1. That was then

Arty, the wood wizard
The staff is Sumac with an optional lit crystal for guiding people through mines.
Each new post will feature something I've made.


I've always been interested in history. First it was the adventure. Pirates, soldiers, explorers, statesmen. As I got older I found myself looking for the answer to "Why?" we are the way we are. It's all about personalities, or rather, personality disorders. I plan to interview some of the people I have met in my long lifetime.
I also think I'm funny, something I inherited from my father who entertained people his entire life with his music and sense of humor. So look for unique insights laced with some of my funniest stuff. ENJOY!
For those who want to hear my wife and me play piano duets just write to me at pipedreams@me.com and write "Brahms" or "Sousa" in the subject line. I'll send it by return email.

THE IMPACT OF HUMANITY ON THE EARTH
As seen by a 5000 year old man

Much has been made of it and many believe there's nothing to it. The planet is too big to be affected by us tiny little humans. Yes, we are tiny. Compared to the earth we're the size of a microscopic growth like yeast. Yeast eats sugar and if it lives in a sea of sugar it will eat till it dies of alcohol poisoning. That's wine.

As a species we are consuming the planet we live on. And we give off waste products. Take the Great Pyramids. They are the waste by product of divinely inspired architecture. They were put up as human ant hills to satisfy the ego requirements of ancient narcissists and to employ the excess population that the Nile valley could support. They were needed when they were built, but aside from the fact that they represent so much work so long ago they are not needed today. Nice but not necessary. Monuments to getting it wrong.

So many human endeavors involve building things, a practice whereby humans extract substances from the planet, alter them somehow, and rearrange them in mostly straight lines. First we built mounds, then pyramids, great walls, finally vast cities. As our numbers grew and our techniques improved we built taller and taller with glass and steel.

Imagine if you will that the earth is only 6' (1.82 m) in diameter. We've seen it that small many times going to and from the moon. You can walk up to it, feel it with your hand, smell it. Right next to it is a time machine that can instantly take the planet back to any time in the past. Set the dial for 5000 years ago. I chose 5000 years ago because the change from oral to written record keeping was well under way by that time. Some of the old oral legends made it through the switchover, Moses and Noah top among them. Even Jesus. His story was not written down until years after the fact. If he was alive today he'd have written the entire New Testament himself.

Now set the time machine on auto time lapse so the earth ages those last 5000 years in an hour. Now let's go looking for signs of human beings. You'll need a powerful magnifying glass. Luckily we know where to look. The "fertile crescent" and the Nile valley are among the earliest civilization sites. They both grew a lot of food and brewed a lot of beer. It was worth protecting those sources so it was worth owning them.

And who owned them? Self proclaimed divinity. We know by now, of course, that all of that ancient religion was a load of crap, beautiful but all wrong. But look what wonders were left by them. Yes, and I love it but it's still litter. Right now we can find it with a powerful magnifying glass but only by looking for natural features and working out what we're seeing. Run you finger over the area and you'd just barely feel anything.

The time machine is working it's way forward. You can can see tiny little cities grow up in Greece and Asia Minor. Soon there is a city in Italy that you can feel and smell. Run your finger over it and it's like a tiny scab that you could easily scratch off. Stick your nose down there. Oooh. Much of that smell is waste, of course, but some of it was death. Every amphitheater in the Roman empire was surrounded with an aromatic type of pine tree to deal with the stench. Besides everything else, the amphitheaters stink like a slaughter house. And at the end of every day of public carnage all the prostitutes would gather around the arena and do their best business working the departing crowd. The Romans were the first to inlay the earth with stone roads to connect their cities.

But I digress. At the same time half a world away a long lesion is appearing in Asia. You can see it more than feel it but it adds a man made feature to an otherwise wild landscape. An insane man named China erected it as a billboard to show the world how much he owned of it. We're left to live with the litter resulting from his personality disorder.

Look over there in central America. More pyramids, some on top of mountains. Few and far between but we can be sure there's a ruling priestly class involved. Anytime a society has any surplus a breed of people appears who think they should have the excess while not adding anything to the common wealth. They do this by claiming to be powerful angry deities or representing them. Still, it's fascinating litter. So different from Europe, Asia and Africa yet so similar. All with the same motivation, the same need to cause monumental buildings so someone would be remembered.

The Romans were fully modern men. They wrote their own lives for us to read. Their cities survived the empire and grew into some large cities. Aside from the black death the population increased continually, yet it is still hard to find them on our 6' world. The time machine is just approaching 500 years ago and you still have to search for all but the biggest cities and even they are just tiny pinpoints when seen with a powerful magnifying glass.

200 years ago things were still as they had been since the beginning. You can look for a long time and still see no sign of human life on our 6' earth.

That was then,