San Francisco Chronicle: The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is speeding year by year, according to global climate watchers gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island.

The consequence is already evident in a small but ominous rise in sea levels around the world, a pace that is also accelerating, the scientists say.

Is the planet really dying? If so, why are we letting the middle east, and Bush’s dog and pony show, have all the attention?

Dear Tasha,

It is August 12 again. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since I had to send you on ahead. It’s 5:30pm, and I remember it was just a few minutes before six when I laid down on the floor next to you and took off your collar with its jingly tags for the last time, and watched the veterinarian put you to sleep. I’ve kept your collar on my bedpost ever since.

I remember the blankie they brought for you, and wrapped around your body, was light blue with little ducks.

You loved your cookie jar shaped like a beagle, that barked when we tilted back his head. And how you’d run to it for cookies when I said “big mean barkin’ dog.”

You loved to share popcorn and the crusts of my sandwiches.

I think about you every day, and try to picture where you are. It’s hard. Sometimes I see a brilliant bridge and trees, grass, a pond and a stream to feed it, and angels feeding you. But I think that you are consciousness, relieved of everything that was not Tash. I guess I’ll find out soon enough, so let’s just accept the mystery.

You loved riding in the pickup truck, anywhere, anytime, but you hated it when I opened the door of the garage. Big old noisy, stupid door.

It’s 5:40pm. I knew they were coming any minute now. I prayed they wouldn’t forget to come. They promised. I couldn’t let you face another long dark night of being old and sick. You were slipping away from me, already half way to heaven, and in sight of the Rainbow Bridge.

It wasn’t a bad day. It was long and hard, but we didn’t want it shorter, right? We had a cookie on the grass, and we visited Stella in her special place. Are you together with her now? Is Pepper there, and Betty June and Lady, Winnie, Rock, and Jack? Ralph and Tinker? Little Boots? Is maybe Squeaky squeaking in a tree?

You loved it when I scratched your back or rubbed your tummy. And I remember those times when I got home from work and you had dragged my sweats and running shoes from the bedroom, and left them by the front door so we could go out and play.

It’s 5:45, and I was with you in the living room by the windows. But I don’t remember if I saw the vet’s car come up the drive. Did you know they were coming? I told you, remember? I said it was alright to go, that you’d accomplished your life and been a perfect friend and spent five thousand nights with me, so I was not alone. I told you not to worry about me. It’s alright, find peace, be free.

It’s 5:50pm, and this is when they came. I heard Mom talking to them in the hall, and they came through fast. And they were there, explaining. And you and I were ready, girl. We had fourteen years to be ready for goodbye, and you were brave. I melted, like ice in a high-banked fire. As brave as I could be, I guess.

You loved the wind in your face, out on the bluffs where the wind comes off the ocean fresh and bringing salt and bearing time; time to cross a million waves and tip them white, then make a small dog turn and smile.

I loved those small moments of peace with you, Tasha. Reaching down beside the bed to find you there. Playing tugger with a knotted sock. Coming out from a store and whistling – still far from the truck – to watch your little years pop up behind the window. I always worried, made my shopping quick. Who wouldn’t want to steal a dog like you? But I know that you were a man’s dog, no nonsense, take no guff. You would guard that truck. And if I got out, and someone was walking behind me, you’d bark like a Doberman. “Look out!” I remember the time you chased the neighbor’s German Shepard off. “My yard!” You had a sense of place.

It’s 6:00pm, and you were gone.

Papa’s clock is striking in the other room, and the nights are getting longer now, again.

Love,

your Kyle

[thanks, JV]

I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do.

-Cesar Chavez, farm worker and
activist(1927-1993)

I’m not a vegetarian right now, though I was for several years. I’m on a special diet, and I need to stay on it for a while. But when it’s done I’m going back. A friend once said this to me: “Meat is pretty dead.”

I’ve been thinking about this train, and about writing; I can’t seem to get enough done lately. I used to write a poem – a rough draft – on a 10 minute coffee break. Now I start trying to get geared up for writing after dinner, and it can be midnight before I get a word on the screen. I suspect the people around me wonder at how I waste so much solitude, while I feel I can’t seem to get enough. But then I’m lonely. I reach out to you.

Here’s an excerpt from a book, Reporting, by David Remnick of the New Yorker, from a section on Phillip Roth:

“I live alone, there’s no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with,” Roth said. “My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day … If I wake up at two in the morning — this happens rarely but it sometimes happens — and something has dawned on me, I turn on the light and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read til all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.”

I don’t want his life. I just want to understand mine. Which brings me to the train I mentioned earlier. Writing poems when I was younger, more spontaneous maybe, was like a car that travels 10 miles from my town of Carpinteria to Santa Barbara in 10 minutes in a 65 mph zone. Writing the stuff I’m writing these days is like a train, traveling the same 10 miles from a dead stop, with the same speed limit. It’s not getting there in 10 minutes, because for the first mile it’s doing 20, then a mile or two at 30, then 40, 50, and maybe it won’t even get up to 60 mph before it has to start braking to stop in Santa Barbara.

That’s why I need time. It takes so damn long to get up to speed. And maybe if you’re passing me in your Ford Explorer, you could waive. Or honk. I might be asleep at the switch.

Would it be redundant of me to suggest that it’s always wise to have a backup system, in case the best laid plans spring a leak?

Well, the motley fool has the story on the BP leakiness in Alaska.

I’m just wondering if crude adds trans fat to a moose burger.

Today is the birthday of Alfred Lord Tennyson, one of the most famous and popular poets ever. The Steven King of 19th century English letters. Well, I guess Dickens was King, but old Alfred was up there. Poets were treated differently then; Tennyson was given a Lordship for his efforts, and was a personal friend of Queen Victoria.

I’m not a fan of Victorian poetry, generally. I prefer American flavors, and the 20th century, if you please. (Robert Frost, William Stafford, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Mark Strand … and a few of you reading this blog. Oh dear, all men. OK, Sharon Olds.) So usually I look at something like Tennyson’s work as sentimental, shallow, overwrought. But I’m getting older, and when he wrote this following poem, Tennyson was an old man. He was writing about his own impending death. Now, if I read it slowly, picture a man like me but dressed differently and with a long beard, with his little leather notebook and fountain pen, on a boat sailing to his home on the Isle of White … well wait. Behind the rhyme and the contrived metaphor, there’s a real sense of commonality, of generations moving with the tide.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad daily say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around Baghdad interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

[San Jose Mercury News]

This is worse than even I ever envisioned it. Back in ’03, I pictured Vietnam; insurgents living among the rubble and the sand, pouring in from across Islamadom, confounding our misbegotten efforts at occupation, until we packed up and left, with nothing but our bloodied rhetoric. But I never imagined the natives would get so restless as to turn on each other, go cannibal. 

Now before I bring on Lincoln, can somebody please explain what the hell they’re fighting for? At least in the US civil war, we had a few really stupid reasons. But I hate your stupid guts on general principles is not a reason at all.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

One more point: that nation was so conceived and so dedicated in the Oval Office and at the Pentagon. The seeds of this war may have been germinating for something like 1500 years, but they were planted, watered and fertilized in this new century by US.