Toad in the Hole

The Point of Light

I first wrote this for the SF Examiner a mere five years ago.

One way or another, most of us are celebrating a feast of light, a traditional midwinter occasion at least in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s the darkest time of the year, and we all need to keep our spirits up, to remember that the Earth does turn askew on its axis again and long days of sun will return. Some of us grit our teeth and endure another month of what’s lately called Seasonal Affective Disorder. Some of us have ritual family fights and nod off in front of the TV after ingesting all those turkey tryptophans. (Maybe turkeys aren’t as stupid as they’re supposed to be. Maybe they’re just perpetually nodding off under the soporific influence of their own contents.) Some of us make overtime pay. Most of us light candles, string bulbs, hang sparkly reflective gewgaws here and there, set the Yule log aflame. Anything for light.

Is it a sort of cheerleading, or do we appreciate light most when it’s a rarity, a contrast? We humans love contrast. It probably lends as much as nostalgia does to odd horticultural habits: fake snow on California indoor trees and fake rocks made of concrete—or real rocks imported from the mountains—in flatland gardens, where the largest native mineral formation is a clay clod. We import all sorts of odd creatures and then struggle to keep them thriving where they look misplaced. We plant spiky red phormium cultivars and gaudy ‘Joseph’s Coat’ roses, just to have something else in a green garden. We wear diamonds, if we can, the strongest contrast to soft flesh and fur, seeming to carry its own light —  light in a stone, of all things. We cherish our light when it’s set off by darkness. We bask in the sun but we gaze at the stars.

The love of light is something we share with countless other Earthdwellers. As seals recolonized the ocean, leaving their landbound ancestors behind, a species here and there has recolonized the night. Bats and owls and night-blooming cereus mount expeditions into that less-crowded niche, and we look over our shoulders and invent myths about such odd behavior. But they are in many ways as dependent on light as we are. Even moles, who fled into subterranean darkness almost permanently, need food, and that ultimately means plants. Somewhere in the evolutionary depths of time, some being learned to make sugars and proteins, the bases of all our lives, out of whatever was handy —  and light. Aside from a few very odd beings who live around deep-sea volcanic vents, everyone on the planet springs from and lives on that earthly miracle.

What a talent! Look at a redwood, all that towering mass drawing itself into existence from a seed, the soil and the weather, by the impalpable force of light. Light kicks off the biggest manufacturing operation in the world: photosynthesis. At eight photons a pop, a plant sorts out a carbon dioxide molecule to make a carbon compound for its own use, and just by the way drops a molecule of oxygen back out into the air around it. As waste goes, this is rather environmentally benign, especially to those of us who need to breathe it. It does this trick using pigments, usually green, that get excited and start tossing electrons around when they see light. After that beginning, a chain of chemical reactions follows; some of those can happen in the dark. Plants don’t actually sleep. (Quite a few animals don’t sleep either; it seems to require or be a requirement of a certain quantity of brain.)

Some plants do curl up as if napping, though. Some like California poppies furl their flowers when the light disappears, or even on dim days. Some like sunflowers watch the sun alertly, moving leaves or, more spectacularly, flowers, to track light all day. Even those with less apparent mobility chase the light if they have to, growing spindly long stalks to reach it or oversized leaves to catch as much as possible. A houseplant will change its shape to face and gather light; a shrub will drop neglected leaves from a shaded side. A tree will curve its trunk —  using methods that vary among species, cells either shrinking on one side or expanding on the other —  to push its leaves into the light. When light wanes, in winter, some trees cut their losses and lose their leaves entirely. They’ll do this even where water doesn’t freeze into inaccessibility, where you’d think everybody could afford to stay dressed all year. Maybe it’s a habit formed when they evolved in freezing climates and not disadvantageous enough to give up. Maybe keeping leaves just becomes a net loss when the light lasts only a few hours a day.

Herbaceous plants, with less hard capital investment than trees make, can just drop everything, go dormant and disappear down to the roots, in the dark of the year. It seems drastic, a bit sulky, but it works. Lengthening days will stir them to wake in spring, but now they abandon us and only bits of decaying brown litter are left. Between those and the leafless trees, winter looks bare and stingy even when it’s beginning to revive the grass to green. No wonder we cook up rich foods and sweets, and set fire to things. We’re lonesome.

The longing for light is more basic than custom or religion. It’s a tropism, older than humans, older than animals, older even than eyes. It’s one of very few appetites we share with those mysterious green aliens we depend on for food, shelter, and the air we breathe. A kind word of reassurance to your wistful plants would not be out of place in this season.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

Whine, Woman, and, Well…

...I’m not coughing up blood, no. I don’t even have the flu. By way of lagniappe with the braces, tho’, I went and had a little lump sliced off my nose today. Technically it’s a biopsy but the lump hasn’t changed in at least a decade (since it appeared) I’m not worried.

The nose is evidently hard to anaesthetize. Plus you don’t use Xyloxcaine with epinephrine, you use straight Xylocaine, this being an extremity whose circulation you don’t want to chance compromising. The function of epi with Xylocaine is to diminish bleeding—it constricts blood vessels. Without it, you bleed all over the place. Or I do, at least.

And take note, practitioners (and patients too): The body processes yer average medical procedure as an assault. All those glands and reflexes don’t know beans about modern medicine, so someone poking needles and blades about one’s body—about one’s face—register as a sort of mugging, with the consequent after-effects. Shakiness, loose jointedness, weak in the kneesedness, all that, sure, and a certain narrowness of one’s sensory processing capacity. But also serious defensiveness—one (OK, I) might bite the head off one’s nearest and dearest or any innocent bystander, because one is working like hell not to punch at random. I suspect that recovery room nurses know this already. I think maybe I used to know it myself.

I really wanted to bite someone but I couldn’t risk getting shreds of raw flesh in the damned braces.

But the worst thing is that even now, nine hours and some Christmas shopping while wearing that ridiculous gauze dressing across my nose later, I still can’t shake off the smell of my own burnt flesh, from the electrocautery. I mean, it’s my nose. I never did like that smell—imagine singeing your hair and throwing a little blood on to douse it, something between burnt hair and burnt cheese, ugh. No it’s not much like burning a porkchop, unless the porkchop is stil alive; somehow that makes a difference. It’s nauseating.

Reading Robert Sapolsky and H.P. Lovecraft in close apposition to this experience makes it even more interesting, just by the way.

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Soular Nadir

Approaching Solstice and not a moment too soon, say I. Dark, gray, cold, muddy, cloudy, wet, and the weather outside is just as bad too. It ain’t just the braces, though it’s frankly surprising what a nibbled-to-death-by-ducks feeling I’ve been getting from those. It’s fifty-six other ducks, I guess, piling on. The interior of our house looks like a cyclone hit a junkyard, and that’s both cause and effect.

But we did bring the tree in, and it fits (just barely) on the designated whoozits by the window. And the mantle’s full of candles, and we’ll drink eggnog and trim the tree tomorrow night.

We’d trim it tonight but we got a spur-of-the-moment invitation for pot roast from John and Mary, who’ve already seen my pathetic attempts at eating so it shouldn’t be too embarrassing. This is encouraging, the pot roast invitation. John promised me mashed potatoes too.

Emma stopped by last night to pick up something I’d picked up for her while running errands yesterday, and (another spur-etc) we invited her to sit down and eat supper with us; supper was some of her own barley-and-stuff soup, which she’d given us frozen in commemoration of my delicate condition. I guess this is networking? It does make the difference.

Joe picked up a bit of neighborhood news with the mail. The shade-tree mechanic across the street, in the house on the corner with his teenage son (a buddy of Gabe Downstairs) and the kid’s grandmother (who looks to be in her 70s), died yesterday. He’d seemed healthy enough; we saw him outside working on assorted cars and the odd used truck, camper, or step-van (and once, a cherry-picker truck, which I coveted) all the time, or riding around on a bicycle. Evidently he’d been coughing blood for a couple of weeks, coughed up rather more blood last night, and died. He never went to get the cough checked out because he didn’t have health insurance. He was 36.

There’s nothing I can add to that that hasn’t been said a million times already.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

Shoutout to my Homie

Since Pharyngula’s offline at the moment (Coincidence? Hm.) I’ll take the opportunity to cheer the Harrisburg PA judge who decided for the plaintiffsand against teaching “Intelligent Design” in science courses in the Dover ID case.

I particularly liked the no-bullshit quality of these:
“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy,” Jones wrote.
“We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom,” he wrote in his 139-page opinion.
“It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

I take the occasion also to remember the actual outcome of the famous-all-over-town Harrisburg 8, um, 6 Trial.

ETA: Pharyngula’s back—I assume it’s being overwhelmed with enthusiastic mobs. Here’s a link to a PDF of Judge Jones’: decision.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

War on Christmas Post of the Week

... is Friday 12/16 (that’d be today) at Janis’ blog but I’m not sure it’s a practical solution, what with increasing commercialization across the board and all.

My Private War on Christmas: Can you believe I was stoooopid enough to get braces installed at the start of the holiday season? I might have to arm myself for all occasions with one of those stick blenders, as our friend John suggested.

Pass the goddamned eggnog, and Merry Fucking Christmas.

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