Watermelon Bats

The small amount of coffee remaining in my frosted and dotted Yayoi Kusama mug is still a little warm and I take a big gulp. I listen to Blackberry Smoke sing “One Horse Town” on YouTube as I read an online article about the dying of bigleaf maple in the American west. Scientists don’t know why this is happening. But it’s happening everywhere. Bigleaf maples are in decline. They think it’s got something to do with climate change.

D’ya think?

The maples under the McGraw Street bridge in Wolf Creek Ravine all look sickly, their leaves coated with a greenish-brown discoloration. It’s mid-October and the leaves aren’t even changing into the usual fall colors of yellow and orange. The signs of planetary, ecological distress are everywhere, and they’re not good: methane emissions in the waters of the eastern Arctic are causing the water to boil; atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have now exceeded 410 parts per million; the rapid ice melt in Greenland is causing the Atlantic Ocean’s meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to slowdown; 80% of the world’s insects and birds have vanished. And so on.

Meanwhile, I’ve never seen so many babies. There are babies everywhere. They’re as ubiquitous as Uber and numerous as goobers. Every day I see men and women pushing baby buggies down the sidewalk. When it comes to human reproduction, it’s been pedal to the metal. People are popping babies out like popcorn. And they love bringing these monsters to restaurants where we can all hear them crying and running around screaming their heads off.

I remember one afternoon out running as we approached a small Mexican restaurant with several tables outside a man and a woman changing a baby’s diapers in close proximity to the other table where people were eating. I’d have a tough time dipping a corn chip into guacamole if I were sitting there. The memory itself is welcome to leave any time it wants.

R believes – more charitably and kindly than my take on the situation – that this rash of human reproductivity is because people are anxious and desperate for some kind of normality. There’s nothing like a family to make one feel secure and happy. At least until the babies grow into teenagers and applying to schools like Harvard or joining the military in order to get financing for a school like Harvard, or sulking in the basement looking up guns and explosives on the Internet.

Reproduction is a powerful instinct. I’ve never had that particular instinct, but I’ve got to believe that that’s a reality for a lot of people: the transmission of human chromosomes into the future. And who knows, maybe one of these kids will be the genius to figure out how to restore balance to the planet.

Or more importantly become a farmer. A genius farmer able to grow crops in increasingly difficult circumstances. Plough her fields with Percherons. Power greenhouses and irrigation systems with windblown turbines and polycrystalline solar panels.

In California, PG&E – after being blamed for sparking 17 out of 23 major fires across the sate in 2017 and 2018, one of which destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people – cut power to millions of people due to their own incompetency and filing for bankruptcy.

Jesus. Why aren’t the people in California in the streets screaming bloody murder? The outage is an outrage.

I should ask myself a few questions as well. Such as, why am I writing this? What’s the point of writing at all if people don’t read and there will be no libraries or universities in a future of carbonized forests and barren radioactive wastelands in which the sixth mass extinction has run its full course and all that is left of humanity are a few tribes of cannibalistic zombies miming old Mad Max movies around the campfire?

Shit, I don’t know. Writing is like reproduction. It’s a compulsion, a driving force, flames from the back of a rocket pushing this sentence further into space. When it reaches a habitable planet it will land and sink its roots down deep and grow into a giant watermelon.

We will make a giant palace out of that watermelon and when we’re done eating the moist, sugary contents of the watermelon we’ll spit the seeds out on the surface of our new planet, the planet I just created with words, the same words I used to make a palace out of watermelon, and whose seeds took root and became a field of watermelons, a planet of watermelons, a galaxy of watermelons, watermelon comets and watermelon stars, watermelon elevators and watermelon cars, watermelon gas and watermelon hats. Watermelon caverns. Watermelon bats.