Mean Temperatures

I keep checking the temperature. It’s become an obsession. As long as the temperature stays above 32℉ there’s a chance the streets will be clear tomorrow, maybe slushy, still a slop of dirtied snow on the ground, bits of ice, but mostly gone. The joy of regaining traction cannot be overstated. Gets cold in the room at night. But when I turn the heat on it gets too hot and has to be turned off again. It’s like dealing with a yo-yo. A very slow yo-yo made of temperature. Odd thing, temperature. It fluctuates so quickly in a gas. Funny to think of air as a gas but that’s what it is it’s a gas gas gas. Mélange of gases: nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, neon, and hydrogen. The scientists say the oxygen is the result of bacteria. Cyanobacteria. Blue-green algae. Breathing is lovely. Puts to the lie any notion of individuality. We all breathe air. It’s like sharing the same membrane. Protects us from meteors. Never ceases to amaze me to see a 910,000- pound plane fly through the air. Wave your hand in it and it feels like nothing, a whisper of molecules on the hand, gentle perturbations, the softness of a cat’s belly holding mountainous clouds and jets and planes and helicopters and drones. Even that drone on Mars flew. The atmosphere on Mars is 1% less than earth’s. Mostly carbon dioxide. Trace of oxygen. Still. I can’t help fantasize wandering those plains of red dirt and jumble of rocks. Tarzan leading an army of warriors mounted on pterodactyls. Can still see Carl Sagan laughing heartily on Johnny Carson. What happened to him? Myelodysplasia. Bones stop producing mature blood cells. I wonder if he’d been exposed to anything as a scientist that may have brought that on. The need to find some explanation, some cause, some reason for such an early death is powerful. If I were to surrender to a nihilistic view of the universe it would undermine an already wobbly sense of well-being. But there it is. Even as eloquent and amiable a spokesperson for science and the ability to see wonder through the precise and quantitatively exact lens of science as Carl Sagan, a rare exemplar of unpretentious rationality, did not lead, as one would anticipate, to longevity. Where does it come from, this compulsion to find a moral hand in everything? Diseases are random, cruelly arbitrary. Never know when they're going to strike. The Covid pandemic has condemned the world to constant surveillance, division, poverty and death. Except for the billionaires. They’ve profited hugely from this pandemic. Where’s the morality there? We live in a fallen world, to put it biblically. Nietzsche claimed that an ordered society put the passions to sleep. Is it possible such egregious wrongheadedness, psychosis, and bloated self-interest might result in something radically beneficiary? A keener sense of being alive, an incendiary Byronic blaze ignited by an “offense to the pieties?” Wonder if that’s why everyone is so fascinated by outlaws. Rebels. Or they used to be. Those Peckinpah movies reveled in disorder. The “overthrow of boundary stones.” Warren Oates shooting holes in Mexican wine kegs in The Wild Bunch. Outsiders used to be so much fun. To watch, at least. This was a different kind of sociopathy. The outcast. Outcasts are sexy. Were sexy. A society on the verge of collapse isn’t such fertile ground for outcasts. Billionaires aren’t outcasts. It’s a different sociopathy. More lethal. Bank robbers are one thing. Bonnie and Clyde were seen as heroes. So was Machine Gun Kelly. People knew who the real thieves were: the banks. Billionaires aren’t a rebel class. They rise to their fortunes on the backs of workers, who are often abused, treated like slaves. Billionaires are more like the villains in the James Bond movies: they steal it all. World Domination. The wealth of an entire planet. It's a villainy so huge it can't be comprehended behind the face of a placid rationality, as it is in real life, where a dulcet manner hides a viper.