Believe me, I’ve tried.
To stop thinking.
I can’t seem to help myself. Even when I sleep, I’m thinking. I wake up in the morning, and I realize that I spent most of the night dreaming about the most ridiculous situations… and the whole time, in my dreams, I was thinking. Just like when I’m awake.
But I guess when I’m awake, a lot of the situations are also pretty ridiculous. Like right now, for example. What person in his right mind would publish a column about thinking, knowing full well that he understands almost nothing about the subject?
That’s what I’m thinking at the moment. That I’m a fraud. I pretend to know stuff, but if I really think about it, there’s every reason to believe that I’m simply dreaming this whole weird story, even when I think I’m awake.
These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do.
Ha ha. Not really. That’s just one of my favorite lines from an old Jackson Browne song, ‘These Days’. I guess he also thought a lot, about things, back then. Maybe he still does, and can’t help it. Maybe I’m in good company.
What I actually think a lot about, these days, is climate change. I was thinking about climate change yesterday, while I was driving to Durango to buy some socks, pretty much the whole way there. They don’t make socks like they used to. Seems like I’m always buying new socks.
But I wasn’t thinking about socks. I was thinking about climate change.
I had the car radio tuned to KSUT, and the show was talking about cows, burping methane. Apparently, when cows are raised in an industrial livestock environment, they burp up great quantities of methane gas, which is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases known to man. The bacteria in their gut generates methane gas, and it has to come out one end, or the other.
This must be embarrassing for the cows, living in close quarters as they typically do.
I’m sure the cows don’t want to cause climate change, and make the planet inhospitable to man and beast. But they can’t really help it. When you gotta burp, you gotta burp.
So this scientist was being interviewed on the radio, because his research team had been searching for a way to cut back on the cow-methane problem, and they found out that they could reduce the amount of methane by mixing seaweed into the cows’ feed. I mean, like, drastically reduce it. By 90%, or something like that. (I wasn’t paying close attention at that particular point in the interview, because I was, right then, trying to pass an RV.)
You could tell the scientist was excited. He thought he was on track to solving the climate change problem.
Meanwhile, I was listening. But I was also thinking. About seaweed. Which is a plant. Meaning that it absorbs CO2 like all plants do. And CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
So, like, don’t we want to leave the damn seaweed alone… to grow and grow… and absorb as much CO2 as possible? Seaweed grows 30 times faster than land-based plants, and it doesn’t cause catastrophic wildfires. (For obvious reasons.)
The scientist didn’t mention that little problem… that you have to kill the seaweed before you can feed it to cows.
Anyway, I’m thinking about all this, while I’m trying to pass the RV on my way to Durango.
And I’m thinking about seaweed and CO2 and our planet’s dire future. And meanwhile my car is pumping out the CO2 gas like nobody’s business, helping to cause global climate change and probably, eventually, leading to the harvesting of innocent seaweed plants, to try and balance the damage I have caused.
I think about these things. I can’t help it.
I actually hope this is all just a dream, and I’m going to wake up.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.