The Texas heat is putting stress on me in more ways than one. Economically, I can’t make ends meet if I don’t earn extra money each month. And it is too hot for me to survive driving in the heat with passengers and food deliveries for Uber. My household air conditioning is laboring hard to keep the house livable. It could give out from old age. And if the electricity goes out during peak electrical usage hours, that could bring about the end for me.
I have, in the past, found some relief by being a nudist inside the house and behind drawn window curtains. But it is illegal to go outside that way. And if I do get a job at either the school district as a substitute, or at Walmart, I will most likely have to put on clothes to go to work and earn money. Unless, of course, the whole society decides to go clothing-free due to the oppressive heat effects of climate change in Texas. It could happen.
But when I joke about naked truth, I am not merely punning around about physical nakedness. I am talking about exposing what’s underneath, revealing the truth that was previously cloaked under something artificial. That’s why the truth underlying my 1990’s monster-movie poster above reveals a hidden thing that is truth about me as an artist and a writer. I am not only the mad scientist (admittedly a much younger version of me) creating a robot girl in my evil castle laboratory, but I am figuratively also showing you how I write or draw a character, using an underlying mechanical structure to give a semblance of life to an un-living thing, namely, a fictional character.
Unfortunately, there are others in this world who have used their own technical expertise to create the heat-extinction scenario we now have to live in. And that is not merely a figurative exaggeration of a very real truth.
Fossil-fuel profiteers like the Koch Brothers and Exxon Corporation have known what the consequences of their unbridled exploitation of a natural resource were going to be since studies were done by their own researchers back in the 1970’s. They made the conscious decision to take maximum profits from their non-renewable resource knowing that their own grandchildren would have to face the fire-breathing dragon they created after their own lives of obscene wealth and comfort were already over. (I do hope those evil people’s grandchildren at least taste good when the poor and deceived people eat them.) So, we face a world of flooded lowlands, intense heat, fires like the one burning out of control in the Amazon today, crop failures, food shortages, and societal.collapse a few short years from right now. Thank you, Charles and David Koch.
The naked truth is, like my backyard sunflower, we are all soon going to be collapsing in the unrelenting heat. But I have lovingly watered the root every other day since I got back from Iowa. And it has yielded far more blossoms than any other single sunflower I have ever seen. It grows and thrives horizontally instead of growing upwards. Just like when a nudist wears ugly clothes to work. He can take the clothes off again at the end of the work day. When the day is ending, there is beauty underneath. And that is also a naked truth.
Catch a Falling Star 
That Damned Human Race
You have to wonder when you pay attention to what people are actually doing in this world, if the human race needs to be exterminated once and for all.
I know that as jokes go, that one is a little bit dark. But as we may actually be faced with a tipping point into the funnel of human extinction in only twelve years, it seems to me we are more likely to go down that awful rabbit hole at the bottom of the funnel than not. And that is not a very nice flesh-eating bunny we are going to find in that particular hole.
Remember, please, that I am, in fact, a pessimist, both temperamentally and philosophically. I look at the worst that could happen. But I am chagrined to see that people are actively either ignoring the climate change problem, or working to bring it on even faster by deregulating polluters in the name of making higher short-term profits. So, when the Midwest becomes an inland sea, the oceans rise to make New York and Miami into underwater bubble cities like the Gungans have, and we will have to learn to eat dirt in underground tunnels as drought and heat eliminate farming completely, we may very probably be getting what we deserve.
Obviously we are not taking things seriously enough when we continue to let the criminal orange monkey sit in the White House in pile of his own political poo and tell us things like “The Green New Deal is the radical Democrats’ attempt to turn us into a socialist country!” He doesn’t even understand that the Green New Deal is merely a strongly-worded resolution not to die in a blaze of heat generated by greenhouse gasses, and to be willing to do whatever it takes or pay whatever it costs to stay alive.
Maybe the whole question shouldn’t matter to me. I will, after all, probably be dead before the end comes for the rest of humanity. Like the Koch Brothers, I probably don’t need to fear the consequences of what industrialists like the Koch Brothers have done to our world just so they can have more money to stuff under their silk cushions to sit on.
But I do care about the world I will be leaving behind. I have many children in it. Three of my own and over two thousand that were mine for a school year or two or three to nurture and teach and shape into real human beings. I will be leaving behind a literate culture that I love and have tried desperately to add to. The worst part of that is all the wonderful books that I will never get the chance to read and own and share with others.
But there is an answer.
If we can laugh about it as the ship is sinking, we will be alright, no matter what the outcome.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Mark Twain, Paffooney, pessimism, philosophy
Tagged as climate change