social/political/natural environment is changing...

The environment is changing.

I can feel it in the air and in the sunlight. The atmosphere is crisp and the planet is leaving the sun. It causes crazy shit with the weather and Lake Michigan. I rode my bike home on Tuesday night and was amused by the violent waves crashing up over the concrete embankment and splashing back. It's fun to try to time the approaching wave and getting around it. I only got caught once. It's best to avoid these waves, as the current is deceivingly strong... and can pull you off the bike. The headwind was hard and the lake active, but it was a fantastic environment to be in.

Florida has been hit by four hardcore tropical storms, California has been rumbling the past couple of days and Mount St. Helens is showing enough activity to warrant observation.

I am completely and totally fascinated by extreme weather and natural occurrences. I'm in awe. When I was a kid my dad and I would stand in the garage with the door open and watch a hardcore storm pass through. It was so wild to see trees sway violently back and forth - occasionally breaking branches, knocking entire trees down - all due to the incredible force of the pressure in the atmosphere. It's horrifying and beautiful... a natural rollercoaster.

And the fact that magma can rise from deep in the earth and shoot upward to the surface blowing the top of a mountain off - like Mount St. Helens did - is nothing short of awesome. I recall growing up in southern Wisconsin and finding extremely fine ash landing in the neighbor's garden. It traveled 2,200 miles through the atmosphere to land in my neighborhood. Fuck yeah.

I remember an excellent issue of National Geographic (January 1981) a year or two after Mount St. Helens' last eruption in the early 1980's... there was a sequence of photos taken by a hiker showing the sequence of erupted ash getting closer and closer and closer until pitch black. The film was later recovered from the hiker's corpse and developed. Fuckin wicked dude.

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On a totally different note, I've been unable to completely get my head around the surreal images taken on the street in NYC after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. This one is the most horrific event caused my man (thus far) during my lifetime: the slaughter of 3,300 innocent Americans. To this day seeing footage of the jets crashing into the buildings and then watching the aftermath makes me tear. The photos that I've seen from that day... photos of people running in the street... people running in fear... people running for their lives... scare me still.

That day looks like a vision of hell. If someone were to show you a photo of an NYC street labeled "September 11, 2001 - 9:40 a.m." one hour before the event, you could never believe it. It's also the photos of the people on the street covered in ash that I find surreal. People who are too shell shocked to respond to what's going on and are just walking home photos like this businessman, this woman doesn't even look real... this man. This photo of people reacting to the sight of the second plane hitting communicates exactly what I was feeling when I saw it on TV... shocked, helpless, frightened.

September 11th is not Iraq. I wish that they would stop connecting the two. September 11th is a wound for all mankind. Iraq is a deliberate act of aggression.