Battle headline ennui with puppies | Ammi Midstokke
My morning routine of checking the weather and the headlines has become a ritual of anxiety these days. My phone says the temperatures are 15 degrees above average. The headlines say people are dying and that more will.
The cynic in me wonders if this method of population control is effective in slowing climate change, and if we know what the carbon footprint of a ballistic missile or its ensuing damage might be.
I’m not sure how other folks are faring, but I’m shopping for new spiritual practices to cope with the state of the world. It may even take pharmaceutical intervention, but only because someone told me that an ayahuasca ceremony is akin to passing through the birth canal all over again (though I was given no indication on the direction).
My usual methods of running-to-delirium and caffeinating-my-way-to-optimism are losing their efficacy, as I emotionally migrate from privilege-shame to survivor-guilt. Even my escapism in nature is losing its luster. Hiking in a T-shirt last week and feeling the warm sun bake into my winter-pale arms felt like a sin. Should I enjoy it now because it will be clouded by smoke come August?
Every small joy is tainted with a knowledge of its implications, whether it’s a warm winter day or accessibility to a bag of M&Ms in a desperate moment.
Recently, I was driving through urban sprawl, thinking I had made a wrong turn because I passed the same cluster of chain shops every few miles. I was sure I’d just seen a 7-Eleven and McDonald’s next to each other. I had, but that was four turns ago. Is this what abundance is supposed to feel like?
The once-farmed fields of Rathdrum are covered in acres of “affordable” housing; blocky spreads of apartments off-gassing new carpets. Here, the people who work at these shops can live, where they will buy the things in those shops (sour gummy worms, fast food, X-boxes, heart disease), and someone will call that “development” as if it were akin to “progress.”
The developers, most likely.
When I was a child, those fields were burned every summer, and Sandpoint raised hell about the way the thin smoke veiled our skies for a week.
“You’re ruining our resources!” we said, concerned that tourists and locals alike could not tolerate an Air Quality Index over 70. Now we import our hay and oats from distant fields and our fruit from Chile, and the August smoke is of a different, apocalyptic caliber. We plan family visits around fire season, cross our fingers and hope our prayers are heard.
My only consolation to the current warm temperatures is that I have attempted to over-winter some eggplant bushes. Maybe they have a chance. But as I’ve already seen a mosquito, I won’t be going outside to check.
The eggplant and moment of sunshine are the tiny hopes I cling to, a kind of squirrelly distraction from the bigger picture, an attempt to not become socially unacceptable through chronic negativity. Like the depressed robot, Marvin, in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
At my local grocery store, the checkers have stopped asking me how I am, and now they refer only to the products I purchase with the excitement of a kid who just saw a bear in a tutu riding a bicycle.
“I’ve been meaning to try this hummus! It looks so good.”
I’m not fooled, though. I tell them about how chickpea crops need a lot of herbicide, but they’re probably a better source of protein than industrial meat, which is a carcinogen now. I bet they have posters in their break room with kittens and quotes like,“Together, we can combat climate concerns with toxic positivity!” I won’t go down that easy. Unless someone hands me a real kitten.
Baby things are the answer. Puppies, fat infants with rosy cheeks and the tiny plants I’ll start from seed in just a few weeks. When the songbirds return and the first flowers break through the soil, and everything begins to smell less like the heavy sweetness of decay and more like the perfume of nectar and wild rose, even a curmudgeon like me sighs with relief.
Somehow, someday, everything is going to be alright. Maybe not until the humans are gone, though.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com