There are a trio of fighter jets making low altitude circles around Rochester, NY. They look like F/A-18s. There are no armaments loaded: a training exercise? I find military aircraft to be utterly compelling devices for the skill needed of the designer, maintenance crew, the operator and technical mastery of its engineering. The sheer number of people which must be coordinated to even sustain the industrial civilization of which such planes are artifacts is beyond my grasp, a thing to be understood only in a logarithmic sense. I am a caveman plus 10,000 years—I keep and train wolf derivatives, leading them about on ropes in a manner instantly recognizable to any nomadic, agricultural, industrial or informational human in history—but through the effort of unknown hands I live 60 feet in the air with no fear, consume electricity to drive a digital mechanism I am familiar with though training and interest but could never rebuild from scratch and receive money for using this machine to instruct others like it with specially structured artificial languages. My wife studies the dead languages of Germanic pirates, poets and the latinized culture they eventually encountered—texts from a mere thousand years ago. Yet, mere; a strange word to use. I knew my great-grandparents but such people as I am descended from that lived even two-hundred years ago I can now only understand in aggregate. Sharon can sing the songs of skalds, long-boats sliding on icy, ink-black seas. Into the future do our works and genes go, but who can say which will survive into memory as idea or as body?
There is a man outside of my window spraying herbicide; the amount of which used here in Rochester, NY is, to me, astounding. There is a strip of land between my building’s parking lot and the next; my management company occasionally sprays herbicide on it, killing the shade plants that grew underneath the trees bordering the lot. The man is doing that now. On windy days—which are often—the dirt blows around and in through my windows. Nothing is done to plant a more agreeable species there. This pattern of behavior is common here: why must Rochester be either asphalt surface or dead top-soil? Too many are the places that could be gardens or parks paved over for parking lots, largely empty but for a few hours a week. The Museum across the street once had a beautiful lawn, fully half of it is dead, black and empty asphalt. Water gushes down the streets, finding no purchase on the lots that once were absorptive ground. Token trees wither and die for lack of water and car pollution. Men and women yell angry things from their car windows as I ride my bicycle in full accordance with the laws of this State.
Why?
