Mooonday 11 December 2000

Pic of the day: Sorry, I'm not sure but I may have used this screenshot from Daggerfall before. ("You dream once again of the moooon...") But my imagination runs a bit dry after two days and a night almost without sleeping, so it was either this or mooning y'all ... ("Verb, t., esp. US" says my dictionary. Hmm? Esp. US?)

Moonstruck

I wondered why I was so wide awake through the night. But around 5 AM I noticed the light on the window and looked out. There it was, a bright full moon. Isn't it funny how usually there is a little bit of clear sky when the full moon is up? What a show-off! :)

Since I had not slept this night, I went to work early. We have very flexible working hours (I more than most) so that was OK. Apart from some ribbing by my coworkers, of course. They guessed at once that I had another of my rare sleepless nights. I wonder about those poor souls who turn up here early every day. That is, except the days they take off because they get too many hours and overtime is limited. Perhaps they don't sleep at night either - though in that case, they probably sleep in the evening. Must be a strange feeling. :)

On the bright side (apart from the moon, that is) I got to play a lot of Alpha Centauri. I have quotes for a week or more now.

***

As I went to bed - I did not stay many minutes - I thought about yesterday's entry. I think it could be construed as criticism of religion, and particularly of christianity. I'm thinking of the childish "God will clean up after us" attitude. At first glance, that sounds plausible. After all, it is common to read the Bible as saying the Earth (and the heavens too, wherever those may be) will be destroyed by fire; then a new Heaven and a new Earth will be made from scratch. This is a common reading. (Though not the absolutely only one possible.)

So why not hurry and use what resources we can find while the Earth is still there? And the spotted owls and rare salamanders will presumably be back on the new Earth, whatever we do to them here. And if not, that's because God did not really like them all that much and then they deserve what's coming to them. Let's use the planet like there's no tomorrow ... when it's all burnt to ashes it's too late.

But those who think like that forget the small thing call context. The eventual destruction of all things material is used as an argument to forsake the pleasures of the world, to not strive for material gain, but live a life in humble poverty. The kind of people who actually believe in the book are not likely to be the ones building highways through the rain forest.

No, it's not piety but greed and ignorance that drive the thoughtless exploitation of our planet. And in this it matters little what faith one confesses with the mouth - it is the deeds that show how much one cares for the generations to come. After all, "in the long run we are all dead". Five billion years from now, Earth and Moon and Venus and probably Mars are indeed going to be destroyed in the nuclear fire of a dying sun. By then we are long gone, of course. But for us alive today it matters not so much whether Earth lasts a hundred years more or five billion: As long as it outlasts us, we have a responsibility to keep it habitable. (And above all, to keep it there at all. No artificial black holes please.)

I was looking at a photograph
taken from a window way above the world
we've got to learn
we must leave here a garden for our children
when we are gone forever.

Chris de Burgh, Shine on, from the CD Power of Ten

***

Back to the day. For some reason I have not been all that horny this full moon. I know I used to have problems with that before. Perhaps I'm just too tired. I still felt fine when I came to work around seven, but a bit after ten I entered a half-awake haze which lasted until just before I went home. :) Not that this couldn't have happened anyway, with a job like that ... but it was particularly bad.

Luckily, I still had some left of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Mad King, and when I was about to fall asleep I turned on my pocket PC and read a little bit. It was just too exciting to feel sleepy then! I finished reading that novel today, by the way, and started on Jungle Tales of Tarzan. The first was about how the teen Tarzan fell in love with a female ape. Uh, it was not very graphic, though enough to give you a hint of what might have happened. Luckily it didn't, but you already know that, Tarzan being Tarzan after all. Burroughs was certainly pounding pretty hard on the 'everyone had a mate' anvil. You know, even if you're not Tarzan, not everyone has a mate. Unnatural selection.

You can't read Burroughs all workday, after all. I also had to move two computers (PCs) with heavy monitors and the usual cable jungle to somewhere in another corridor. And the occasional question from the coworkers. And the 2001 version of software to read through.

Reading documentation in particular was hard when I was this tired. After a few paragraphs, my eyes would glaze over and the world would fade away, being replaced by drifting images of Alpha Centauri units. I think these things are called "invasive memories" - you've looked at something move and then it continues to move behind your lids for a long time after. In fact, I have heard that this is fixed by the first two hours or so of sleep. It seems that deepsleep is for some reason important for this. To actually learn whatever we have bouncing around in there, we later use dreamsleep (REM) to fix it in place and associate it with other stuff. But I had neither deepsleep nor dreamsleep this night. And so the vision that was planted in my brain, still remains.

***

Other memorable events in my personal life this day: The bus I took early in the morning was stinking of puke. Obviously someone had thrown up big time in there, and even though the bus was washed the air was full of the smell. And after this, the smell has come back to haunt me again and again through the day. It must have settled in some of my clothes, I think.

And in utterly unrelated news, I ordered the train tickets for Oslo and back today. I called Cutie and asked her if it was OK that I come late in the evening Thursday 21st. That would leave us two days for shopping. Being a man, I am not expected to buy any gifts until two days before Christmas anyway...