And on the sixth day, He created global warming

If you ever wonder why our planet's environment is so screwed up, you ought to seriously consider getting very angry at God. I mean, basically, he told us to do it. In case you don’t remember how it all went down, here's the scandalous transcript of the meeting ...

26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 
28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 
29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 
30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 
31: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Before my righteous indignation gets too high and mighty, I will point out that living in the wild is pretty brutal too, and I also like a cheeseburger once in a while. Still, "dominion over the fish of the sea" and the command to "replenish the earth, and subdue it"? I mean, folks, it might have made some sense in an Iron Age culture struggling to survive, but in case anybody bothered to notice, yo, Iron Age ended a while ago.

Ok, it's a Friday, so I'm going to end it here. But seriously people, let's show some upset here. I mean, can you believe this stuff?

The difference between labor and capital

With labor, I work with my hands and you pay me for my time.

With capital, I work with my money (or better yet, I work with your money) and you pay me just for being around.

The New York of my youth, the television of it too

There are many ways of looking at the “me” in each of us.  At any given time, we exist in so many different worlds simultaneously that we could be said to be different people connected only in body, not in mind. Our work world, our home world, our play work, our love world, our think world — these different worlds integrate into one person whom we call “you” or “me”, but in practice, the very parts of us that make up us may be coexisting oceans apart from each other.

Time adds a whole other dimension to it all. Living a lifetime allows a person to have many different lifetimes. The crawling infant turns into the playing child turns into the amorous adolescent turns into the contemplating adult turns into, you get the idea. Mewling and puking in our nurse's arms, or something like that.

To make sense of it, we push a needle and thread through these different layers of persona, binding them together into one continuous life story, one we insist has a direction, a point and a purpose. This life includes a full cast of characters, heroes and villains alike and everyone in between, joined by events that produce the person you and I become to be. Still, dissonance never pulses far away.

Dissonance is not a sound unfamiliar to any of us. Every child struggles with a certain amount of it, and we might say that the task of childhood is to make sense out of a world that otherwise would make no sense at all, filled as it is with odd incongruities and these strange creatures called adults.

I was thinking this morning of one my incongruities, which I’ll call the intersection of a world of realities and a world of dreams. I am speaking about the city I grew up in and the television I saw at the time. The first was New York City in the 1970s, and the second was the suburbanized fantasy world of cheap sitcoms.

Pictures show this dissonance more succinctly than words could describe, so I won’t bother with the words. Furthermore, interpreting this dissonance is to some degree what subsequent life is all about, an ongoing performance piece happening in real time for all to see. So again, I’ll let my own too many threads be its own exhibit for inspection and loosen my clammy grip on the writing pen for the time being.

Here’s the goods in pixels …

Kids at play, on a cold day, in East Harlem, circa 1971

Yes, this was New York in the early 1970s

An image of American Eden, from Leave It To Beaver, in the immediate post-War years.

One of the most iconic houses in all of TV land, the southern California template for fulfillment in the 1970s, with sidewalks to nowhere, off-street parking and traffic-free streets, where the Bradys lived.

Bobby Brady, eat your heart out

If you ever saw The Brady Bunch episode where Bobby tries to do his own laundry and puts too much detergent into the washing machine and bubbles overflow over the whole room, well, I just lived Bobby's nightmare except I did it with my dishwasher. 

I had just bought Seventh Generation dishwashing soap (I do live in Cambridge after all!) and so squeezed some of its clear liquid into the dishwasher's little receptacle. I did think, "Odd. I thought the liquid was cloudy not clear, but hey, perhaps they’ve changed the formula."

On went the machine. Within minutes, from a crack in the rubber seal around the door out came the sudsy bubbles, spreading like a slow disease over the floor.  Quick, get the mop!

I swung briskly into action, grabbed the handle and massaging it back and forth dragged the mop head across the gray tile. I stopped the machine and opened it up so that I could scoop out some of the bubbles. I restarted the machine, but again out came more bubbles. I stopped the machine again. More mopping. More scooping. I poured cold water into it in the belief that cold water breaks down soapy water more effectively than hot. 

Machine back on. But out come the bubbles again, this time flowing across the slate with an even greater ease, more diluted by the water.  Again and again this repeated.

For the past two hours, I’ve been mopping and wiping, wiping and mopping. When there was a brief pause in the bubble mania, I took the opportunity to mop the bathroom floor too.

Not quite as dramatic as the Brady Bunch, but still a white frothy mess!

In the middle of all of this, I emailed the company to express my rage at their incompetence, with this subject line “Dishwashing liquid = terrible.” It was just then that it occurred to me, maybe this wasn’t dishwasher machine soap after all. Maybe it was dish soap for the sink.  I grabbed the container and scoured the label intently. Sure enough in small but distinctly unmistakable capital letters it read “NOT FOR USE IN AUTOMATIC DISH WASHERS.”

Yeah, they didn't hide the message, that's for sure

Sometimes a bad television show comes up with a gag so stupid you assume it could never happen in real life. And then it happens in real life, and you realize, the writers got their idea from somewhere.

It was all very humorous in that way that very annoying things can be very humorous in very annoying ways.