Match Point

Red Skies and Cyclospora

The last time the skies were red like this, also from fires blazing in Canada, it looked like the end of the world. But now I know the end of the world won’t come when we expect it. We’ve lamented the fires and the floods and the pestilence, all here now, and still we stand. Each day something new, as the unleashing of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the breaking of the Seventh Seal. I imagined there would be more hysteria and horror at the darkened skies and mood, that mankind would twist in agony at the suffering of us all, that we would, at the end times, all writhe as one knowing our end was imminent. But for so many each day is just a day. There is no anguish or moral torment, sorrow for the deaths of innocents. Fear and terror that the skies are red and the earth soaked with the blood of all killed in acts of self-righteousness by dominant groups that perceive everything as less valuable than themselves. There is more effort spent in describing who and what is not deserving of compassion, safety, and respect, than in the acceptance that we all are.

I never could, as a child, understand how Noah under the guidance of God the Father decided just who, two by two, was going to get in that ark and be saved. Everything destroyed, yet those few and the animals two by two would survive and repopulate the earth. A do over. A fresh start. It was years before I accepted the symbolism of the story, considered divine deliverance and protection in the face of man’s unending thirst for murder and chaos, that I was able to forgive Him for failure to recognize the likely goodness of some of those left to drown. I’ve always wondered about those of us who might be forsaken because we’d lacked the power to draw his attention.

The skies today are a dusty rose and the air smells faint of smoke trapped in the acrid humidity of our endless summer haze. We’ve had too many days over 90 degrees and as many with high humidity and stagnant air. Walking is pretty miserable. If not for the dog, I’d likely stay in. The air quality is at 131, unhealthy for sensitive groups and going up. (It would reach 244 before I finished this draft) But are we not all part of the sensitive group?

And there are drains on our water supply and forever chemicals on the fruits and vegetables we buy and eat from a handful of large industrial farms, which appear now to have been bathed in human fecal matter, and are causing an epic outbreak of cyclospora making people across Canada and the United States explode with diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms. But our representatives who appear to represent no one that I know or care about continue to offer up the planet and her gifts as collateral to a system that can and will only eat all of us alive.

We will watch the world around us burn despite the warnings of all the indigenous peoples of the land and the could-have-been-president Al Gore, who was too much of an egghead it seems to have been taken seriously by the unserious. An Inconvenient Truth offered scientific data and personal histories that reflected the imminent disasters we would encounter if we did not globally respond to the issue of climate change that was being wrought by overzealous production and misuse and waste of the world’s resources. It is hard not to mourn the loss of considered concern and leadership that could have circumvented the poor management of our planet and the geopolitical mess that has brought us to the brink time and time again.

We return to source, consider it, and pollute anyway, allowing multinational corporations in bed with soft-handed politicians to sell us our demise while blaming the lowest in the MLM¹ for not carrying their own straws or watering their lawns or selling enough crap to make them rich. This is true of our resources and the energy, God, divine, whatever it is called by any and every group, when we ask that it all be made in our own image rather than we in a more profound and glorious way.

We likely cannot see ourselves collectively in divine light anymore, so tarred and feathered have we been by punishing, angry would-be, lower-cased gods who move the pieces, not on a chessboard, but in blocks and pulleys and erector sets made of forever plastics, metals, and fossil fuels that make shiny but destructive things. So, we figure it must be done. We’ve no chance for it to end well. It has all kept me quiet but not silent, vigilant and moving in stillness. Choosing instead to align myself with philosophies and perspectives that choose the most good and do the least harm.

I walk my dog in the haze because he has to go, try to help my children find a pathway to kindness and goodness through the mucky muck, and watch documentaries and shows that move me in between making art and writing and cooking all my vegetables so that I can maintain my will to live. I’ve watched Hamnet now four times and have cried every single time and just finished RAFA.

In RAFA, the four-part docuseries about the final season on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Tour for the formidable, Rafael Nadal, one of tennis’s greatest players, I discovered a sensitivity, melancholy, and drive I could only sense when I first discovered him. He had been one of my favorites because of how he bashfully spoke English, his shyness and humility, and his incredible athleticism, power, and agility. That I had been to Ibiza as a younger person and fallen in love with the Balearic Islands and loved a young Spanish boy from Malaga when I was at college and started learning Spanish, added to my interest.

Watching Nadal as a young boy with a sweet smile overpowering his mentors and opponents as he came into his own, learning of the toll it all took on his body, almost from the start, and how he endured, seeing the tears in his eyes as he winced through pain and tests and therapy and training gutted me and allowed me the chance to cry for everything I’d been keeping at the back of my throat. That he was mentored in an aggressive style, that he muscled (or as the kids say, bodied) through strife and torment, and that he was treated for anxiety when the demons of doubt and fear rode his back, made him a familiar.

The twitch in his frame and in his face as he described the highs and lows of his career, the revelations of his torment, physical and emotional suffering, his rituals and tics that ‘kept things in order,’ that were required for his safety, all while dominating and competing at the highest level, revealed the exhaustion in his existence that sometimes prevented him from fully enjoying the highs and caused him to suffer more deeply in the lows.

I have expected, for most of my life, the trials and tribulations, never quite prepared for the rewards, and that keeps me pushing on in an N95, abstaining from salad and fruit, and watching the rules cease to apply for those at the top, no longer surprised but still shocked and wounded by the unfettered, top-down cruelty of those with ‘power over.’

We make jokes about the Diarrhea Lettuce and having to lean on a Dorito diet to survive this outbreak but it’s hard to laugh at ourselves when the joke is always on us. Every sense has been threatened or compromised. We are running on empty, hamstrung in weighted vests believing we just might work it out when the machines lead us nowhere, waking each day to another horror, and it looks like everyone climbing the ramp to the ark paid their way on with our souls and acts like we don’t all know it.

I always wondered as a child about the cries of those left behind when the flood waters broke. I asked my pastor because I could not believe ours was a god who’d leave them all to die. I wondered if it was possible there’d been some error. How could it be that so few had been righteous enough to be included? How could it have all gotten so out of hand that the only option was a do-over or the end of the world? And it was then that I began to have my doubts, left unspoken.

I became a watchful creature, made note of who seemed to give a damn about others and those who acted in their own interest. I exposed for myself the performers and actors who talked the talk and could hardly if ever walk the walk. I learned the mental gymnastics it took to defend a position where one was either actively or passively allowing harm to others in the name of any and everything as long as they were able to keep their hands clean. I wondered if it might be better to be left behind if it meant I would be with all the people I loved, that I’d not have given up my compassion, sold out others to make it out alive. None of us makes it out alive.

We’d been spoon-fed sugar-coated inaccuracies, doubled down on definitions and descriptions that the defined refuse to be named. We were gaslit and placated with things, not even necessarily nice things, just shiny, distracting things, whose glint gave us momentary blindness that made us feel special, and we missed the boat.

In the face of the retired athlete, I saw sadness of the close of this spectacular part of his life, as he considered the new, unknown. He had a wife and two young children, comforts and appeared to have forgiven himself for being mortal, for having given all he had and being spent. I hope he has been able too to relish just how extraordinarily talented he is and how incredible the accomplishments of his career.

I sit often with the ‘best years’ being behind me. One child in college and the other rising into her senior year of high school. I think of each of the moments spent to get them here, and where it leaves me. Where it leaves us.

I remind them to look for safety, for the safe spaces, the people, the places, the things that would not put them intentionally in harm’s way. I have taught them whom to trust and with what and how much and begged them to take every precaution. Then I hold my breath.

Skies are meant to clear here tomorrow though a flash flood warning has been given from tomorrow morning until Sunday afternoon. I worry about the creek that runs behind the house and my dog who is terrified of thunderstorms and the future of the planet and everything in it. I knew there were masks somewhere in the house, but they were not at the ready as they’d been during Covid. We will move the car to the top of the driveway should the creek rise and crest as it has done in the past.

The last time the skies were red, the last time the water broke the wall and flooded the streets, the last time the lightning struck a neighbor’s house, the last time a man or woman or child was killed in the street or detention, it was still not yet the end of the world. When it comes will we know? How will we recognize that the damage we have caused is irreparable? Are we one point away from winning or throwing it all? I don’t know anymore.

The skies clear tomorrow. A thunderstorm may bring flash flooding. I will walk my dog without a mask; make sure he gets to smell all the grass and that we walk together as we always do because it gives me my peace. And I will do my part to be part of the community that despite current implications that ‘money talks and suckers walk’ wants to see us all win. It is somehow still

not

yet

the end of the world.

1. Multilevel marketing pyramid.