We started on our regular yard-sale route this morning, got a couple of hours in and it started raining. It kind of spit for a while, then the skies opened and put an end to yard sales for the day. Can’t say it broke my heart. I babysat last night for a toddler who woke and wandered a few times, until I finally crawled into his mommy’s bed. He still woke a couple of times but only wandered the few steps between his toddler’s bed and his mommy’s bed. Very drowsy toddler. Meant I was up late though.
We made a couple of other quick pickups of some odds and ends early this afternoon, and then I came home and crashed and burned in a big way. I woke about 7-ish, ordered a pizza and think I’ll have no problem sleeping again in a short while.
My oldest son finally got his diagnosis. It’s both worse and better than we’d hoped. He has MS. I don’t know which version, and know it’s obviously serious, but at least now with the diagnosis they can actually begin treating him accordingly. I hope he responds to the treatment. Of course autoimmune diseases like MS are hereditary. We have reason to believe my younger daughter may also be in the early stages of the disease, and it throws my own health issues back under the microscope.
Needless to say, it’s been a daunting week.
I am still 8 years from retirement, but at the rate my health is deteriorating I can’t see myself in the workforce that long. I am investigating what I think may be a viable option for at-home work. I’d need to make comparable money to what I make now, which would be tough. However for the business I have in mind I think it would be doable, and the demand is certainly there. I reached out to a friend about partnering with me on the project, too. I can do it alone easily, but thought it might help her too. I gain nothing from asking her on board, unless it’s adding a bit of credibility by having two editors instead of one.
While perusing the vagaries of Facebook tonight, I ran across a post from Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, “The Hair” guy from the Ancient Aliens TV show. The Ancient Astronauts aficionados will be gathering at the Joshua Tree Convention Center this August. The website is contactinthedesert.com, if it interests you. I personally find it to be evidence that these people are certifiable.
Who holds a conference in the desert in August???
Aside from the scheduling thing, I find the whole ancient astronauts thing increasingly laughable. I do think we have massive gaps in our social memory. There is no question civilizations lived and died before ours, civilizations with their own knowledge and technology. We only have records going back for about 4000 years or so, and the earliest of that history is still unfolding. We now know for a fact that at least one sophisticated bit of architecture dates back to about 12,000 years ago – Gobekli Tepi – which was just at the end of the last ice age. All that tells me is that people survived the ice age, probably with at least a nominal amount of technological know-how that made it through. Who knows how far humanity stretched before the ice age?
While the Bible isn’t my go-to for history, it does convey some interesting information that many a Christian conveniently ignores. For example, in Genesis God tells Adam and Eve to replenish the earth. The literal meaning of replenish means to refill – to fill up AGAIN (my emphasis.) How can they do it again if it didn’t happen before? There’s also the story of Job, which is understood to predate every other story in the Bible. It’s believed to have been penned about 1500 BC, give or take. It predates the Pentateuch, the stories of creation and the formation of the Hebrew nation. In the book of Job there’s a reference to a Leviathan, with a description that sounds for all the world like a fire-breathing dragon.
There are ancient stone structures scattered around the world, structures for which we’ve assigned dates based on carbon dating the detritus around them. By that definition God knows how many stone structures our future progeny and descendants will attribute to us, because we leave crap everywhere. The pyramids? Built in 1975 by our then-king, Elvis Presley. The Eiffel Tower? A tribute to Paris Hilton, who was so famous they named a city after her. She was the goddess of sex and no talent.
Think those are farfetched? Lemme put it this way. If tomorrow the Internet crashed and burned for good, as part of a worldwide apocalypse of either extreme warming, asteroid strike, ice age, whatever – how long do you think our paper records would survive? You think a few hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand?
I’m definitely not betting on the latter, not unless by some amazing change of nature paper itself can become petrified and still have its words embedded neatly into its surface. Keep in mind the condition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they’d only been hidden away for a couple of thousand years. Are our books more likely to exist long term than the scrolls? I don’t think so either.
Then of course there’s also the language barrier. Will future humanity be able to read and understand our every word, or 15,000 years from now will generations scratch their heads, wondering what the rows of symbols are meant to represent? Will reading as a concept even exist 15,000 years from now? Will humanity still be around then?
My point is that as wonderful as some of our current developments are, we have exactly zero idea what human beings had in their arsenal, literally or figuratively, 20,000 years ago. We find dribs and drabs here and there that suggest crude instruments, flints and other stone tools. There’s no doubt some of humanity lived like that in our distant past. But then Gobekli Tepe shows up and laughs in our history lessons. We didn’t bother to account for things of that caliber. I can’t imagine its carvings being done with your average piece of flint or wooden club. I also can’t see its makers living in caves if they were capable of building structures with that degree of sophistication.
Imagine the conversation at home:
“Ooogie Boogie, I’m so tired of this cave! Why don’t you use some of your mad skillz and build us a place to live, you know, like the one where you work only smaller?”
“Now Mabel, you know I can’t do that. Those fancy things – whaddya call ’em – walls, they’re only for our big buildings. We build those things because they look cool. I carved me a lizard on my pillar today, but you can’t expect people to be in there. That’s just silly.”
“Oogie Boogie, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“To the moon, Mabel!”
And so on. If people are building that kind of massive structures, it stands to reason they mastered the art of building homes first, not the other way around.