A Diary From Planet Earth

Coming soon...

Greetings and salutations from a tiny oasis in a desert of urban decay. I'm sitting in a secret greenspace buried deep within a vast expanse of concrete. More specifically, the old local mall. (Malls are large buildings from the 1990s.) My mother is having cataracts surgery down the street, and I find myself with several hours to kill. When I was young, the mall would open up early to let the elderly have a safe, warm place to exercise. The stores weren't open, but the Food Court was, and you could sit and have a cup of coffee after a doing a few laps. But this morning the mall is dark and locked up tight. Yet another simple pleasure deemed "not cost effective" in our growingly greedy world. The enormous gray building looks like the corpse of an ancient, lifeless leviathan that has stranded itself upon a flat gray beach of asphalt. A few world-weary employees have started to trickle into the side door, giving me strange looks. I'm a little too well-dressed to be u...

Hello, old friend. I'm still here. Writing brings out the softer side of me, and for a while I didn't feel like going there. In a world such as this – in a time such as this – I needed to focus on my strengths. But this time of year always makes me feel wistful (perhaps the cool weather cools my temper as well) and I feel safe enough to reveal my soft belly here again. It is a soft day here on the farm. At dawn, the sun pinkened the sky, blurring the edges of the horizon and blending it into the vast indigo field of stars. A brisk-yet-refreshing mist has settled into the hills, tucked down in the valleys and peeking over the horizons. During a few morning chores, I was engulfed in it, barely able to see the ancient black barn hiding in the lower field. The twin maple trees are wearing their autumn gold, while others such as the black walnuts are already stark silhouettes ready for the dark time of the year. A new plague is wiping out the local White-tailed Deer population, prod...

I've been feeling a little down lately.  Well, really down, actually. And just when I couldn't stand it any longer, the perfect day happened.  A brisk, cool morning with no humidity and no smoke - the offer was too tempting! We played hooky and got in the car.  A picnic was purchased and we drove to the river, watching ospreys and cormorants hunt for their breakfast while we ate ours. Never one to miss a trick, a family of crows recognized our car from the last time we fed them and demanded a do-over. We filled our lungs with the cleanest air they'd had in weeks, tinged with the smell of ions and river clay. We decided to wait a bit before dessert, so we drove around the backroads for a while. Mom bought tomatoes at our favorite honor stand and we saw the old familiar sights: falling-down barns built from ancient black wood; ginger cows watching their calves being loaded into a truck, never to be seen again; and wild human children with dirty feet enjoying their last day ...

Hello, I am a human. It has been 12,445 solar days since my birth. It has been 3,887 solar days since the end of the world (as predicted by the ancient Maya civilization.) I wonder if they were right, and the past 11 years have just been a dream. Sometimes the dream is a nightmare. The planet is burning and the air is unbreathable. This week, my family has been hiding in the basement from tornadoes. I spend more and more time hiding inside, staring at a screen, trying to connect with other humans. So far my efforts have been largely unsuccessful. I do not have a mate, and am now probably too old to acquire one. This makes me feel lonely. But I am lucky in ways other humans are not. I'm closer to the flora and fauna of this planet. Many humans believe these life forms cannot be communicated with, but I talk to them every day. They are my friends. In the morning, I walk outside and say hello to my Sugar Maple friends. I ask them about the night they had, when the wind rushed through ...