Author: Inthegazeoftheother

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As it should bee…

Assembly Bill No. 1789
CHAPTER 578

An act to add Section 12838 to the Food and Agricultural Code, relating to pesticides.

[ Approved by Governor  September 26, 2014. Filed with Secretary of State  September 26, 2014. ]

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL’S DIGEST

AB 1789, Williams. Pesticides: neonicotinoids: reevaluation: determination: control measures.
Existing law requires pesticides to be registered by the Department of Pesticide Regulation. Existing law requires that a pesticide be thoroughly evaluated prior to registration, and provides for the continued evaluation of registered pesticides.
This bill would require the department, by July 1, 2018, to issue a determination with respect to its reevaluation of neonicotinoids. The bill would require the department, on or before 2 years after making this determination, to adopt any control measures necessary to protect pollinator health.
The bill would require the department to submit a report to the appropriate committees of the Legislature if the department is unable to adopt those control measures and to update the report annually until the department adopts those control measures.

DIGEST KEY

Vote: majority   Appropriation: no   Fiscal Committee: yes   Local Program: no  

BILL TEXT

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

SECTION 1.

(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(1) Honey bees are vital to the pollination of many of California’s crops, which are critical to our national food system and essential to the economy of the state.
(2) Annual colony losses from 2006 to 2011, inclusive, averaged about 33 percent each year, which is more than double what is considered sustainable according to the United States Department of Food and Agriculture.
(3) Scientists now largely agree that a combination of factors is to blame for declining pollinator health, including lack of varied forage and nutrition, pathogens and pests such as the Varroa mite, and chronic and acute exposure to a variety of pesticides.
(4) Based on data submitted to the Department of Pesticide Regulation showing a potential hazard to honey bees, the department initiated a reevaluation process for four neonicotinoid compounds in 2009: imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, clothianidin, and dinotefuran.
(b) It is the intent of the Legislature to set a timeline for completion of the reevaluation of neonicotinoid compounds to ensure that the Department of Pesticide Regulation completes a thorough, scientifically sound, and timely analysis of the effects of neonicotinoids on pollinator health.

SEC. 2.

Section 12838 is added to the Food and Agricultural Code, to read:

12838.

(a) On or before July 1, 2018, the department shall issue a determination with respect to its reevaluation of neonicotinoids.

(b) (1) Within two years after making the determination specified in subdivision (a), the department shall adopt any control measures necessary to protect pollinator health.
(2) If the department is unable to adopt necessary control measures within two years as required in paragraph (1), the department shall submit a report to the appropriate committees of the Legislature setting forth the reasons the requirement of paragraph (1) has not been met.
(3) The department shall update the report submitted to the appropriate committees of the Legislature pursuant to paragraph (2) every year until the department adopts the necessary control measures specified in paragraph (1).
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Something About the Bees

  
In fits of nostalgia, I have bemoaned the loss of bygone items and activities. No, not 8 tracks or vinyl, but more like the bliss of ignorance. Somehow, not knowing what everyone I know ate for dinner last night or that a hit and run accident happened in some town called Smartsville hundreds of miles away is something that strikes me nostalgic. I miss the quietude of select pieces of information entering into my sphere of knowledge. I miss the word intrusion that had meaning, not like now where it will be erased from common usage given that there is nowhere to hide from anyone else in the world.
 
In particular, however, I will miss the bees.
 
Not just because I grew up with them, just like I grew up with aluminum street roller skates and homemade skateboards of wood blocks mounted atop those skates. But because our world depends on them, more than we know. I am not an alarmist. I shy away from ringing any alarm bells for a cause as I am a subscriber to the crying wolf wisdom. Save the fire alarm for what most needs sounding. The bees need a five alarm fire warning, for they are sounding bells for us in their departure. Why are the bees leaving us?
 
Not that they are going off for good. Most bees abandoning us are domesticated slaves to the agriculture industry, shuttled from farm to farm to pollinate crops, but it’s not only the pesticides that are killing off these slave bees. Those in the wild know better than to go where the pesticides waft in the wind through miles of wheat stalks or almond trees. It’s also the stress. The suffering, farm-raised, overworked honey bees are one of the most threatened populations–enslaved pollinators chained to their instincts and the dollars that drive their keepers and chemical companies. While the EPA as well as the world looks away.
 
Bees are responsible for a third of all we ingest.
 
Agribusiness practices include bee transportation across countries where they are released to pollinate crops: a month feeding on blueberries then another month on almonds and another month on some other fruit or vegetable plants, season to season, place to place. Keepers earn their keep.
 
The artificial dietary conditions and non-stop travel schedule stress these insects that vibrate to one another and radar their stress all along the colony, a highly systematized bee industrial complex inside the hive. They want out.
 
The smart bees have left the building–abandoned their hives, collapsed their colony. They punched their final time card in the clock.
 
Stress and pesticides are forcing the bees out. Their disappearance is a message to those who can decode it. I will miss the bees.

 
Photo: Bobby Doherty

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And Yet You Know…

  
We visit our then, a scrim of sense, diffusing pleasure like burning lemon oil 

and surfeit our now, a false dredge of real, deferring the candy-colored recoil.  

Bodies heaped in undulating ether, sweat-sore and sticky smiles, lie assured

the way it never was, but ever lives in imagination craved of slick-thin succor.

 

I was never that woman, you never that man, and yet we perform our analysis

like religion, like cookie dough on a sheet, anticipating the rise and melt of us.

At last I ceased tracking the trailer down an outstretched road to preview then.

Steady we blow, chime-sounding earth’s heaving guts of it all in resolved amen.

 
credit: http://www.i4wardsolutions.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/link.jpg

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What kind of love is it?

  
Unconditional love. Love unconditionally the gospel of everyone tells us. So simple. Just love for the sake of loving without expectation of return. Love is enough.

But we are also socially conditioned to believe that love is circumscribed to acceptable people and circumstances. Monogamy dictates love only to the betrothed, regardless of how many loving people a lov-er meets along the road of a long life. 

We categorize love: friendship, passion, God, country, children, siblings, spouses, lovers, flings, new cars, cats, gardening and pizza. We give time limits–for a lifetime, a season, a night.  So many names for so many kinds of loves–expensive ones (mistress or travel) to home grown ones (God, spirit, charity, and light).  We love the earth, the skies and the seas. We love. 

But we are so busy defining the type of love we are receiving and giving that we forget to just love and let love be the guide not the answer or the question. 

Analytical as I am, I fall prey to this downsizing and chopping love to bits. If I love being with an other, just talking and spending time, so much so that I can declare that I love that other for this compatability and gift we bestow of conversation and time, am I violating some unspoken laws or ethical codes if this person is promised to another for that other kind of love, the eternal everlasting one of ceremony and song? This I must always inventory.

A visitor came to town, someone from cyberspace, whom I have never met other than through x’s and o’s. I took it upon myself to be ambassador. The tour of some of my favorite cafes and nature spots yielded an instant bond and good time. I found a co-spirit in great conversation, shared interests and world views, a peace of just being. 

Flitting thoughts of expectations or produced impressions strafed this good time like WWII bombers overhead, periodic and impactful, enough to disrupt the flow with slight uneasiness. Am I giving the wrong impression–that I am interested in a relationships, fling, one-night stand? That I am interested? Don’t want to mislead.

Why not love what or who sits before me without figuring out the good or bad of it, hemming myself in measured patterns of behavior and select words?

My daily aim is to feel love not that way but freely–unfettered.  Not in exchange or as gift but connection. In some rare moments, even I am successful.

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Morning Start

image

A phone call,

the muffled tunnel voice cracks,

“Mom, I want to come home.”

A wave hits the transformer and it’s blown.

No connection.

No contact.

Stunned, mouth agape–

Forgotten exhales,  a mind cries, “no, no, no!!!”

No breath, out of an airless burn, searing lungs, stifled scream—

“This can’t be. I have to jump!”

Over the cliff, falling the eternal drop–

and the shards of rocks jut through the sea to meet gravity’s slam-tossed burden,

through the air and…

((Gasp)), “huh!!! I’m up, I’m up. [catching breath] Okay. Okay. Okay. [quickly glancing about the sliver moon-lit room left to right].

What time is it?”

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Margins

 
 

Not a single paper, not a wrapper, stub, shoebox, tag, container, cookie box or article, never intending to wear, she throws nothing away.
 
No castaways, no delusions, cares, tidbits nor morsels, not a dream, fantasy or truth, nothing gets past the gates of her need.
 
All she has touched, received, and placed on a shelf or dresser top, even dropped to the floor, never leaves her.
 
She retains everything.
 
She lives knee-deep in it, until the inevitable; they come with a shovel, mask and plastic bags to remove the amassment.
 
The long lone bedsheet melds with the mattress, unchanged so long; once the whole mattress got tossed out.
 
Not even shed skin may be shaken from her. No, no loss tolerable, nothing must abandon her, nothing left, taken, discarded, out of her control–a sacred keeping.
 
She shudders and screams in spasmodic yips and soul-shook howls in skin-ripping pain at the disturbance, the violation.
 
Skull-red circles emanate from angry, forsaken roots.
 
“Get out!! Nooooo!!! This is MY room! You can’t just come in here and throw my stuff away. I need things you are throwing away! You have no right!! My door was closed!
 
Oh? Which side of the door shuts out and which closes in?

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Bicycle Down

image

Why do I want to know that a bicyclist was killed by a hit and run driver way up north in the state somewhere, some place that may as well be Mars for all it has to do with me?

Shouldn’t the news delivered to my phone via text be something more urgent, more relevant like, “nuclear bomb just dropped in Los Angeles” or “meteor headed to earth in about an hour,” something more significant, enough to sound the incoming text alarm and make me look?

A bicyclist down hundreds of miles away.

Well, no doubt it’s a shame, and I can go there with my heart and my mind, that place of family grief and loss, and I can make it my own, especially now that I have a more specific piece of death than people dying everywhere every minute.

But it’s still too far for me to muster up the feels, the agony of killing me pain in the heart over losing someone I love.

Why do I want to be there when I don’t have to be?

And this is how we operate 9 times out of 10 of any given day.

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Akrasia

  “akrasia, the mystery of why people choose to do other than what they think is best for them to do.” ― John R. Perry, The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing

I am having a meta moment: procrastinating by reading about procrastination. My article is due by midnight. It is not even half way done and the one who assigned it, my possible future editor, is waiting for it to see if I am worthy to write his blog fodder will-write-for-food spin.The thought of this looming project deadline scratches at my peace every hour–at coffee, eating breakfast, scouring Facebook, chatting with a friend, doing yoga, watching a soccer game, eating lunch, texting anyone, playing with the kitten, reading emails–even every quarter of an hour, yet I cannot muster the urgency…yet. 

Curious about procrastination, I started reading widely over the net to discover why I am procrastinating. Finding no answers (and still not writing my work with an ever shortening deadline), I decided to draw the feeling of it, a cocktail of procrastination–slow and steady, slightly shaken–with a shot of stress on the rocks. It should be a jolt but it is more like an electric line down shorting out wildly slashing the ground like a toad on cocaine, like my brain some days. And this is what it looks like at the moment:
  
So now it’s getting late. I’m sufficiently motivated. Until tomorrow….

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Pissing up Ropes

  
Read a Reddit post about the plight of being white, cultureless, unoppressed and bland that someone replied to by stating, “I’m not going to waste my time pissing up ropes.” 

I had never heard of that expression prior to reading it there so researched with little success. My procrastination limits have already been reached today, so I could not spend the requisite time to do the slang expression justice, but I did find this on encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com

“Piss Up a Rope” is a song by the band Ween in 1996 from the album 12 Golden Country Greats. It was released on 7″ yellow vinyl single on Diesel Only Records.

When asked about the lyrics “You can wash my balls with a warm wet rag” and “On your knees, you big bootied bitch,” Dean Ween stated that he wrote the song for his wife. The inspiration for the title came from his father: “[It is] a funny expression that I copped from my dad. When I was a kid, he used to say, ‘Aw, go piss up a rope.’ It was just nonsense. It was like, ‘Aw, go shit in your hat’ or whatever.”[1]

I gather it is a British expression for some futile exercise, but I would love to find the origins of the expression, just because…well, being a logophile, I like that sort of thing. Who first thought of it and in what context?

Oh, and there is a Facebook page with the title “Pissing up Ropes” that has one like.

Anyone know something about this expression?

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