Think Draw - Picture - Half-Century / Half-Life

Title: Half-Century / Half-Life
created on 01 Jul 19

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Comments on this picture (37):
1. chelydra wrote: The earth (and the whole solar system) is supposedly about half-way through its ten-billion-year existence (at which point the worn-out sun will engulf us with dissipating gasses, etc.)
2. chelydra wrote: But the earth is also just about 1/2 as alive at used to be. In terms of sheer quantity of life, the high water mark came early, in the Carboniferous Age, full of ferns and salamanders and giant dragonflies.
3. chelydra wrote: AT used to be?â€”>AS IT used to be
4. chelydra wrote: And in terms of both quantity and quality, the downhill slope gets steeper every year. It's fashionable to blame our planetary unraveling on those Carboniferous critters and mega-veggies, who made possible our fossil-fuel addiction.
5. chelydra wrote: But it's everything else too. And because we've given up on saving the planet, more and more people are jumping on the end-of-the-world bandwagon, just cuz it's easier.
6. chelydra wrote: Some go to Africa to pay a hefty fee to blow the head off an endangered giraffe; others claim Jesus wants the planet dead anyway and we'll burn in hell if we try to buck the trend. Mostly it's just business-as-usual...
7. chelydra wrote: But our business-as-usual is radically incompatible with the rest of the planet's business-as-usual, and so the planet is at war with itself. There's the earth, from the Indo-European root word ert(?), meaning the ground.
8. chelydra wrote: And then there's the world, from were-old. "Were" meant man, as in werewolf. "Old" meant age. The world is not a place but a time: The Ag of Man. Like the age of dinosaurs, or the Iron Age, a temporary condition of the place.
9. chelydra wrote: Agâ€”â€”>Age (of Man). But we're in the habit of thinking the were-old (this infestation of half-werewolves) is what's real and permanent. The earth is just where we get stuff, or visit to swim or hike now and then, no more real than a shopping
10. chelydra wrote: ...or an adventure park. In the past few years about half the topsoil has disappeared (poisoned or blown away). An estimated 60 harvests remain, and presumably each one will be harder and smaller. Oh well. Have a nice day.
11. chelydra wrote: Back in the summer of 1969, like most people, I was drawing cartoons and writing a Horoscopes without Hogwash column at Rat Subterranean News. We had a centerfold ad from the Sierra Club, pointing out that...
12. chelydra wrote: ...the surface of the earth was more and more like the surface of the moon. Incoming solar energy was still sometimes getting caught up the web of life (photosynthesis, oxygen, food) but increasingly just getting absorbed as hot pavement.
13. chelydra wrote: I'd had premonitions of stuff like that even as a little kids lying sleepless and wondering how these crazy grown-ups got such weird ideas about how to manage (Man-Age, see #8-9 above) the planet.
14. chelydra wrote: By mid-July 1965, my apt at 622 e 11th street had been infested with its own local breed of half-werewolves. They gathered around the stove, brewing heroin (when they weren't busy kicking and cursing the blind sax player for trying to cold turkey as he cr
15. chelydra wrote: ...crawled on all fours down the hall to the toilet by the stairwell, where the landlady's cats got tossed down six flights if they got underfoot.).
16. chelydra wrote: Junkies are bad news. When the moon landing was showing live on a stolen TV in a little room off the kitchen, not one junkie (there were about 8 or 9) even looked up from their druggy stew. They had their priorities. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't an i
17. chelydra wrote: ...integral part of the story of the moon shot... We assumed the scene on TV represented mankind's future, but if the past half-century is any indication...
18. chelydra wrote: ...the depravity around the stove was a more accurate portent / omen / indication / whatever you want to call it.
19. chelydra wrote: I haven't seen any moonshots since the end of 1972. But I briefly lived in another place infested by another swarm of half-werewolves (the crackhead variety) not long ago, and it soon became clear the swarm was being managed for fun and profit by local co
20. chelydra wrote: ...cops. This, not space travel, is what happens during this phase of the Age of Man. And now whenever a revival of space travel is mentioned as a future possibility...
21. chelydra wrote: ...it's in the context of providing ultra-rich people with an escape route from the planet they've sucked dry.
22. chelydra wrote: But I think there's hope, and maybe will get around to explaining why on another picture. It's all about halvesâ€”wholes breaking in half, and halves joining to become new and different wholes.
23. chelydra wrote: There are vast systems built on each half of our broken planet, both ert and wereold. (You've heard of the Doppler Effect? This is the DopplegÃ¤nger Effect. But that's enough word-play for now.
24. AFSOUTH wrote: One Strange Rock! Where ever we go ( space ) we bring our humanity! 10 billion years should work out nicely!
25. chelydra wrote: Thanks, AFS! You topped it all off with a fine conclusion. One of these days I'll get to the hopeful part (if I can remember how it goes).
26. AFSOUTH wrote: Outstanding!
27. indigo wrote: :-]!
28. indigo wrote: Thank you for your comment chelydra. I wish I could write like you. I enjoy reading everything that write.
29. evefoster wrote: well said Big C... i feel like leaving this planet every day, but i do enjoy the dragon flies, the fish, the wasps, frogs grass snakes, and killing flying bloodsuckers... and most of all I enjoy my family..so when i go I am taking them with me
30. chelydra wrote: Hi Eve, tell us all about your garden sometime soon. In pictures or words or both. And stay grounded for god's sake!
31. chelydra wrote: If god was happy to have us all be disembodied souls floating around in empty space (or unspace, depending on with century's physics you prefer)...
32. chelydra wrote: withâ€”â€”>which
33. chelydra wrote: ...then Creation was a big miscalculation, a waste of space and time (and of spacetime), and the Creator was misguided or not very bright to bother with all these planets and species
34. chelydra wrote: So settle down, let your roots grow down through your toes towards the hot center of the earth and fight for what's left of creation, which is the best way to honor the creator and the only prayer he has time for these days.
35. chelydra wrote: Is that blasphemy? I don't think so.
36. chelydra wrote: Amen
37. nancylee wrote: chelydra- I had no idea you could write as powerfully as you paint, or how your life had unfolded. Are you published anywhere?