That’s how the world ends. The party seems to be over for humanity. The reckless expenditure of our potential. We could have been creating an Eden. Instead we’ve squandered the wealth the Earth has given us. We creep toward our just doom.
I saw a photo yesterday. On the front page of the NYT. A young family dead at a checkpoint where safe passage was promised. Yes Ukraine. I must learn to look away. I am too old now and maybe that’s for the best. My instinct is to go and fight. Tens of thousands of veterans younger than me will go to Ukraine. The hairless ape has learned so much but nothing about living in peace. Our response to killing is more killing. But how to look away?
I have a friend who covered wars as a correspondent for many decades. I told him about my reaction to the photo. I ask him if someone who is exposed to the carnage as an observer only, a non combatant, develops a callus view, an emotional shield. He didn’t he said. He suffers what he calls empathy overload. He said he was returning to his garden. I will avoid putting any more salt in his wounds, the “news”. His garden is along a river in a valley in the Andes. Mine must be for now a plan on paper. Spring is close though and my thoughts need to leave eastern Europe. Any fighting I do needs to be with weeds and ticks. Nature heals.
The new 24 inch Huion 4K tablet is a lot more useful with the arm I just received and installed. The Huion is at the upper limit in weight for the arm, 15 pounds. There are tensioning adjustments and they have brought things into balance. I can have landscape or portrait orientations, depending on the subject. Still need to find all the controls for rotating the video but its good already. Always a lot to learn. I got the little keyboard dial too. The KD-100 made by Huion. They are phasing it out I think so it was bundled into the deal to get rid of it. It worked for a while but I think the driver stumbled and then the buy me buy me unzip started screaming and refusing to work. When I get the free one working I will try the driver again. Its always something but considering the complexity of all this at all levels….surprising it works at all. I mean, really, there are a billion transistors in the processor! A thousand million little field effect devices, FET’s, the invention that made this stuff possible albeit incredibly difficult.
I can sketch with this thing. With the little 13 inch Wacom one I couldn’t. Or, it didn’t feel right. I would sketch something on paper and scan it, then work on it in GIMP. GIMP is the open source graphics program I use. Strange how NOT having the paper’s “tooth” makes a tablet feel strange. I got used (over 60+ years of drawing) to a drag on the stylus, pencil or pen. Paper at the point of contact is like the floor of a pine forest, lots of fibers matted and a little rough. This stylus on plastic is slick, the friction is missing. Maybe somebody offers a film overlay that restores the feel of paper, the “tooth”. Or I could just get used to this.
Took a walk with a friend. We crossed town and walked among the fifty or so sail boats up on jacks waiting for spring. Not too much longer and they will be lifted and moved to the edge of the harbor and lowered in. At the height of summer Rockland’s harbor has maybe 75 sailboats at anchor. Many more come and go on the highway on trailers. I have one in the back yard. Maybe its days are over. I am certainly not sailing it again. Too old to step that mast as I did twenty years ago. It was fun. I can always ingratiate myself with a local and go out on their boat. I can pay for a cruise on one of the schooners that sail with tourists out of Rockport, Rockland and Camden. Did that years ago, great fun. Sailing the Penobscot Bay in a hundred year old two master, hauled over, scuttles awash….can’t beat it.
We walked without talking about the war. We avoided the subject. Then over wine back at his house it came up. Nothing in this country (USA) isn’t polarized politically. I heard an argument that the USA provoked the Russians. My friend is old enough to have a gut fear of a nuclear war. I am too. I am not sure younger people have it in their gut, that fear, a rational fear. But after a while, as with the virus, I’m tempted to say….f*ck it, bring it on, lets get it over with. Easy for me to say, I’m old. My movie has run most of its length. the credits are about to scroll up the screen. I don’t loose many years. But the kids do – so I am scared for them I guess. I looked up Einstein on Wiki, on his attitude re nuclear weapons. He said if he had known the Germans were nowhere near creating a bomb he would not have recommended to president Roosevelt that the USA start a program to develop one. I think he, like Oppenheimer and unlike Teller, regretted the development of these terrible devices. Human nature is plenty perverse already, these nasty gadgets just make it worse, deadly in fact.
CSB 