OK, time to fess up : I don’t give a fuck about old growth forests.

I mean, I guess it’s sort of sad when really old trees die. In theory. But then again nature itself kills more old trees than humanity ever could every single day.

Old trees die. New trees grow. That’s just nature. You can’t tell me that it makes a whit of difference whether humans take a tiny percentage of trees for our own use.

And we replant, too. So what’s the big deal?

I consider myself an environmentalist, but my green ambitions are rooted firmly in my humanism. I don’t give two tablespoons of organic fertilizer for Gaia or Mother Earth or natural beauty or any other doe-eyed hippie bullshit about how there is nothing more evil than a smokestack.

Why? Because factories and cars are icky and flowers and trees are nice. That’s all it boils down to a lot of the time. Hippies are aethetically offended by rubber tires and traffic jams, so they must be pure unadulterated evil. End of story.

Some go so far as to wish the whole world matched their green fantasies. No cities, no cars, no modern medicine, no highways, no fast food, no anything except nice green fields and nice green forests and nice green farms (all organic, of course) and nice green everything everywhere forever.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, except that without modern agriculture, 95 percent of the world’s people would starve to death and the rest of us would be picked off by the lack of modern medical facilities, the diseases running rampant because of the lack of vaccines, nobody having a job since the economy went critical and turned into a supernova, the food wars that would soon break out, oh, and everyone losing their minds from their world radically changing and there being no entertainment left.

I mean, sure, it would doom 999 out of 1000 humans to die horrific deaths that could easily have been prevented, but at least a handful of hippies thought things were really nice shortly before they died.

Makes me want to do a “It’s A Wonderful Life” type Black Mirror episode where some hyper green dogmatic hippie type person gets to see the world without the evils of modern technology and the industrial revolution.

It would seem all bucolic and wonderful – till they asked where the people are.

Cue montage of corpse strewn streets and roads and lawns, all showing clear signs of dying in great misery, chaos, and pain.

And then the wish-granting entity says “But none of this really happened. ”

And the hippie says “Oh thank God!”

And the wish-granter says, “….because without technology, humanity went extinct a long time ago. We never even made it off the Serengeti. ”

And then the hippie begs the wish granter to put it all back the way it was and they do and all seems right again, except that we end with a montage of dire global warming news about the world being on fire.

Because I’m a dick, that’s why.

I should probably start actually, ya know, writing things.

More after the break.

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The bicycle incident

The story in the following vid :

…about a father suddenly cleaning his child’s room and said child getting very upset at the sudden change sounded reaaaaaallly familiar.

Patient readers know this story already, but to quickly recap : when I was a kid, all I wanted for my birthday was for my bike (my sister Catherine’s hand-me-down yellow girl’s bike with the banana style seat, aka “The Banana Bike”), to be fixed so I could ride it around the neighborhood again.

But instead, my family bought me a brand new bike and surprised me with it on the morning of my birthday.

Emphasis on “surprised”.

Should have been a Hallmark moment. Young boy reacts with wonder and joy at getting a brand new excellent bike instead of old broken down Sears special.

But nope. It was way too much of a surprise. Instead of wonder and joy they got me freaking out and crying my little eyes out from the sheer shock of it.

Of particular issue was the fact that the new bike was too tall for my feet to reach then ground while seated on it, and I hadn’t learned to balance the proper way yet.

Yet another time in my life where my emotional reaction was “wrong” in that it was not what people wanted or expected or could possibly have predicted.

One thing about the video that adds to this is that it pointed out the connection between this kind of response and autism.

So add a few more shekels to the “evidence I might be a little autistic” column.

Still not nearly enough to diagnose myself with anything, not even “high functioning autism”^[1], but still interesting to examine.

Some level of autism would go a long way to explain why I was such a serious and cerebral child right from the get-go. No imaginary friends, no imaginative play with my toys, in fact very little playing with toys period.

But I only have these little scraps of evidence. So far at least, they don’t prove anything. They don’t form the kind of single, coherent picture necessary for a solid diagnosis.

Which is, I suppose, a somewhat autistic way of looking at things. And talking.

I know I’m sure as fuck not normal. I have known that since elementary school. I was just not like the other kiddies and that has remained true up unto this very moment.

I was born weird and I will most likely die weird. Amen.

And a solid and coherent diagnosis of just waddy fug is wrong with me would do me a lot of good, I think.

It would help me to not feel like such a misbegotten alien…. thing. I feel the mismatch between what society expects and what I can give it very keenly.

And while I would not want to surrender my unique mind in order to fit in, it would be awfully nice if someone could retrofit the dang thing so I can come in out of the cold.

I will talk to you warm fuzzy people again tomorrow.