Winter

You must learn to stand up for yourself, because I can't always be around.

I'm reading an interesting book about the approaching Dark Age. She's an American author and I find it quite interesting. To think, all of our society could very well approach one again. We have only attested to one Dark Age but there have been numerous ones. Societies have completely disappeared, cultures have dissolved into nothing - and we have no information whatsoever about them.

A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North American we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past. Whatever happened to the culture whose people produced the splendid Lascaux cave paintings some seventeen thousand years ago, in what is now southwestern France? Or the culture of builders of ambitious stone and wood hedges in Western Europe before the Celts arrived with their Iron Age technology and intricately knotted art?

Our Dark Age is approaching some say. There is a tremdendous amount of environmental damage; we have religious wars, fossil fuel issues...not to mention the inevidible collapse of the global economy due to outsourcing, ineptness, and failure to create a working market. I have accepted the defeat of North America and am ready to move on. Already I see parts of Canada changing. We have Newfoundland - my home - changing and already losing its culture due to a 10 year moratorium, where people have moved on to fishing crab, shrimp and other markets as opposed to cod. Already these markets are becoming extinct. Some Newfoundlander's have become complacent, hoping that oil revenues will eventually trickle down, others leave for better lives; the long and short of it is, we will lose our culture. We will lose the ability to fish, to produce salt cod, and will lose our history...

In a couple of decades the way our culture is, will no longer be; changes to the systematic approaches to business, energy management, global policies, and even government will attribute to this…all I can do is sit back and enjoy the ride. My prediction is that North America will be under attack due to the forces that are building up in this day and age. We are not approaching change readily; we are more or less adopting it without planning or analyzing the future. Already the spiral is speeding up, but how can we stop it?

It's a little deep I know, but why not. I can't keep reading fantasy novels, I have to branch out. Before this particular book, I read a David Sedaris novel called Naked. My friend Jacob gave me an autographed copy...I guess he had two. It was very funny and entertaining, and it's a satirical look at his life growing up in the US as both a homosexual and a Greek. Some of it actually reminds me of my childhood.

I'm running out of photos, I will have to get my camera out and charge up the battery, or take a trip...Jesus I would like to take a trip.