Two eight one - eight two

281. After writing a memo about "21st century universities" yesterday afternoon, I woke up early this morning to realize that the time frame of 21 centuries sits as a convention, a bubble, in my mind. Geological time is my new default context. I position recorded human history as a sliver of 10,000 years in a 50,000 year shard, silently our species emerging from within a pack of similar hominids... . Then that shard falls from, and can be replaced back into, a chunk of time of mammalian evolution after the fifth mass extinction 65 million years ago. And so on. A great energy flux, a weathered wash of life..., this is my default perspective! Ten years ago, it was not; then, I felt the millennium as a giant surrounding wave... . I like it. The Museum of the Earth has affected my imagination. My habitual imaginary is post-Christian, temporally speaking.

282. Ode to a global flow. The cotton from [?], dyes from [?], buttons from [?] made from plastics from [?] -all stitched into Zara's Spring line outside Dhaka, Bangladesh; shipped to Spain [?] and redistributed to Dubai where's its sold in Mall of the Emirates to a U.S. woman who travels back to New York, then to Cleveland, and lives in Shaker Square, wearing the suit downtown on the commuter rail and walking around Public Square into her office building, up to the 27th floor, corner office, overlooking Lake Erie. Peak oil hits -oil prices skyrocket. It's too expensive to ship and fly. Reused fabric from Bratenahl, Ohio; stitched in Lakewood, Ohio; sold in Tremont, Ohio; worn in downtown Cleveland. Will peak-oil shrink wrap the globe? Will global warming? No, because each will tear the shrink wrap open, gaping holes now for the globe to breathe as we retract our frenetic activity out of necessity. Who knows? This is just speculation. Will we adapt ourselves to new flows: river-ways, sail routes, corridors without incessant storms? Will we avoid some, too -salt water flows edging inland, pouring into dips and vallies; flows of mosquitoes and Mayflies clogging the air, plumes of heated air so hot they scorch the lungs?