Time again for the Thursday Thirteen. It’s been a tough week for those of us who don’t like war. I’m tempted to list thirteen reasons war sucks, like charred bodies of children scattered like dry leaves by the side of the road, killed while fleeing with their families. Like bombed out airports, roads, bridges, dairies, factories and power plants, part of a pattern of mass destruction of civilian infrastructure. Like missiles lobbed blindly towards civilian centers in hopes of killing innocents. But I’ve been writing about this shit all week.

So herewith are Thirteen Things That Give Me Hope:

1. My two beautiful children, who tonight took a bath with their swim goggles on.
2. My beautiful, strong, loving wife, who has been through so much shit in this world, but managed to hold on through it all and save enough of herself to take care of me and the kids—and she still manages to be a creative force in the universe.
3. Long summer evenings, with cool breezes.
4. The life cycle of our garden. Got it in a little late this year, but it’s coming on strong now. “Plants always try,” says Wacky Mommy.
5. My children’s generation, who seem so much brighter than my own, and an order of magnitude brighter than those in power today.
6. An abiding faith that the Earth will survive even the worst we humans can dish out. Visit the blast zone of Mt. St. Helens, and you’ll get some sense what I’m talking about. Life will go on here long after humans are gone.
7. In the scope of the universe, humans are incredibly, infinitesimally insignificant. Quoth R. Buckminster Fuller:
   

   To get a little idea, …our Earth is 8,000 of miles in diameter and the diameter of the Sun is just a hundred times that, so our little Earth looks very tiny against that enormous big ball.

   But our star Sun is a small star. Most of you are familiar with Orion’s Belt. In Orion’s Belt, one of the two bright stars is reddish in color and this is Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse’s diameter is greater than the diameter of the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. So that’s a good size star.

   So, we are a little planet of a rather inferior star which is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and we know of billions of galaxies. So you get an idea of our little planet, and you and I are utterly invisible on it. We take pictures of our planet coming in from the moon, when you can see through the cloud cover, you can see the blue of the waters and brown of the land, but you can’t make out a human being. You can’t even make out a mountain, let alone a human being.

   There’s absolutely no visibility of a mountain because the aberration of the deepest water–five miles below sea level, five miles above to the mountain top–ten miles aberration in 8,000 miles is so meager that a polished steel ball is probably rougher than that.

   So we are absolutely invisible on a really negligible little tiny planet of a rather negligible star, which is one member of a hundred billion of known million billion such stars. So you multiply the billion times a hundred billion and you’ll get an idea.

8. Once you’ve hit rock bottom (e.g. George W. Bush), there’s nowhere to go but up.
9. Mojitos taste really, really good.
10. Hockey season is just a couple months away.
11. My family doesn’t live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza or Lebanon.
12. Thursday Thirteen has prompted me to blog about something other than war and hockey for at least one day a week.
13. I worked on my slap shot a little today, and I think I’m starting to get the idea…

Whew. That was really hard to come up with. I tell ya, it’s been a tough week to think positively, but it sure is a good exercise! See you in the funny pages….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Lebanon, Me, Middle East, Politics, Thursday Thirteen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.