The Mosquito Larva Miracle

Welcome to the planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is, as I have said, poignantly beautiful and rare.  But it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware.                                                                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                  -Carl Sagan, Cosmos

My God! I am thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives – the domestic routine (same old wife every night), the stupid and useless degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the business men, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones!

                                                                                                                                -Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire 

The other week I went on a walk through Ocean Song, a farm and wilderness center near the coast in west Sonoma County.  The lawn and gardens are well-kept and watered, and when I visited the place was like an oasis surrounded by dry chaparral hills, ranchland, valleys, and forests. (If you go there at the time of this writing then the land would be drenched because heavy rainfall from an ‘atmospheric river’ has been wonderfully relentless and will bring forth mushrooms across the soil and beckon the prodigious salmon to return to their natal rivers to spawn).  There are hiking trails beyond the parameter of the garden outskirts which are parameterized by an old fence.  If you enter or leave the confines you must pass through a wooden gate and, in accordance with the laminated sign, latch the gate shut to keep the deer out of the sacred garden.  As I was re-entering and locking the gate I was imagining these deer as vicious killers, with one such antlered foe on his hind legs aggressively fighting to pull the gate open and yelling, “You mother fucker!” while several other deer bounded over the fence storming the garden.

The gardens are home to a number of flowering plants and trees, hummingbirds and bugs, but I was captivated by the insect pond life that was stirring around in this concrete pool under a little gazebo. Hundreds of mosquito larvae (called wrigglers) were whipping around vertically in the water, breathing through a tube on their abdomens and feeding on microscopic aquatic plants and algae (diatoms and bacteria).  Strewn across the surface of the water were the husks of the pupae which had completed their metamorphosis into the imago – the mature or adult insect – shed their exoskeletons, and presumably flown away.  This all started because the larvae were hatched from eggs laid by a female mosquito, which cannot do so without having a blood meal beforehand. (But this all really got started when primitive insects first appeared on Earth 350 million years ago, or possibly even longer than that in the Silurian Period.  Over a million species of insects that have been identified, more than all other animals combined, and taxonomically speaking we share a common biological ancestor with them somewhere way back on the evolutionary tree.)  While listening to the birds and gazing into this miniature world and the tiny creatures with their even tinier brains and thousands of ommatidia – the facets that make up their compound eyes, I remembered something that a housekeeper at work had told me the previous day:  she was going to drop her daughter off at her sister’s house today so that they could watch movies at the movie theater all day.  I thought to myself, did I hear that correctly?  Who in their right mind would choose to be inside on a glorious day when they could be outdoors appreciating the marvels of nature?*  A little bit of going outside never hurt anyone (not true), and mother nature offers the greatest forms of entertainment and education one can possibly enjoy.  And while it may not be entirely free, it’s relatively affordable (there are underlying costs associated with getting to any place, and having any leisure time at all could be considered a privilege), not mention immeasurably beneficial to your health and mindset. Thousands of grey whales are going to begin their southerly migration to Mexico this month, and most people will miss seeing them because they’d prefer to go to the movies. 

I work at a hospital where patients are regularly dying – wasting away on their deathbeds with plastic feeding tubes shoved down their throats, IV lines pumping fluids and drugs through their veins, EKG leads stuck all over their torsos, oxygen masks smothering their faces, while electronic monitors are incessantly beeping and blinking and overweight nurses are incessantly cackling and palavering (I’ve recently listen to staff discussing “good deals on Cyber Monday,” how “Nestle coffee makers taste like Starbucks,” the pros and cons of buying a X-Box for Christmas).  The televisions in patient rooms are tuned-in to CARE (Continuous Ambient Relaxation Environment) TV which features peaceful music and calming visuals of streams, lakes, waterfalls, etc.   A recent survey commissioned by LG Electronics found that the average person will watch more than 78,000 hours of TV in their lifetime.  How fitting it is that many of us will die under the glowing light of one in a hygienic hospital room while the television plays clips from the great outdoors, the place where we should have been all along.  This scenario of dying in a hospital (which is a decreasing trend) is less regrettable if one has lived their life to their fullest, which cannot be done if we are continuously obsessing about the procuring material possessions, consuming shit we do not need, and watching TV all the time.  Yet it’s not the dying who are at fault, the truly disappointing demographic is constituted by those who are still healthy but are puttering through life with the option of transforming bad habits and extricating themselves from a pattern of wasting time but choose not to.   Every day we spend not doing what we find meaningful is a day wasted. For many, the greatest accomplishment of the day is a successful bowel movement. 

CARE TV

It is tempting to blame our shortcomings, neuroses, physiological aliments and maladies on society and the status quo.  And while the dangerous shenanigans of baseless and inept septuagenarian politicians and businessmen leading various nations, but especially America, down paths of war and authoritarianism may lie beyond our spheres of influence, we need not exacerbate an already precarious situation by acting like imbeciles and pursuing activities that harm our health and well-being (physical, mental, and spiritual).   While elected officials seem hell-bent on dragging humanity into World War III and transnational corporations skirt their responsibilities to safeguard the environment, it doesn’t help if we as citizens are habitually transfixed by Netflix shows, Marvel superhero movies, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football,** hotdog eating contests, monster truck rallies, NASCAR rallies, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump rallies, Hillary Clinton book signings, shopping malls, shopping online, Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays, the Mega Millions jackpot, the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, cruise ships, casinos, television gameshows (excludingJeopardy), tabloid talk shows (excluding Jerry Springer), cable news shows (none excluded), impeachment hearings, degenerate music videos, moronic social media and video-sharing posts, video games, virtual reality, pornography, sexbots (coming soon), gorging on factory-farmed fast food, gobbling antidepressants, fentanyl and other opioid-based drugs, smoking methamphetamines and crack cocaine, sucking down big gulps and super-sized fountain sodas, and other mindless routines atrophying and discombobulating our brains and accelerating America’s downfall into the land of fat fucks.

On December 21^stthe solstice will arrive.  Here in the northern hemisphere, the sun will set at its most southerly point, and after that the days will start to get longer.  This means that planet Earth is completing yet another one of the billions of full-circle trips it’s taken around the Sun, a very limited number of which we are blessed to be alive for.  Another series of seasons will have passed, as will have the opportunities to witness the miracles of the natural world that manifest themselves throughout the year.  Due to the good fortune of being located the circumstellar habitable zone, Earth offers a mind-boggling array of incredible phenomena that many of us are privileged enough to observe, experience, and learn about.  To be alive with the chance of immersing oneself in the beauty of the natural world should never be taken for granted as it is one of the greatest gifts and prizes one could have bestowed upon them, and it is a tragedy that we have created systems which prevent many members of the human family and myriad living creatures in general from realizing this godsend.  Most of us do not have to travel far to see miracles unraveling before our eyes.  They manifest in infinite forms and orders of magnitude.  They can be as grand as total solar eclipses, meteor showers, a night sky filled with stars, a sunrise or sunset, the moon overhead, mountain ranges, rainforests, towering waterfalls, rugged coasts, open oceans, jungles and plains, deserts of sand or ice, beaches and islands and reef systems, forests and rivers and lakes, the incredible creatures that roam on or beneath the surface of earth or swim through the seas of this singular planet drifting through space.  The fascinating wonders of the natural world the can be a small as snails and shells, leaves and flowers, lichen and algae, mushrooms and moss, plankton and pond life, mosquito larva, a drop of water, a central nervous system, a beating heart.  And these are only the things that we have discovered and are here today.  An incomphrensible amount of species and lifeforms have come and gone throughout the preceding epochs.  Trillions of creatures have lived and died over the long and bumpy spectrum of life on Earth. Continents have risen and fallen and entire flourishing ecosystems have been wiped out or swallowed up by mother nature.   Like the dinosaurs of prehistory, 99% of all species to have ever lived on Earth have gone extinct.  This means that we and everything around us will too someday vanish.  Like the mosquitoes in Ocean Song, whose life span is less than two months, we must make the best of our time here because there is no guarantee that we and everything we cherish will be here for long.*** And it is a sad fact of life that we sometimes do not realize what we have until it’s gone. 

I’ll end with some pics from Big Sur, California.  Where you can stand on a cliff and watch pastel clouds drifting above a boundless ocean expanse stretching across the horizon.  And with an unobstructed view, you can almost see the curvature of the Earth. 

*Recalling the unsolicited information that the housekeeper proffered about her sister and daughter watching movies together all day, I was reminded of another nothing-burger conversation not worth having that took place the week prior when I had finished a sea kayaking excursion. As I was walking toward my car in the parking lot and man asked me if I knew what all the boats were doing out there. I said, “Yeah, they’re fishing.” He said, “They’re actually baiting and tagging white sharks.”  I said, “Great white sharks?”  He said, “Yup.”  “Why?” I asked.  He said he didn’t know.  I told him that I was just out there and I didn’t see anyone doing that and they were all fishing.  I loaded up my gear and wondered how it comes to be that a grown man can go around all day thinking that the boats off the coast are out there strictly for the purpose of tagging great white sharks.  I came to the conclusion that he must deduced his conjecture from television shows.

**I’m not saying that these things are bad in moderation, but, like most activities linked to instant gratification, over-consumption, sensual stimulation, hedonism, and nihilism, if you make of them an obsession or addiction, then you can kiss the real world goodbye.  There’s a pseudo-race event in San Francisco called Bay to Breakers which epitomizes the stupidity of masses gathering to behave like idiots in self-absorbed decadence. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that a huge gathering of people behaving like buffoons demonstrates that there is no hope for humanity, but there is little difference of the impact and disposition the people behaving like this is one big group and those behaving like this in smaller or individualistic groups, separated or isolated from each other every weekend.  It’s a matter of scaling (not to mention the purpose of the gathering).  A same logic applies conversely to numerous crises facing humanity.  A recent UN report called the Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty found that over seven million children worldwide are deprived of their liberties by being held in one or another form of detention (child soldiers, refugee children in detention centers in the United States, Uighur Muslim children in reeducation camps China).  If these seven million children were being held in a single prison, adults worldwide would unite, raise hell to free the children, and shut down the prison.  But because they’re being detained in smaller numbers dispersed across the globe, people just don’t’ care as much.  The point is that we’re wasting precious time on shit that doesn’t matter, for example with our infatuation with professional sports.   To make matters worse, the Warriors really dropped the ball somewhere, that stadium in San Francisco was a gigantic waste of money, the Raiders have been losing – sucks for them, not sure why the they're moving to Las Vegas where it’s going to be 130° there daily in ten years.  We’re spending so much time and resources on materialistic garbage, gambling our lives away, and destroying the planet in the process.  It’s a very complicated world, and it would be advantageous for our collective well-being and future if individuals spent less time entertaining ourselves and more time striving to understand it.  And if you put in the energy and effort required to do your best to figure it out, there are rewards beyond your wildest imagination. Having said that, the return of the Houston Astro’s fan’s hat at the 2017 World Series parade was pretty damn cool:

***It’s likely that in the near future most urbanites will be seeing more drones in the skies than birds.