Day 484…
A couple of weeks ago I was out walking on the street in New York and the left lens of my sunglasses suddenly fell out and dropped down onto the sidewalk. The frames with the remaining lens still in it tilted to the right and started to slide off my face. I was completely startled. For a moment, I did not have the slightest idea what was happening. Did something drop on me? Did someone throw something at me? Did a bird fly into me? I’d never had anything like that happen before.
After a beat or two, I realized that the little screw that held the lens in place had fallen out, so the frame separated. They are a very well-made pair of glasses that I’ve had for several years so it never occurred to me to check to see whether the screws were tight or not. Even if they were a cheap pair, I don’t think I’d ever check something like that. The screw in question must have loosened up over many months if not years before it finally jogged free and fell.
The glasses have been at the bottom of my backpack in their case ever since and I’ve been trying to get a repair kit at a drugstore to fix them, but I can’t seem to remember to do it.
On Thursday when word got out about the apartment building that collapsed in Miami, stupidly, my sunglasses were the first thing that I thought about. I can absolutely imagine what that initial moment of complete disorientation during the start of the building’s disintegration must have been like, especially since some of the people inside must have been asleep at the time. It’s the seconds after those initial confusing ones that I can’t picture and don’t want to think about.
There is an engineering report from 2018 that warned about serious issues with the concrete infrastructure of the building that seems to have been ignored. The building, and, in fact, many of the buildings near it were originally built on sand and have been sinking by a couple of millimeters every year since the 1990’s. The worsening storm patterns that are occurring each year with the advancement of climate change are eroding the beaches faster and putting much of the construction along that area of Florida’s coast in the same kind of danger.
Meanwhile, Portland, Oregon is expected to hit 113 degrees (46C) in a couple of hours and get even hotter tomorrow. There has been an average 2 degrees warming in the Seattle area since 1900 and 3-4 degrees since then in the Puget Sound area. Even so, this is not a location on the planet that should be getting that hot.
A few years ago, my mother took Michael and me and my sister and her family to South Africa on a family vacation. On the way we stopped over in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for a couple of nights. It was summer there at the time and during the day the temperature got very close to 120 degrees. We human beings can really only function in a very narrow band of temperatures without some sort of protective gear. 120 degrees is definitely pushing the upward limit. Yes, you can go out in it, but in a very short time there is a real risk of getting heat stroke.
One day while we were there, we took a ferry across the river to the old souk area and about halfway across it became very apparent that my niece was going to overheat. A tea salesman in the souk took pity on us and let us stay inside his air-conditioned shop for a while and gave us some water. As soon as we felt better, we taxied back to the hotel and spent the rest of the day in an indoor winter sport facility. It was in a downtown mall that had ski slopes and frozen ponds to skate on. And penguins. They rented out parkas and snow suits.
The people who live in Dubai expect the weather there to get that hot, so they prepare for it. Like Las Vegas, everything indoors is air conditioned to a ridiculously low level. Nobody except idiot tourists ventures outside until the evening when it gets a bit cooler and more comfortable. Portland, Oregon is, from what I’ve read, one of the least air conditioned places in the country. There has simply been no need up until now for people who live there to have to cool their houses down. How many days of 115-degree weather is it going to take before everyone who lives there goes out and buys air conditioners, plugs them in and overtaxes the local power grid?
A Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius first predicted that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could change the surface temperature of the earth. This was in a paper he wrote in 1896. How much more warning time than that do we need?
I haven’t been listening to the news for weeks. It might even be months by now. I am fully back at work for at least the next five weeks with only Sundays off. Between the work itself and the dining out with colleagues and friends where we unwind and discuss the day we’ve just had and plan for the one coming up, there is very little time left for anything else.
I’m thrilled to be back at work, don’t get me wrong. The project that I am on is challenging and time consuming and completely rewarding. I feel like I am working with the best of the best and being able to completely throw myself into what we are doing is thoroughly entertaining. It helps that I know that the project is going to be done with after five weeks. Cutting myself off from a lot of what is going on around me while I work on this is, therefore, temporary.
The sixteen months before this when a lot of us weren’t working, there wasn’t anything keeping me from being fully engaged with the news and fully enraged by it. Before the pandemic struck, I was so busy, however, that I picked up what was going on from headlines and didn’t ever really get caught up in it. It feels like I, along with many of my friends and colleagues, experienced an awakening over this past time when I saw just how much time I had been giving over to my work and just how little of it was left over to pursue what I might be passionate about and I vowed to change that.
It is not possible to do what I do as a stage manager and not be fully engaged. Especially at the level of commercial theatre that I usually work on, you have to live, breath and eat it in order to get the job done. I can’t just take a few hours off during the day for myself. I am writing this on my day off because I truly took the day off. Aside from a couple of phone calls I made and some rescheduling for tomorrow’s rehearsal that I had to do at the last minute, I’ve spent this day largely on my own. I needed to do that. As we get further into tech, that might not be possible every week. So, yes, I am back on the hamster wheel, but I keep telling myself that it is for a finite amount of time and then I will get back off it again.
“I can stop any time I want”, is the number one delusion of alcoholics the world over.
We humans tend not to heed the warnings that we are given about anything from climate change to politics to even health concerns, because to address them would take away from and distract us from our work or whatever it is that we usually devote our time to. Despite all those warnings, we just keep pushing forward until whatever it is - buildings, climate systems or our bodies - inevitably collapses.
The 2016 and 2020 elections and their aftermath should have been a warning to us all. The voter suppression laws that are now being passed by the GOP in states all over the country should also be a warning to us. The GOP have been as steady in their push to erode voting rights and disenfranchise their opponents as the storm surges have been to the Florida coastline. They are relentless. Their appointees in the US Supreme Court are also starting to eat away at the hard-earned rights we have all fought for over these past decades. Bit by bit. Grain of sand by grain of sand. They have been at this very thing for decades and, as a result, our basic democratic structure is far more compromised already than anyone really wants to admit.
I never noticed that the screw holding my sunglasses together had become loose. It’s not as if now that it’s happened, I can look back and say well of course that’s why they felt loose. They didn’t feel loose. Some people in the Miami complex have said that they noticed the building shaking at times and saw water accumulating in places where it shouldn’t, but they didn’t do anything about it besides occasionally complain. It’s not as if the residents all suddenly moved out afraid for their lives. I’m sure that it never crossed their minds that the building could collapse. Instead, they just got annoyed by the inconvenience and continued living their lives there by sidestepping the giant puddles and enjoying the sunsets from their balconies.
Buying air conditioners is not what the good people of Portland and Seattle should be doing. Obviously, they are going to have to do that to survive but adapting to rising temperatures is not remotely the same thing as trying to lower them.
Something about us as a species, though, keeps us from taking the kinds of actions that prevent calamities. Instead, we do figure out how to adjust to them. And make no mistake about it, they are all preventable. In 2018 that building in Miami could and should have either been repaired or torn down when the report came out. As the warnings about climate change started to proliferate after Arrhenius’s paper came out a hundred and twenty some odd years ago, we could have started to try and prevent it then. When the 2016 elections happened, we could have woken up and done everything we could to ensure that nothing like that could ever happen again. We could be doing all of that now.
But, of course, I have work first thing in the morning. There is a whole schedule to coordinate and automation cues to adjust and, well… the list goes on. I can’t really deal with it right now.
I did finally fix my sunglasses the day before yesterday. A friend loaned me a kit and one of the tiny screws fit perfectly. Now, they’re good as new and it’s like nothing ever happened. I will admit that I have started to check to see that they are still tight before I put them on. It was such a strange sensation to have them just disintegrate on my face that I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. They were expensive, after all, so I want to take care of them.
A very relatable post Richard 👏👏♥️
I enjoyed your musings and insight.