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“It will come down all right, and pretty soon at that. But it won’t be your doing. It will be the system collapsing in on itself.”

This is the guy at the Post Office! There are many who know this, but few who speak it out loud. I say, “We can hurry it up.”

“It’s going to be nasty,” he responds.

“It already is.”

“That nastiness is exactly why I bought a gun. A thirty-eight.”

I’m about to say that’s also exactly why I bought a gun a few years ago, but he carries my packages to the big bins in back.

When he returns he says, “It’s for myself.”

I don’t know what he means.

He says, “I don’t want to live like that.”

“I don’t want to live like this.”

“I don’t want to live like an animal.”

“I’ve got news for you, Jim. You already are an animal.”

“I need my electricity. I can’t live without it.”

I don’t say anything. I think, Is it worth it to you?

He looks me straight in the eyes, and says, “I’m going to retire in January. Don’t do this right now. Give me a few years to enjoy my retirement.”

It’s the next day. I’m flying to Pennsylvania to give a talk. I hope my talk does more good than the oil that’s burned to get me there.

I’ve just learned that the largest ice shelf in the Arctic—a solid feature for 3,000 years—has broken up. I’ve also just learned that a scientist studying this ice shelf—overseeing the destruction, as it were—stated, “I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming.”307

And here’s something else I’ve recently learned. Global warming (or is it just regional warming that somehow seems to happen all over the globe?) has caused phytoplankton to decrease 6 percent in the last twenty years.308 That is very bad. That is unspeakably bad. When the phytoplankton goes, it’s all over.

I left before six this morning. I woke up at 4:15. It’s now 8:30. I’m on a plane sitting on a runway in Sacramento. This will be my third take-off of the day. I’m tired, and at least pretending to sleep. My two row partners are talking about the weather. One says, “This was the first year since 1888 that we had more than ten days in a month over the century mark. Eighteen days it was.”

I hear the other murmur something.

The first says, “That’s damn hot, it is. It sure is damn hot.”

It’s only going to get worse, I think. And then I try to sleep.

I had two dreams. In the first, my father came to my home. I did not want him here. He began to throw rocks at me. I tried to evade the rocks and did not throw any back. His daughter in the dream, who was not my sister, approached me. She spoke. She was pregnant, she said. Her father, my father, was the fetus’s father. She was unable to bring herself to have an abortion. This would, she said, be an act of violence she could not commit. Nor could she bear to give birth to this product of rape. She could not bear to continue her father’s lineage. Her only choice, she said, was to kill herself. She saw that as the only way to stop the horror that her parent had perpetrated upon her, and to stop the product of that horror growing inside of her.

Two thoughts came to me as I slept. First I noticed that it never occurred to her or to me in the dream to kill her father, my father, nor did she abort the baby, kill her father inside of her, and begin to live her life anew, free from him and his rapes. The second was to recognize that this is of course what we as a culture are doing. We so identify with the poisonous processes that have been forcibly implanted inside of us by our ancestors that we see no way to remove them save suicide. To kill the oppressors, and even to kill their influences they’ve implanted in us would be a violence we must avoid at all costs. And so we kill ourselves and the world with us. Somehow we do not perceive this as violence.

Several years ago I spoke with Luis Rodriguez, who wrote the wonderful book Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. He is a former gang member who got out through the literature of revolution. One of the things I