A Work story

..this story takes place a few months ago...

During a lull in business the topic of Marijuana came up and my coworker Christian, who is for lack of a better word, a square, asked me if I smoked weed. The rest of the guys looked to me for my answer.

"No," I said, "I don't."

"Any LSD?"

"No."

"Well do you party?"

"Sometimes."

"Is there any weed there?"

"Sometimes."

"But you don't inhale, or what?"

"I don't use drugs, Christian."

"None at all?"

"No."

"You don't do anything exciting, do you? You're boring."

"Well, I drink from time to time and I do engage in frequent and vigorous premarital sex. That's pretty exciting."

And this is where the conversation ends because he was too embarrassed to continue and had to leave.

I knew that what I said would bother him before I said it, and it did. I felt as though his calling me boring was a challenge of some sort and I had to respond and shut him don to prevent more questioning.

I thought of my possible responses: a denial would be like a losing path the conversation would then follow. It would give him the power and I would keep trying to respond to his statements. If I refused to answer that would be a one-time loss of power for me, which would only inflate his ego because they all know how much I can take before I lose it.

What's more I knew that Christian was too goody to do drugs himself, (who needs drugs when you have the Lord and His narcotic God-Love?) which meant he was just saying those things--from the perspective of a learned and exciting pot-partying cool guy, someone I doubt he had ever been-- to challenge the Californian, me, in some sub-textual test of testosterone in front of the other guys who were all aware of the contest on a gut level. I couldn't let him win. So I said something I knew everyone would recognize as one-up-man-ship. And they did.

They were embarrassed, but not from what I said; sex is a frequent topic of conversation. They were embarrassed for Christian, they knew he was a good christian guy, or claimed to be, and what I said would damage his sensitive sensibilities. The bible says it's wrong, it also tells him what he should think about that. And that's that.

fun squared

In a few hours my best friend arrives in Michigan and we get to hang out for the next week and a half. I am SOOOOOOO looking forward to this we are going to have so much fun.

Mike has been my best friend since 2nd grade, we get each other. I'm looking forward to our intelligent conversations, dark satirical humor and mindless video game enjoyment.

Tonight we will play super smash bros. brawl and maybe Star craft 2, I haven't played it yet ( my old computer can't handle the graphics captain!). And we might watch some Penn and Teller Bullshit as well.

Tomorrow we are going to go shooting because he brought most of his guns, a steyer pistol, gsg-5 abd a russian saiga. The way I explained it to Loo's sister Bean was: you know those machine guns the bad guys allways use, with the wooden grip and the bannana clip?

Yeah

Well, its like that, and you know the one that the good guys always use, thats like a black machine pistol with a long skinny clip out front?

Yeah

Those are the two he is bringing, and you know that one used in the movie enemy at the gates?

Yeah

He's trying to bring that one as well, but it is too big.

Cool!

And it will be, he couldn't bring his Russian sniper rifle, the Mosin Nagant, because it was too long to fit in a hard case which is what TSA will only accept. Luckily I have a coworker who has one and he said I could borrow it, which is really cool.

Got to go pick him up, see ya!

BP Oil Spill

I read Melissa's blog and it made me think, so I started doing research. I listened to a talk on TED from a marine toxicologist about the oil spill in the gulf. (http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_shaw_the_oil_spill_s_toxic_trade_off.html)

Here is what I learned.

The dispersants that break the oil up into tiny pieces, do so by breaking down lipids. Three points about this.

First point: oil broken down to its tiniest part is still oil, this is just like plastic (like the North Pacific Gyre), and similar to the pesticide DDT (which most Californians and indeed Americans are aware of). In other words they do no break down in to harmless chemicals that can be ignored or forgotten about, but simply break down to smaller versions of the parent chemical, they are chemically identical even if they are microscopic.

Second point: Biomagnification is a process in which animals at the top of the food chain ingest large quantities of chemicals. It starts at the beginning. The ocean's floor belches out nutrients and vital chemicals that drift about the worlds oceans carried by the currents. Microscopic organisms eat, or make use of these nutrients. Floating in this nutrient rich soup is Hazardous Chemical Z, we'll call it Z. Larger microscopic organisms, multicultural ones, eat the single cell ones and some Z, or they are evenly mixed with Z so that the organisms that eat them cannot distinguish between the too. This is the planktivore fishes (sardines and the like) that swim with their mouths open skimming edible microscopic critters in the water and Z. Larger fish eat them and so on and so fourth and the quantity of Z is increased along each link of the food chain. Because sardine eating fish have to eat a lot of sardines which have eaten Z, they get a lot of Z in them, it is magnified. Replace Hazardous Chemical Z with Oil, Plastic, DDT, Mercury, and etcetera and you can understand how chemicals can move up the food chain terminating in lethal quantities for the top predator, which could be us humans.

Third Point: The dispersant that is used by BP to break the oil up (is patent protected as a trade secret, its chemicals are unknown) does so by breaking up lipids, lipids are what our cells are made out of. The gills of fish are destroyed as they breath the water. They die by 'chemical pneumonia' as their gill cells die one by one, decreasing the amount of oxygen being absorbed until they can't any more, they suffocate. Bigger fish eat those fish getting more of the chemical in their bellies which dissolves their insides and so on up the food chain to whales and dolphins, a powerful symbol for nature and all things good with the ocean.

And I now understand documents have been released today that say the coast guard OK'd BP to dump more dispersants than it was supposed to, several hundred thousand tons of it.

If you break up the oil slick on the surface, which we Americans recognize as a powerful symbol of all kinds of things like greed and pollution and etc, you allay the fears of people looking for that slick oil on the surface of the ocean. People think it isn't so bad because there isn't much slick on the surface. That's because the oil is uniformly mixed into the water all the way down to the bottom, down to the coral. And the worst part is we have no idea what this will do, what the long term effect will be.

But as I read in Melissa's blog, a good one by the way, (http://scrapsfromthegooduniverse.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-little-beach-cleanup.html) if you dig down in the sand a few inches you find this slop that has seeped into the sand. How long before that seeps further inland, into the water table say? Will it spread into the ocean, or like Agent Orange will it remain, an industrial strength chemical that does not break down. I guess we will find out.

There is no silver lining.