonian period (364 million years ago) and hosted the swan song of 57% of earth's marine genera. That extinction was probably also tied to global cooling, though paleontologists are still arguing over the ultimate cause. They throw around terms like, "stable isotopic excursions," "tektites," "platinum-iridium anomalies," and "physico-chemical events." It's not pretty. Don't watch unless you've got a strong stomach.

The Permian-Triassic extinction (251 million years ago), which has also been called "The Great Dying" or "The Mother of All Extinctions," relegated 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates to the fossil realm. Some believe that Earth's biodiversity has never since recovered to match that of the Permian period. The Permian-Triassic extinction, and the one that followed at the end of the Triassic period (about 200 million years ago) -- which, in case you're keeping score, spelled quits-ville for 52% of marine genera -- are thought to have been caused by global cooling resulting from a double-whammy of asteroid impacts (talk about your Spare the Air days) and massive volcanic eruptions that generated noxious gases surpassing all current-day SUV exhaust emissions and cow farts combined.

The last of the five major speciation do-overs happened a mere 65 million years ago (yesterday, by galactic standards), at the end of the Cretaceous period. Again, asteroids and volcanoes were to blame -- a plummeting hunk of space trash gave us Yucatan's Chicxulub Crater and a massive lava flow in India created the Deccan Traps. Nearly half of the earth's marine genera, along with 18% of its land vertebrate families, including Dino & Co., paid their bills and checked out -- permanently. It was only then that, hidden somewhere in the duff of a gymnosperm forest, a small band of tree shrews began launching their take-over plans. And, through a miraculous series of evolutionary accidents, not to mention utter dumb luck, here we are -- running the planet, or so we think.

Modern humans have existed for only the smallest fraction of Earth's history. And for only a still smaller fraction of that time have we had means to exert measurable control over our environment. We are specks in time; we are a cosmic triviality. We are weak, soft-bodied, dull-toothed, clawless, naked apes who would long ago have become hiena-chow, were it not for an overly-developed, highly-specialized bundle of neurons floating delicately inside the bony sphere we carry atop our shoulders. That neuronal mass has endowed us with an astounding intelligence, but also and quite unfortunately, an obnoxious arrogance, which I fear will be our undoing. But, I believe there is hope -- if only we can learn to truly treasure our world.

If you can manage it some day soon, I challenge you to pry yourself away from your T.V. and march your lazy butt a couple of days into the nearest wilderness area, where I guarantee you will become swiftly and wondrously reacquainted with the quality of your own insignificance. You will suddenly feel very small and vulnerable and you will, hopefully, realize what a very big place the world is, how it's not always particularly friendly, how it really doesn't care whether you live or die, and how it is certainly deserves more respect than you are currently affording it. Moreover, you will hopefully come to recognize just how tenuous, and at the same time tenacious, life is.

The global events that led to Earth's previous mass extinctions were huge -- far beyond any cataclysm humankind has yet witnessed and possibly far beyond any cataclysm humankind could generate. Nobody knows for sure whether the current atrocities we perpetrate on this planet are significant enough to precipitate our own extinction. This tiny globe we live on, in a distant corner of an obscure galaxy, in an incomprehensibly vast universe -- this planet is a moody thing. In its 4.6-billion-year history, Earth has been variously gaseous, molten, soggy, parched, sweltering, frigidly, noxious, desolate, teeming and violent. For the blip of time we have lived here, Earth has been a relative paradise. Anomalously so.

Perhaps the global warming we are currently observing has nothing to do with our dependence on petroleum-powered machines or our destruction of rain-forest acreage by the millions. Perhaps the polar ice-caps would be melting anyway, because, like the life-cycle of that tomato plant on the BART tracks, it is just nature's way. Perhaps there's nothing we can do about it. Or perhaps there is. Humans are a part of nature and ourselves possess the same awesome resilience and dogged persistence as the MacArthur tomato plant. If only -- as they say in the comic books -- we would use our powers for good instead of evil. However you look at it, I don't think it would hinder the cause if we paid some respect to our wondrously beautiful home -- while we're still here to appreciate it.

Quirks and Closet Monsters

Quirks. Everybody has them -- little personality kinks, oddities of temperament that cause us to wonder exactly where we, as individuals, fall under the normal bell curve of human strangeness. (Am I the only one who is twisted or is the boat of life filled with wackos?) I'm talking about the kinds of foibles that, among the broad strokes, don't matter unless you happen to be accused of serial murder, in which case everyone says, "Ah, yes, of course. We should have suspected she was a sociopath. She knits sweaters from her cat's fur, for Crimeny sake!" (Just for the record: I don't do that. No cat. Can't knit. Swear to God.)

There is this one thing about me, however, that I'm sure will end up in the prosecuting attorney's body of evidence if anyone ever discovers where I've stashed the severed heads. I figure it's bound to come out eventually, so by way of introduction, and in the spirit of the I'm-OK-You're-OK Zeitgeist in which I grew up, I share with you my strangest eccentricity:

I can't sleep if the the closet door is open.  Never could, not even as a child.

Back then, it was because of Closet Monster. He materialized every night, as soon as Mom flicked out the lights. Through the crack in the closet door, I could feel him staring at me from those darkened depths, his coal-black eyes burning holes into my tender, young flesh. Sometimes I could hear him breathing -- a low, hungry, wolfish pant. I knew his plan: he was waiting for me to slip off into dreamland so he could come out and swallow me whole. The only reason I am alive today is because I would, within seconds of Mom's departure, leap from bed into the center of the room (thus avoiding the clutches of Under-the-Bed Monster), run to the closet, slam the door closed, then leap back into bed and dive under the covers (because, as I'm sure you recall, children hiding under covers are impervious to physical harm.)

When I moved out of my parent's house, Closet Monster stayed behind, as did Under-the-Bed Monster. I believe the two, along with Garage Monster and Woodshed Monster, formed a cartel with the goal of consuming future grandchildren. Now I live in a house that is 99% monster free (there's one in the attic, but I never go up there so it doesn't matter). Still, I find it impossible to fall asleep if my closet doors are open. Worse still, this quirk of mine has metastasized to subsume all open closet doors in my house, as well as open bureau drawers and open kitchen cupboards. If they no shut, I no snooze.

As would any practiced neurotic, I have invested shamefully immoderate quantities of time cogitating on the marrow of this quirk. My free-associative self-analysis has led me to conclude that it no longer has to do with monsters. Rather, I have surmised that the roots lie entangled in those nourishing my visually-oriented, nit-picker sensibilities -- the same ones that can't stand to have little puddles of water left standing on the kitchen counter. (Pardon me, one moment, while I shudder at the mere thought of them.) My conclusion, therefore, is that I am suffering from Clutter Aversion Syndrome.

Further introspection has led me to implicate Clutter Aversion Syndrome in a number of my other hang-ups. Chief among them is the whole soup-can-alignment thing.  I think Clutter Aversion Syndrome is also manifested in my abhorrence for extra spaces left at the end of paragraphs in word-processing documents (those of you in the copy-editing world will, no doubt, empathize). And, it's probably also responsible for the eye-twitch I develop when (like) listening to (like) people -- typically, vacuous, gum-snapping, cell-phone addicted, 20-something Paris-Hilton wannabes wearing those ridiculous bug-eye sun glasses -- who (like) litter their speech with (like) the word "like." (Ya, know?) And while I'm thinking of it, perhaps this also accounts for why I require that the toilet paper always be hung with the business end out in front of the roll, instead of back against the wall.

We're not talking OCD here. I don't check, a million times, that the lights are off before I leave the house. I don't count out the same number of Cheerios into my bowl every morning. I don't wash my hands until they're raw and bleeding. I don't floss every damned day... oh, wait, yes I do. We all do, don't we. And we never lie to our dentists about it. Right? (Just nod "yes" and smile.)

So, this closet door thing is harmless, really. Just a minor eccentricity. I'm not a wack-job. I don't need to be medicated. You don't need to warn your kids away from me when we meet in the park. And my "alleged" stash of severed heads is not from dinner guests who failed to close the kitchen cupboard after getting themselves glasses of water. Really, it's not. (Again, just nod "yes" and smile. And maybe back away slowly... No sudden movements.)