07.28.06
Posted in In the Kitchen at 10:19 am by steve
It was with some trepidation that I set the timer on the bread machine last night at 10:30. The bread machine approaches a year’s age, but I have never loaded it in the evening and set it for morning bread. I was not sure what to expect. Would the yeast go crazy, eat all the flour and turn the whole batch to some sort of alcoholic slime? Would the raisins in the bottom soak up all the water and instead of bread I would end up with a giant flour-dusted crumb? Would the bread somehow magically expand at night, push the top of the machine open, crawl across the counter… These are the flights of fancy of a person who needs sleep.
By my calculations, the bread machine should beep around six thirty. And since I was going to bed early, I had some hope of waking up to fresh-baked bread. It would be good stuff. One might find the recipe on the back of a King Arthur Flour company bread flour bag or at Chef Home . It contains just enough raisins and brown sugar to tease the taste buds, and it has a pleasing assertive yet soft texture.
Being a sleepy-head by nature, I was surprised when I awoke to beeping down stairs. I came down to find a perfectly done loaf of “oatmeal toasting bread.” My wife, who eats her own different kind of toast, eggs, and microwaved blueberries for breakfast, was sitting at the table eating her toast. She had already been up for hours.
I removed the bread from the breadmaker, sliced two pieces, ground coffee beans and brewed a pot of coffee, and sat down to eat. As soon as I sat down, the beeper beeped. I got up and hit the reset button on the breadmaker. I ate my toast, drank my coffee, and went into my office - which is near the kitchen - to work. No sooner had I sat down, when I heard the beep. I rushed to the kitchen and hit the reset button again. But this time the breadmaker objected. It thought I wanted to start baking, but it will not start while it is hot.
I went back to work. Several minutes passed and there was another beep. “Well, I thought, I shall just have to let the bread machine cool down and I will start another batch of bread, this kind for my wife. ” So, while the bread machine rested, lid open, I went about my work ignoring intermittent beeps for about ten or twenty minutes. Then I started malting millet for my wife’s millet bread. I loaded the machine with millet and flour, set it to the jam cycle, and told it to go. This time it did not object. “Good,” I thought, “farewell beeping.”
Not five minutes later, I heard the same infernal beeping that had been bothering me for almost an hour. I ran to the bread machine, and I pulled the cord out of the wall and muttered a few unfreindly things under my breath. I worked in peace for some minutes. The blue streak I had sworn had just about dissipated, and my mood had just about returned to normal when I heard yet another beep.
I flew into a rage, raced into the kitchen. I managed to suppress my urgent temptation to take a baseball bat to that pesky bread machine. Good thing, too. It was the microwave. My wife, an hour before, had forgotten to remove her blueberries.
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07.26.06
Posted in In the Kitchen at 9:41 pm by steve
Muttering “Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Coffee..” a dishevelled graduate school house-mate of mine, John, started every day. Or prolonged one as he consumed and digested the ideas of Locke, Descartes, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant, and J.S. Mill. He was reading for his ‘comps.’ It somehow seems appropriate that one would drink strong coffee, and lots of it, when one is reading the words of men who changed the course of history. Their ideas were revolutionary then and as many as three centuries later, living in a world bounded by their ideas, those same ideas can sometimes seem as fresh as a morning cup of coffee.
My house-mate had his own French Press and his own stove-top percolator. He gravitated toward the dark roasts. Presumably the jolt of bitterness served with the caffiene to sharpen his senses as he read and comprehended the work of these masters. Sometimes wisdom is a bitter pill.
We sometimes think of coffee as being just a beverage, but it is a food. And it is a drug. Caffeine is part of a number of over-the counter painkiller medications because it tends to dilate the capillaries. And in some cases, especially the case of headaches, this dilation increases the effect of the anaglesic. Presumably this dilation improves blood-flow to the brain and helps us think more clearly even when we drink coffee and don’t take analgesics. Perhaps it is the caffeine or perhaps it is some other chemical, but people who drink coffee live in a slightly different space from people who do not. Or we might have the causal relation backwards. It may be that people who live in a slightly different space tend to have a special relationship with coffee.
When coffee was first introduced to Europe in the dark ages, it was served in coffee houses. Before long the churched banned coffee because they believed it turned people into rebelious malcontents. The observation was that coffeehouses were where they all seemed to gather. Quite possibly coffee has this effect. Or, it could be that something in coffee or coffeehouses appeals to the malcontents.
It is more than the occasional malcontent who enjoys coffee. There is no question that coffee is consumed not just for its flavor, but also for its ‘buzz.’ Those well along on their addiction to the stuff may no longer experience the buzz, but anyone who gets through three or four days of withdrawal and resumes drinking coffee will likely be reminded what it is.like. It is a kind of profound feeling of well-being that makes the external world feel slightly less important. Sometimes it allows one to focus or concentrate more clearly. Sometimes it might make one just want to sit and enjoy feeling good. And somettmes it creates a nervous-system overload, causing a person to metaphorically ‘bounce off the walls.’
The feeling can pass rather quickly, almost always lingering for less than an hour. And when it does fade, one begins to pay the price. One feels just a litte more tired, just a little more irritable, just a little bit less focussed, just a little less patient, just a little less tolerant than one did before the first cup. The usual practice is to have another cup. This restores some of what was lost, but after some time, perhaps an hour or so thngs are a little worse still. Five or six stiff cups of coffee before lunch can turn a slightly grumpy person into a full-blown curmudgeon by mid-afternoon. And perhaps if one drinks coffee like Balzac - who was reputed to go through fifty cups a day - one will become either a frenetic writer or a veritable revolutionary.
Everybody responds to coffee in a slightly different way. And in fact, different coffees from differrent geographical locations and from different suppliers will produce different effects Each person must judge for himself whether the net effect is good or bad. Coffee is a good source of some useful minerals. And there is no doubt some health benefit that the coffee industry will come to claim for the material.
I drink it because I am a coffee addict. Coffee makes me feel good. And I like its flavor. Five or six days after quitting it I am still getting over it. Two weeks after quitting it I am starting to recover. But just the smell of freshly brewed coffee, just the odor of the ground beans, and I am back at six cups in the morning. Nothing helps. Not throwing away all the coffee and all the paraphenilia. Not substituting tea. Not giving up all caffeine. I have not tried hypnotism or electroshock therapy or being run over by a freight train, but some addictions are not regarded as having serious enough consequences to warrant such exotic or painful measures. So I am still drinking coffee. I am reading Descartes, Locke, Hume, J.S. Mill. I am a curmudgeon in the afternoon, especially if I do not get my nap. In my spare time I post oddities to … ergo sum, or help other poor coffee addicts get the most out of their addiction Chef Home
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07.24.06
Posted in In the Kitchen at 7:47 am by steve
It was two minutes until the salmon steaks would come out of the oven and the riced potatoes were broken. I had peeled six Yukon Gold potatoes and popped them into the microwave uncovered for six minutes. The outer shells got tough as nails and would not go through the ricer. As a result, I had about a third the amount of riced potatoes as I new I needed. So, even though I was pretty sure that the potato problem was due to overcooking rather than undercooking, I decided to cook some more. I put the smushed up tough potatoes back into the glass bowl I had cooked them in, added two or three tablespoons of water, covered tightly with plastic wrap, and cooked in the microwave for three more minutes. At this point they were perfect: moist, tender, easy to rice, and full of buttery flavor.
Normally I would have cooked these potatoes in their skins and covered them with film in the microwave. But I had peeled these potatoes because they were turning green, and green potatoes can be bad for the health. I simply neglected to use film for no particular reason. So I rescued the potatoes just in time, riced them as the salmon rested, and we had our salmon, salad, and riced potatoes. And lived happily ever after.
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07.20.06
Posted in Social at 10:56 am by steve
Anyone with the most casual acquaintance with Lebanese geography and history since the attack on the American Embassy there in the 1980’s might realize several crucial facts about the country. Lebanon is an ethnically mixed country. There are Sunnis, Shia, Druse, and Christians, with each sect being a minority. The government, when it exists - and for significant portions of the last two decades it cannot be rightly said to have existed - is rather weak. It neither tries to nor can do much to enforce a particular order to things. Furthermore, foreign powers can play a major role in the governance of the country, sometimes usurping legitimate domestic government. It has only been a few short years since Syria’s official occupation of Lebanon ceased. And it would be odd to imagine that Lebanese leaders either do not see or would systematically ignore the looming Syrian shadow.
All of these factors suggest that the presence of Hizbollah in Lebanon cannot reasonably be viewed as being either an act of Lebanon or necessarily consistent with the will of the Lebanese people or the government. One might reasonably argue whether Lebanon theoretically had the power to oppose local Hizbollah operatives or to remove them, or to disarm them of missiles. Perhaps they did, but only theoretically. Any Lebanese leader who did this would risk losing his country. He would risk losing his army to Syrian occupation. He would risk losing the country to civil war sponsored by external states. And both of these things would be bad for Lebanese. Both would be bad for the Israelis.
In fact, there are ways in which an Israeli occupation of the southern tip of Lebanon might reasonably be better than any outcome of dealing with Hizbollah in a forceful way. So by ignoring Hizbollah, Lebanese leaders were, arguably, doing what was best for their citizens. And, assuming a measured response by Israel, it would be doing the best for Israelis.
What can we say about Israel’s response? Well, it is a postulate of politics that an independent country has the right to defend itself. There is some argument about whether Israel is an independent state, but if peace is to come to the region, Israel needs to be treated like one. We must grant it the right to defend itself. We must ask ourselves what kind of response would best serve the causes of the Israelis the Lebanese, and the world at large?
First, let us define the injury to Israel. The rocket attacks have been extremely disruptive to life. But the only account I have read of the casualties says that the total number of Israelis killed in rocket attacks is zero. Nor have I heard of any accounts of Israeli refugees - Israelis who have decided that the conditions in their own country are so dire they needed to leave to protect themselves from harm. In other words, the rocket attacks are an annoyance. They are a major annoyance. But in some real sense they pose a relatively limited amount of danger.
Now, let us look at the response. Lebanon’s capital and principal city is bombed to the extent that it is abandoned and becomes a ghost town. Tens of thousands of people try to leave the country. Hudreds of thousands are trapped in remote locations with limited food and water and no hope of help because the bridges have been bombed. How many innocent civilians are killed? We don’t know. How many will die because of lack of water or medical care or transport? We don’t know.
What is the result? The entire country of Lebanon is on the verge of collapse, dozens of Israeli soldiers are dead. After a week or two the Hizbollah operatives remain at large. And the rockets remain unsecured. Israel instead of being a wronged party, looks like a raging goon. One might assert like a four-year-old “well, it was Hizbollah who started it.” Yes. It was Hizbollah. It was not the Lebanese. But who is paying?
Suppose hypothetically that CIA operatives slipped into Israel and used the land to launch rocket attacks on Russia. Would the Russians be justified in levelling Israel because it failed to control visiting or occupying operatives? Certainly we cannot say that Russia would be justified in attacking civilian targets in Israel for such an insult. But if this scenario did occur, we would know that the US and the Israel work closely together on intelligence matters from time to time and that we can therefore impute to Israel some culpability by virtue of this fact and by virtue of its higher level of control over the nature of arms deployed in their lands than Lebanon had. In Lebanon, Hizbollah is not a uniformly welcome party. It reasonably would be seen as a potential threat to ruling powers, and to a goodly portion of the Lebanese population. It one could justify a Russian attack on Israeli military targets in this scenario, it is not reasonable for Russia to respond by levelling Israeli civilian targets.
It is one thing mount a limited military operation against military targets. It is another thing altogether to make war on a country to punish its own citizens for being victims of insults and injuries by a shared enemy.
The situation suggests a story. Suppose I live in a house in the country. I have a nice patio, and during the summer I spend all of my evenings on the patio. My neighbor has a nice house set on a rise some distance away. Between us is a large flat swampy area, an acre or two in size that sit entirely on my neighbor’s property. A few days after it rains mosquitos swarm out of the swamp, and if I am sitting at my patio enjoying a nice after-dinner drink, they come and bite me all over before I can go inside. And I get giant mosquito pustules over my body that itch and drive me crazy. Each year before the rainy season I tell my neighbor. “Drain your swamp.” But he always seems to be away on business when it rains. And year after year the swamp breeds mosquitoes, I get bit, and I get really irritated. And year after year I yell at him. This year I got fed up. When the mosquitoes bit me I went over and torched his house and burnt it to the ground. It is no concern of mine whether he had insurance; he let the mosquitoes get out of control.
This example falls short because it presumes my neighbor has a level of control over the mosquitoes that perhaps Lebanon does not really have over Hizbollah, still let us evaluate the situation. What can we say about this? Is just for my neighbor to burn down my house? What kind of response is warranted? What kind of a response would appear to be just and fair and disinterested treatment? It seems that my neighbor can legitimately feel justified, if he chooses, to go out on an evening three days after a rain, wade through he swamp to my house. While walking there he gets bitten all over with mosquitoes, but when he arrives, he succeeds in burning down my house. This would be ‘an eye for an eye’ justice. But what if my daughter were accidently burned to death. Then, would I not have a moral obligation to kill my neighbor?
Or if my neighbor were constitutionally incapable of burning down my house, it seems that justice could only be served if there were an interposing third party who inflicted a punishment of some similar severity so that my neighbor would feel rightly avenged and I would feel rightly chastened. This is how one treats criminals and fighting four-year-olds.
Just as no number of mositoes could ever destroy my own house, it seems unlikely that Hizbollah could ever launch so many rockets as to wreak the same havoc on Israelis as Iraelis have on Lebanon.
Does Hizbollah even have the right to have rockets? I have seen quite a bit of mental energy expended on this. But I think the answer can be seen simply. The unfortunate fact is that Israel’s existence has never settled on the basis of rights, not in any strict sense. It was established on the basis of power. Israel is a state whose existence is entirely due to the exercise of power. It persists entirely on that basis. Power itself is amoral. Wielding power does not - in and of itself - contstitute a moral right. What moral authority Israel does have, it has earned on the basis of any just treatment it has administered to displaced people. The ‘Land for Peace’ initiative is an example. And by just internal government.
Unfortunately, bombing Lebanon into oblivion is not a way to enhance that moral authority. So long as Israel chooses not to show restraint in dealing with third parties as it responds to Hizbollah attacks, and to the extent to which it wantonly attacks Lebanese citizens, the whole question of whether Hizbollah has the right to have rockets is moot. So long as Israel operates on the basis of sheer force - six eyes and a tooth in return for a nasty bite to the forearm - it is inevitable that Hizbollah will respond. Rights play no role in the argument, only expediency. Only force. This is where we stop being human and start being brutes.
This is why such disproportionate responses as the one in Lebanon must absolutely assure that should Israel succeed in tracking down every single militant Hizbollah operative who has set foot in Lebanon or who has planned to or hoped to, there will be ten more scrambling to replace them, simply to repay Israel in kind for the injustice in their dealing with Lebanese. The question of rights is simply not a reasonable question until both sides are capable of tempering responses in accordance with reason, and respecting the rights of innocent third parties.
Reason, too, is called for in parsing the Israeli response. Their impatience is understandable. Their frustration is understandable. Some amount of military miscalculation is inevitable in any military operation. But the rockets were not being launched from Beirut. And even if rockets were being launched from Beirut, what is the military or the strategic argument for metaphorically leveling Beirut?
Sadly, it will take many years and a great deal of good will and good practice on both sides to get back to where things were just after the Palestinian election. That was not a particularly happy point, but there was some hope. Now, there is very little. Every Arab state is losing patience with Israel. As hard as it might have been otherwise for Israel to fight terrorism with limited support of a collection of Arab states, it must surely be much harder now as Arab states find they cannot afford to support such a fight. The consequence of the action in Lebanon is that it promises to renew the cycle of violence for another generation. Only the manufacturers of munitions and caskets can be happy about that.
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07.19.06
Posted in Science & Religion at 9:36 am by steve
“Participants .. ranked [it] as either the best or in the top five best experiences of their lives - on par with the birth of a first child. They described feelings of peace, intense happiness, and a sense of the unity of all things.
“The participants were no strangers to spiritual highs. Almost all engaged at least monthly in religious or spiritual activities such as prayer or attending religious services and were selected for participation .. on this basis.” In some participants, the experience produced halo effects, changing the way they interacted with the world in favorable ways for weeks and months thereafter.(Economist JY 15 2006, p 78)
What sort of activity would cause one to feel so profoundly peaceful and spiritually connected with the greater world? In a word, psilocybin, a material extracted from mushrooms with psychotropic effects. These same mushrooms have been used in mesoamerica since pre-columbian times in religious rituals. The mushrooms had no presence in the US until early in the twentieth century. Nor had the subjects participating in the study experienced them before. They were given one of two substances, not knowing the identity or effects of either.
The Economist. although titling the article “The God Pill,” shows less interest in its theological implications. It is interested in its therapeutic effects. The chemical shows promise for treatment of a number of addictive behaviors such as alcohol and opiate abuse. And there is some belief that because of its chemical similarity to serotonin it may have some use in the treatment of depression. The ‘halo’ effects also suggest this. Since some SRI’s are used already in the treatment of alcoholism, it is not a big stretch to imagine that if it is effective in one area it might show promise in another.
If a chemical can have this exact kind of profound effects on a person’s consciousness - a feeling of religiousness - we must ask “What is going on?” A kind of mystical pre-scientific answer is “God is in the mushrooms. And when you eat the mushrooms, God becomes part of your consciousness.” But in a scientific world we understand that we are using the word God and psilocybin interchangeably. Thus we have implicitly defined God - at least in one face or manifestation - as being exactly the same as the chemical. If one stops here, either God is a chemical or God is a collection of effects, one of which is a particular chemical. This poses a great number of difficulties. For instance, one has to ask “would that put the pre-Columbian Aztecs who ate these mushrooms on the same footing with God as, say, the eighth century Christians?” Furthermore, sometimes when one takes other chemicals one gets a similar sort of peaceful happy effect, though to a much lesser extent. Maybe even to a tiny extent with alcohol or coffee or cheesecake. Is God then in these substances? And if so, is it to a greater or lesser degree? And does it mean that if I eat a second helping of cheesecake I can be more holy than if I stop with one? This sort of equivalence between God and the chemical poses all sorts of knotty problems.
Another tack is to say ” the chemical potentiates communion with God.” It sort of breaks down some barrier in the brain that keeps us apart from God. This idea seems to have some promise. After all, it explains the fact that we commune with God only with some difficulty in the absence of chemical supplementation. And it explains how it is that we communicate with Him with chemical supplementation. God is not the chemical itself. The chemical is sort of like a hot-line - a direct line to God. But there remain some difficult questions. One is, “if this is true, shouldn’t we all rush out and get some of this chemical?” Countercultural types did exacltly this in the 1950’s and ’60’s. And in fact magic mushrooms have been part of the countercultural practice for decades. Yet not everyone would agree that those who have availed themselves of the effect are necessarily much more Godly than those who have not.
Then there is the knotty problem of why God decided to hide the hotline to his throne in some corner of the new world. Surely there were enough people in the old world who could have benefitted from talking to Him? Maybe the Aztecs because of their huge, massive bloody mass sacrifices of human lives were the only group of people on the planet worthy of talking to God? Maybe God became more interested in talking to Americans after we built the atom bomb or the interstate road system or invented consumer credit. This line of thinking creates a number of difficulties when we compare it to the role we believe religion ought to play in the lives of civilized people.
A third interpretation is that the sense people get from the chemical has nothing whatsoever to do with God. The chemical just gives the same effect as other religious practices, though more effectively. This point of view assumes a clear distinction between the causes of the state, but it may fail to fully give credence to the idea that, just possibly, the induced states are qualitatively equivalent. The chemically-induced one is more intense, more profound, has more of a lasting ‘halo,’ but in both cases the same mental processes are being activated. If this were the case it would mean a few things:
1) Certain religious practices induce chemical changes of state in the brain.
2) The pleasant sense one has as a result of a religious ritual is chemical.
And that gets us back to ‘is God the chemical or does He somehow intervene and cause the chemical to be made in the brain. Or does God have nothing at all to do with the chemical?Does God have nothing at all to do with the sense of a religious state?
This sort of idea has the benefit of prying God away from the Aztecs. And so it is more in line with the traditional view that God crossed from Europe to the new world aboard the ships of European Christians. But it further tempts us to entertain the notion that the Aztecs deserved to be slaughtered at the hands of the Christian Conquistadores in the name of God. The view that God has nothing at all to do with a religious sense of peace and connection, however, places the fundamental reason for all religious practice on shaky footing; it separates all spiritualism from God. If it is the good feeling that comes from religious worship experiences that is primarily responsible for people’s practice of religion, this point of view “throws the baby out with the bathwater.” It eliminates a theological problem with religion by eliminating one fundamental reason for its existence.
Any way we look at it, there exists a particular chemical state of the brain that corresponds to a religious sense. Maybe God and mushrooms both communicate to us using the same chemical. Maybe this makes the chemical evil incarnate because it perfectly mimics God’s own method of communication with us. The feeling of being connected to one’s fellow man and all of God’s creation is good if we come to it by self-manufacturing the chemical in our own brains but it is evil if we get help from one of God’s own creations. It is a perverse way of viewing things, but it has some theological attraction because it defines orthodoxy and religious experience in a way that requires the church: God does not live in humans or in his creation, only through the church. Religions always reach a point where they make exclusive claims to God for it makes the institutions indispensible. Christ himself railed at this notion. And it was fodder for the Reforamation. Still, in the way people expience it, religion is primarily meaningful in some social context, so there are practical advantages that accrue to its practitioners from buying into this corporate point of view.
Interestingly, there appears to be a parallel culture around certain hallucinogens: that one ought to be in a warm and supportive social situation when one takes them, else the experience can be a bad one. This parallels “where two or three of you are gathered in my name, there I shall be also.” Even alchohol has the “never drink alone” rule. In all of these cases the brain is making certain happiness chemicals and the happiness is more impactful if it is shared. If we believe that humans are fundamentally social beings then the practices of all these groups would be conistent with a solid understanding of the physiology and psychology of empathy, of being and feeling connected.
There is, of course, another thing going on in all of these cases. Consider that all groups formed as voluntary associations are held together by expectation of benefits. And that groups have their own self-interests that transcend those of the individuals that constitute them. The benefits realized by a group’s constitutive members are ultimately expressed in terms of some sense of pleasure those benefits produce either directly or indirectly. A being experiencing pleasure in a group setting associates pleasure with the group itself and its members. Thus the experience is a bonding one. This realization has the curious effect of binding marriage, neighborhood saloons, rock and roll fanaticism, and religious ritual together as effects of a common social cause. All are institutions that benefit from or exploit the exact same physiological pleasure-seeking apparatus in order to create and sustain their institutional existence. They have an interest in providing pleasure in return for support of the institution. To the extent they can be successful in reserving all means or modes of pleasure to their own spheres they own all the exclusive interests of their members. Group membership addiction, if you will. This was the way the medieval Christian church operated - all forms of art and culture were part of the institution.
If, however, one can successfully argue that religion and spiritualism are disjoint both in theory and in practice: That religion is nothing but a body of moral thought built upon the assumption that there is a God; That the purpose of religion is not to give people a sense of peace or a sense of connection to the greater world and society at large, or to give a sense of purpose or meaning or fulfilment or pleasure; That peace, pleasure, joy, happiness have no connection with religious practice but rather, religious practice is a steady and just barely endurable string of insults to body, mind, and spirit - then all of these pesky questions disappear. If God and religious practice have no connection to a person’s feeling satisfied with the world or connected to other people, or calm or peaceful, or happy, then of course the curious ‘God chemical’ phenomenon poses no theological problems.
If, however, religion is nothing but a body of ethical thought then it is ethics, not religion. Religion without a strong spiritual element is a dead corpse, not a resurrected one. It is inanimate and soulless. Religion must be animated by spirit if it is to live in the daily lives and activities of people. Religion informs ethics. But ethics and religion are two separate human endeavors.
The fact that a chemical produces an effect indistinguishable in quality from that of religious worship poses questions we need to grapple with. These questions ought not keep us from doing good science, but rather should prompt us to do so. For in understanding what religion is not we might come closer to understanding what it really is.
There is some hope that psilocybin will have a number of therapeutic uses. It ought to be given a chance to fulfil these. In the mean time, I will continue to imagine that maybe the religious sense some talk about but not all of us share - due to variations in brain chemistry wrought by our creator - is simply an artifact of brain chemistry. This doesn’t necessarily mean one should stop praying. Or behaving as if there is a God. For it may be that only by behaving as if there is a God will we treat others the way we need to in order to have a durable and bearable society. And maybe only when we treat others in such a way will our serotonin levels reach what is required for that great feeling of well being.
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07.18.06
Posted in In the Garden at 11:59 am by steve
Last Saturday the air was thick with them. Sitting inside protected from the sweltering jungle heat by walls and insulation, shade and air- conditioning you could hear them flying against the windows, flying against the siding. It sounded like a Frisbee being pelted by blueberries continuously for hours at a time. It was hard to concentrate. I put on Debussy and read Proust. The bright and sultry air and the uneven cadence of beetles, both suggested this. Before long it was time for a nap. Nobody can endure the steady onslaught of Proust, Debussy, heat, humidity, light, and Japanese beetles all afternoon without a break.
Every July the beetles swarm to this yard. Here they find what they need. They choose first the rampant vines; the grapes, then the hops, and finally the Virginia creeper. Then roses get it too. Not fond of leaves with fungus, they go for the leaves of the roses immune to fungus. This has a levelling effect. The roses that would otherwise be doing fine without the beetles - the ones one would select because they are immune to one of nature’s insults - end up falling prey to another.
But perhaps the real reason they come is for the traps. Six plastic objects hang in our yard. The bright yellow tops are shaped like the now extinct lawn dart. They hold lures. One sort smells floral. It is so floral that it will sometimes scent a good section of the yard. The other smells like a female Japanese beetle, or so we are told. The beetles certainly behave as if this were so. The little animals swarm to this device, fall inside and cannot get out. Then daily we empty their little rotting carcasses into garbage bags and place these in the garbage can. For the entire month of July the garbage can wreaks of sex and death. Sex and death waft across the garden otherwise thick with the smell oriental lilies.
Six traps can trap a few thousand of their crunchy little bodies. One wonders sometimes what it must be like to die in a trap like that, smothered by the bodies of others who have been fooled by the exploitation of their natural desires. But it is more fun to contemplate how much damage has been avoided each time the traps are emptied.
Near the middle of each month one wonders if the trapping does any good. “Do you think we are attracting Japanese beetles from other people’s yards?” Asked my wife.
“Undeniably.” But sometimes our neighbors will do more than their fair share in other civic duties. And sometimes we must do more than our fair share in ones we can. In this way if we are all well meaning and generous, we can make a community a better place. Trapping Japanese beetles is not fun, but when a plague of pests threatens, one takes action. That’s what I tell myself when it’s time to empty the traps.
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