Flowers and Peak Oil

My freaky spirituality piece of the other day sparked interesting discussion there and there and around these parts, where Fred asked, “what sin made you turn from God?” But before I could answer, Fred had figured out the answer for himself, hitting the Proverbial nail on the head with his first swing – yes, Fred, the “lust of the flesh” pointed me hellward. That, and I like shrimp.

The piece also sparked a couple of phone calls – one from a friend who said my writing was getting “too flowery” and another who told me she thought it was “beautiful.” Well shit, aren’t flowers supposed to be beautiful?

In a related coincidence, I happened upon a wonderful and very apropos Tom Robbins passage last night:

“We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make sense of it; observing a ‘reality’ that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue – only we’ve all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we’re given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We’re given Time magazine and Reader’s Digest, daily papers, and the six o’clock news; we’re given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we’re given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We’re attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe barroom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when’s the last time you heard anyone bitch about it to the management?”

Whew… just imagine an evening of chips, salsa and bong hits with him and David Bohm. Oh well, one can dream.

On another matter, the drive from Austin to San Antonio today took me through a funhouse of seemingly endless suburban construction. It reminded me to direct your collective attention to some big news on the ‘peak oil’ front: it seems the second-biggest oil field in the world, Cantarell, is crashing faster than even the pessimists projected. There was a good WSJ story on it over the weekend. What does this all mean? Well, other than the obvious socioeconomic nut-kicks it will deliver to the American way of life, JHK says it means Martha Stewart might get eaten. BYOB.