Orb Weaver

 I can think of a million little lazy-ass things I need to do before I sit down to write, postponing involving myself in something that requires a special kind of focus and effort that in the end could leave me feeling exposed and embarrassment.

 I  find that a story that has lived in my head for too long a time, becomes stale, spoken to others in bits and pieces  it loses its zest. It doesn't care to be written down any more.  I think that writing, drafting, testing out a line of inquiry, an essay or a story, needs private daily attention, like weeding a garden or sweeping the walk.  By doing that, nudging the story forward every day, I can make it into something ordinary, easier to do, just another part of the day.

After all there is so much writing out there in the world, a little more weighs nothing. For instance, this week the internet has been full of mischief.  Random items that have captured my attention are too numerous to count.   Some days the news can be so terrible and depressing that I get drawn into odd, light-hearted stories. For example, the website “dental floss for the mind” is full of odd mildly useful details. You can chill a beer in 15 minutes, if you wrap it in a wet paper towel and put it in the freezer.  You can cut soft cheese really well with unflavored dental floss.  This and many other tips I learned, were either true or false on a video which analyzed  the effectiveness of 20 life hacks. Don’t ask how I got there, I couldn't tell you. What is a life hack anyway? I had to ask my daughter.

Then there was an article about how a  community crowd sourced security in their town. When the police force was cut and local crime began to rise, they used an internet website called Crowdtilt which helps groups raise funds. The article went on to ask, is this a good idea or is this what government should be doing? Will this funding of private community functions favor only the wealthier neighborhoods?  Good question, interesting to debate. But no time to linger, this led on in a link right there in the article to another story about how the pedestal for the statue of liberty was actually the first crowd sourced project. Undertaken by Joseph Pulitzer,  he raised the money to build the  pedestal in his NYC newspaper. He published every single 50 cent to $500  donor. Boston was trying to take the statue away, by campaigning for the funds he kept the famous statue in NY Harbor.  On and on  the internet path goes from the curious to the trivial to the downright need to know,  interesting details, trivia and worthwhile questions piled one on top of another.

This web of endless information sends me out into the garden. Out there the details are also many and layered. But slower, information is gained leisurely by looking carefully at the same thing closely and often.  Is that plant growing, does it get enough morning sun? What is that big brown spider? I named him web weaver, as that is what he weaves, it is definitely not an orb. It is a web.   I looked him up in trusty google search, something I do not think I could do without, and there he is amongst the hundreds of pictures of spiders in the huge orb weaver family. He is not the prettiest orb weaver. He is brown with long crab like legs and about the size of a quarter. During the day he sleeps collapsed into a tiny space in a clothes pin on my laundry line, but every night, sometime in the middle of the night he gets up and builds his web. It is there early in the morning, before sunrise when I first stumble in the garden. Lucky for me and I guess for him too, he has put it in a place I seldom walk through, unless I am weeding there.  His web is probably three feet square and looks exactly as you would imagine from all the Halloween drawings  you have ever seen.

After a few days he was joined by another spider, I think a female orb weaver.  She spins her web at a right angle to his.  Equally large, the two webs are joined at one edge. They use my clothes line as a place to spin out their trap lines and by 9:00 in the morning that is all that is left of their webs and he is asleep in the clothes pin, she hiding somewhere in the garden.

For those few hours in the early morning, their webs effectively trap whatever is flying through my garden. Every morning he draws his web back in, leaving only one line in place to begin tomorrow’s web.

Their webs catch the morning light from one angle, but are invisible from another.  The radial lines are paths that they can walk on, the other lateral connecting lines are sticky traps for all the unsuspecting.  He and his co-spider sit upside down in the middle of these beautiful creations waiting, and then at some point in the early morning, known only to them they devour the entire net and retreat to rest. To a human this nightly construction looks Herculean, to them a simple, edible place to be.

They can live a year or more and I am  hoping they will stay in my garden.  Apparently this is their habit, to stay in one place.  The only complication being that I cannot take down my laundry line, something I do occasionally to get an unobstructed view of the garden. But laundry is a daily chore and so I don’t mind leaving it there.  Of course I cannot use his clothes pin and I wonder if his rest is disturbed by the bouncing on the line when I hang up my wet clothes.  He seems not to mind.

 We coexist.

Now, the female partner has left the garden, he has been alone these last few mornings and it appears that on Sunday, he took the day off or maybe just took in his web before I got up to check on him. I look for him in the morning and watch him when I am weeding in the garden.  I have seen him catch a fly and roll him up in a quick culinary web taco.  I have seen him carry his fly back to the center of his web  and eat it all.

So there we are a strange little paus de deux.

It fortifies me to see him in his web every morning.  He constructs it and deconstructs it every day.  His simple rhythm makes it just a little easier for me to sit down and write.

                                       This fellow watches with casual curiosity from the roof.
                                                            He is this year's roof kitty.

I haven’t showered in days, it’s silly. I don’t want to wash the ocean from my hair yet, the specific moonlight from my skin. I want to soak in it, absorb it all. I keep asking myself: did you pay close enough attention? Are these things recorded well enough in the pages of your body? Are they true? Will they stand passing time and all its treachery? And will they matter they way you want them to always matter? At the same time I try not to think of them too often, afraid of their fragility. For something to be remembered once, twice, twenty times, it changes. The colors, the light, the way your chest and the tide rose and fell and rose. Details are left out or embellished, the spine of my memory broken, dog-eared, annotated. I think about things too hard sometimes, worry too much. I remind myself that all languages are foreign, everyone is translating. We are allowed some legends in our own life. I am allowed to sigh, to feel in my marrow the incredible coincidence of my existence, the existence of those I love, the existence of everything and I’m allowed to let it go again too. It’s ok if I’m not big enough to hold it all. It takes a universe to even come close.

There

Don’t go there in the dark,

Not in bright sunlight either.

Go when the light is kind

And the air is sweet.

Wander the lanes.

Find an old familiar path.

Your feet remember the curve

And feel the stones and roots,

The soft earth.

Bring back the smells, the sounds,

The taste on your tongue.

That look of surprise.

Recall the transgression,

And ask yourself why?

Can we form an accurate picture of the effect of the internet on our lives on this planet?

Or even how important it is and how we know that it is that important?  I rely on it for so many of my daily activities; my banking, my phone calls, my emails, my news, my recipes, my laughs, my shaggy dog stories, my maps, my fact checking, my when and where do we meet for lunch. It all happens there, wherever there is. I would probably feel deprived and isolated without it. And here is the truly surprising part… I have no idea how it works, or how vulnerable it is to control by evil wizards. I simply depend on it.

I think that view that the computer is essential, puts me, approximately where the younger generation was five or so years ago.  I watch them now with their phones that do everything and instantly and think that the courtly days of composing an email are over for this next generation.  They live in a constantly moving world of instagrams, tweets, and captions with their eyes on their phones verifying their existence in stream of photos and quips. They are connected in a moment by moment way.  It is fascinating.  As usual they are moving faster than we are, I know not where. The computer is as everyday to them as a refrigerator or a toaster or indoor plumbing.

I more or less understand, telephones and telegraphs and even television transmission, but my grasp of any significant detail breaks down when I try to picture the internet. Maybe that is how people felt when the first printed books arrived.  Somehow it seems much easier to grasp that process, it is tangible, it can be pictured.  It is not wireless. And still in fits of political pique, printing presses were smashed and books were burned.  People rebuilt, reprinted.  They knew how to, or enough people did.

 

I am hoping that is so of the internet as well.  That the hackers, the gamers, the people who understand it, for whom it is no more complicated than a printing press, can put it back together again. I think the jury is still out, but I am also guessing that great minds are on this topic as we speak.    

So there it is, my first strange finding in this quest.  It is incredibly important to many of us, for various reasons, it is incomprehensible to most of us, and for the most part we have no idea how vulnerable it is, or how vulnerable we are by using it in a world of data mining and snooping in general.

And the only comfort I take in my general ignorance of the facts of the matter of how vulnerable it is, is that the powers that currently be, need it just as much as we do, and the people who understand it best are the whip smart kids on the planet who, I think, have a moral code about it and its misuse, a Robin Hood mentality, or maybe a new paradigm.  Information should be free, it belongs to no one. 

So how has it changed us, how is it continuing to change us.  Imagine a Mayan astronomer, he has calculated many discrete and useful facts about the universe and its workings. He is fortunate he has a flat and unobstructed horizon on which to build his theories.  He knows his place among the stars.  Now teleport this gentleman forward and give him this to feast his eyes: 

   

And thousands more, it would be an abundance of confusing riches, a birds’ eye view of the great beyond. It is a stunning fact that this great leap only took one thousand years and instructive to recall that many scientist paid an enormous price for pointing out the falsehoods in our mythic thought, think Galileo and house arrest.

So here we are, I think in many ways about to shift our paradigm again.  And in my small and hopeful opinion, shift we must. I think the internet will help us do it. I think it will stir us up.  It already has in the Middle East. 

The Plaza in a Mexico, the central square in the cities and pueblos is a testament to the big changes in their culture. It has always been a public gathering place. First bounded by the Pyramids and the Ball courts, it gave way in a huge shift to massive Cathedrals, built with the same stones.  The revolutions came and brought the government buildings, large elegant buildings often facing the cathedrals on the opposite side of the square. The cell phone arrived and the cell towers went up in clear view of the square and now every citizen on every bus has a cell phone. Carlos Slim made his fortune.  And now all over Mexico, even in the pueblos, the plazas have WiFi.  Students sit in the plazas doing their homework on rebuilt computers. The world is at their fingertips, they can see the stars. They can read the news from around the world.  And it is wireless.

Steubenville, Ohio

Steubenville, Ohio a town of 18,000 people, sits on the Ohio river a stone’s throw from West Virginia and Pennsylvania.  At its peak it was a steel town of 35,000 people that went into slow decline until in 2010 with a 15% unemployment rate, it was resurrected and riven by its place atop the Marcellus and Utica shale formation.  What fracking has done to the ground beneath them, the scandal surrounding Big Red has done to the people of Steubenville. And now this small town is a crossroad on the virtual, viral map.

Big Red is the Steubenville High School three-time state champion football team.  It is what everybody does on Friday night and it has been for two generations, the pride of Steubenville. Coach Reno Saccoccia has coached those two generations and won 85% of his games.  The field of play is named Reno field and it is perfect and camera ready. The games are broadcast every week.

On August 11 at a party, which apparently began at a volunteer coaches house and moved throughout the evening to two other locations, a 16 year old girl was raped and carried unconscious from party to party where she was abused, raped, urinated on and finally left naked in her parents front yard in the morning.

She remembered none of it. It is likely that she was given Rohypnal in a soft drink on the way to the party as according to some sources, the whole adventure began because she had dated and rejected one of the football players.  She was called and invited to the party by the girlfriend of another player who told her that her ex was not angry at her and everyone wanted her to come to the party.

Because she was totally unaware of what happened to her the incident was not reported to the police until two days later when her parents were sent photos and tweets of the incident that the students had sent to each other that night.  She had showered; there is no physical evidence.  She has no memory of  the incident, and so she cannot even testify in her own behalf.

So this story may have faded away as many alleged rapes do. But two of the players were eventually arrested. Because they are 16, the state has decided to charge them as juveniles with delinquency, and not with rape, a charge that will vanish from their records at 18.  All of the other “players” who watched and tweeted and said nothing, played football all season, not even a slap on the wrist.

The incident has caught fire on the internet, all this time later and the case is scheduled for Juvenile Court on February 16. Now the venue is the virtual world, and we members of the virtual world should watch and weigh in. Steubenville, Ohio could be anywhere….

How did this happen, this belated outrage, this struggle to find out what really happened and who is complicit.  It started slowly with one woman whose corner of the bloggers’ world is crime reporting.  Her name is Alexandria Goddard and her blog is Prinniefield.com. She followed the story and screen grabbed the tweets and photos that were circulating among the students at the time of the incident.  She suggested that a handful of the athletes were to blame and was roundly criticized in the local press, saying her site “had lent itself to character assassination and begun to resemble a lynch mob.” She was sued by one of the players for defamation of character, a suit which has since been dropped. And as those photos and tweets she captured were taken down from her website. The phones were collected be the police and the tweets and photos mostly, mysteriously disappeared. But she had preserved evidence and set the debate in motion. The two sides have lined up with opposing beliefs, spilling anger and threats in Steubenville.  The police chief, the district attorney and the school superintendent all had close ties to the football team.

But four months later on December 16^th, the New York Times wrote an in-depth article laying out the story in detail, followed by updates on the Atlantic Wire.  It was surfacing in national media, it was finding a way to the internet: the virtual community.

Into this community steps Knight Sec, a part of the amorphous and vocal crusaders, Anonymous, who speak for those who have small voices. Outraged by the imbalance in this fight, they took up the cause and began organizing protests in Steubenville and restoring the photos and Tweets, that had been removed from Alexandria’s blog.  They named those who were accused of both participating, watching and commenting on this horrific event and continued protecting the 16 year old girl’s identity. They posted a video tape of one of the students laughing and commenting on the events of that evening.  Watch it, if you dare.  It is disgusting and disheartening.

But the story goes on. Into this morass steps a group called Local Leaks.  They have put up a web site which details the events of that night, the players, coaches, politicians involved and links to every article written on line about the night of August 11^th and its aftermath. All of the photos, tweets and the disgusting video are there too.  It is an amazing and well documented effort, but some of the reporting is based on anonymous leaks. Through these leaks the story continues to grow.  It has been reported that there are other victims on other nights, that there is a rape squad at the school that it is supported and protected by one of the coaches, that the police chief is involved in an illegal gambling enterprise which takes bets on the football team, that the district attorney’s son is a member of the group.

After the rape when the sheriff (not the police chief) asked party-goers to come forward to report what had happened that night, only one person did.

To date, LocalLeaks has received over 1,000 testimonial leaks and they continue to receive 50 to 100 each day.  These reports are anonymous so there is no fear of reprisal.

Who are the people behind LocalLeaks. They say they are a small clan of “truth seekers.” When asked where located, their reply, Planet Earth.  They are in fact spread out across the world.  They are developing a verification process for their testimonial leaks, which, must be supported by multiple credible sources in order to be made public. They have now so much information that they are having some difficulty storing it.  Fortunately, they have an attorney who is prepared to defend their right to make information public that has been credibly reported to the site. 

Will it stand up as evidence; doubtful.  It is difficult to see how it can be other than hearsay, unless some of the reporters are willing to testify in court.  As for that there have been multiple death threats against both witnesses and the defense counsel. Chief among them from Coach Soccoccia, who threatened an interviewer saying as he walked away.  “You make me mad now. You are going to get yours and if you don’t somebody close to you will.”

 Does it make change of venue moot, most likely. Many people are watching what happens in Steubenville, Ohio.

So where are we? Better off?  I think so.  The legal system will certainly find these two boys guilty of delinquency.  There will be some repercussions for them, although their records will be wiped clean in two years allowing them to move on with their football careers. 

 The young lady may or may not recover, and unless she chooses to write a book and tell us, we may never know. 

Is there some hyperbole or false information circulating, probably.  But the story has caused the town and in fact the world to question the values that are taught to young men in small town US.

The legal system is trying to grapple with this new court of public opinion.  Anonymous has been CyberSLAPPed with a law suit in an attempt to discover their identity.  The city of Steubenville has put up its own website in a fairly lame attempt to control the information on the case.  Because the young lady was transported across state lines, the football player and his girlfriend picked her up in Weirton West Virginia at a Volley ball game, the case has potential Federal standing.  And the surrounding corruption that appears to affect Steubenville, who knows, maybe the fracking which has resurrected their economy will sink them into the netherworld in a vengeful earthquake.

But for me and I hope for many others, the story is worth following.  Here we are on planet earth, still trying mightily to sort things out.  How’s that going?  The jury is still out, but I am grateful that we have people who can and will give voices to the many and question the privileges of the few.

The trial for the two boys charged in this case begins in ten days.  I am hoping that the world will be watching.

It is difficult to look at this beautiful smiling face and accept that this young man has hung himself.  Here is the face of a genius, 26 years old, generous, loving, at times ill, at times depressed.  He saw a world that we who are older cannot fully grasp, and he wanted it to be free to everyone.

He was a gift to the future, that we have obliterated. It saddens and enrages me that we cannot imagine  that there are many better ways of doing things.  This young man was looking for those ways, experimenting, inventing and maybe making some missteps, but in a search for the greater good, not personal gain.  And for this our justice system hounded him unto death.  Shame on the United States, and its toxic, lethal culture that glorifies violence and greed and fails to support and nuture genius, creativity and generosity.

Let this be the last straw.

Perspective

The Fairy of Eagle Nebula, Ten light years tall and spewing radiation much hotter than fire.  The Greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is an evaportting shell of gas and dust inside of which is a spectacular star nursey.

My daughter Erin posts NASA photos regularly on her blog, Thought and Memory, and I find myself dazzled and amazed by their beauty and scope.  All our mythology and religious dogma seems pale in comparison to these breathtaking glimpses of the cosmos.  This particular one was discovered by a man named Jean Phillippe de Cheseaux in 1745. It is in the constellation Serpens (Serpent).  It is 6,500 light years away from us.  Our first images of it came from the Hubble telescope in 1995, when it was named The Pillars of Creation.

Since light travels 186,000 miles a second, a light year is 5.88 trillion miles.  So this beautful Nebula is 39,000 trillion miles away from us and yet we can see it.  Or so we think.  It is 9.5 light years tall, 1 to 2 million years old and a nursery to 460 stars whose luminosity is 1 million times that of our sun.   

The columns that look like stalagmites are full of interstellar hydrogen gas and dust and they act as incubators of new stars.  Inside the columns and on their surface are knots of denser gas called EGGs, or Evaporaating Gaseous Globules.  Someone had a good time with that.  This is where the stars are being formed, as we speak; maybe. Because there is some evidence that the Pillars of Creation may have been destroyed in a supernova explosion 6,000 years ago. If so, the new shape of the pillars will take another 500 years to reach us.

How we know or surmise all of these events is quite naturally beyond the scope of my education. Apart from the Hubble telescope and its pictures, it is incomprehensible to me.  But those images have been the source of great awe and wonder. 

They cause me to think how insignificant we are, but also how easily the cosmos and mother nature can replace our efforts here with a new model, if we fail to right our planet.