I enjoyed a small success today completing a web template for a friend of mine in Kansas. I did it for almost nothing, but more than money, I gained some knowledge about an aspect of web design that I have always been curious to learn more about. I used CSS and a table to build a website based on his stationary design. If you want to see my small victory you can check it out (at least in the short term)
here. You got to take pride in the small victories. It only took me a few hours, but I am satisfied with it.
Otherwise I have been feeling good, although I am still in a sort of a funk in some ways.
I watched part of a public television program about the building of the Panama Canal. I recognize the amazing feat that it is, but I was struck by the widespread destruction of the ecosystem in Panama. I also was struck by the 40,000+ human deaths caused by unsanitary conditions and yellow fever in the project's first years. I guess I am uninspired by the "accomplishments" of humanity when they are primarily about extending commerce and imperial power. I was unimpressed by the words of Teddy Roosevelt about the canal. While he said
many wonderful things during his life, he was primarily a man who believed in the supremacy of building a White Christian American Empire, exploiting human beings and nature in a fanatical drive for national power.
I believe our modern condition of searching for meaning and value in the world is in part a result of this conquering of our natural environment. Also it is when nature strike out at us and proves that it is not conquered that we are shaken hardest. The crises brought on by this years gulf state hurricanes shows that we are at best stupid and at worst arrogant in the face of the massive power of Gaia, our Earth mother.
Living in a city like Philadelphia, which is so removed from any sense of the natural world is difficult and alienating for people who came of age wandering in suburban woods and making trips to the countryside to visit grandmother's house.
Watching a
documentary about
noodlers in
Oklahoma, I felt new hope for the survival of our species. These men are close to nature in a way that I idealize. There is a part of me that thinks the cataclysm is coming and that we don't have an infinite amount of time to live in the unsustainable consume and throw away culture that we have been living in since perhaps as long as the 1920's.
Perhaps my sense that things must change is part of the cynical process of getting older. According to my parents, my grandfather thought the world would end 50 years after Israel had been a sovran nation. (I am not sure why he thought that.) Now perhaps my sense of change is less extreme than grandpa's apocalypse, but I think that we in America are going to witness some
major shocks in the
coming 20 years. We are going to look back to the days of
cheap oil and our illusions of security with nostalgia as our national and personal economic prospects continue to degrade and the rich continue to build walls between themselves and the rest of us.
Perhaps I am old beyond my years. Awareness of mortality ages one sometimes. A song just came on that sums up my feelings right now:
In My Grave (8MB) by
Mason Jennings.
(When you look in the mirror, let your focus go "soft," and allow the patterns made by the moon or candlelight and shadows to suggest forms, symbols and other dreamlike images that speak to your intuition.) 
Tired of a full belly and a soft bed.