Archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch. Louis Shalako.

Mommsen: history is a moral question.

Louis Shalako

Archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch.

 

The great thing about archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch is that you really don’t have to dig down all that far.

I was digging a garden, some years ago, probably digging down a foot or so into rich, black humus, and all of a sudden, I was coming up with all kinds of marbles, and green plastic army men. The propeller from a Cox 0.49 airplane engine. Bits of a plastic model car. That was out behind my old man’s garage, on Bright St.; here in Sarnia.

Imagine digging down about forty years and finding your own artifacts—pieces of your own life, buried there in the dirt. As Mommsen said, ‘history is a moral question’, but it is also a philosophical question…looking at my own past life, so to speak.

I’m not too sure of how I got here, but this is where I came from.

The modern equivalent of the good old shell midden is right outside our back door, in some cases.

Your typical thrift store, in any city or town in this nation, is literally riddled with artifacts of a kind. Every one of those artifacts has its own story, and collectively, they tell a bigger and more complex story.

It is a very human story.

The Anthropocene is the story of what human beings have done to this planet, outside of all other natural causes. Essentially, we can’t really shift tectonic plates, but what we can do, is to cut down forests, build great cities and pump out all kinds of products…including waste products.

What is a shell midden?

We don’t have to wait five thousand years before going back in time and digging up our own time and place. It exists, right here and right now, and all we have to do is to look about us—at the world we have created.

This is the world we are living in, right now.

Five thousand years from now, they will live in a different world. Five thousand years from now, they will dig down, and discover that the entire world was wrapped in a sheet of plastic a hundred metres deep, too.

You can build a pretty good picture of a society by sifting through their trash bins…

In any ditch, you will find pop cans and beer bottles, broken baby carriages and sacks of clothing, auto parts and the skeletons of roadkill. This gives us a pretty good picture of the life of the day, which includes proper drainage of farmland, high-speed roads and vehicles, and an established infrastructure—all very obvious, and so no one observes it. No one really analyzes it from the archaeological, the cultural point of view. You could trace an entire ancient road system, just by following the trail of crap in the ditches.

This is, clearly, an abundant society, also, a wasteful one. Great resources are being squandered, and it’s like no one has a second thought.

This is a wealthy society indeed, and a well-fed one, considering the human race has gained, in the collective sense, several inches in average height, and a good hundred pounds in terms of the average weight over the last century. This is an evolutionary response to a social change, (and chemical changes in the food we eat), in the sense that the world is growing more food, more efficiently—all those hands, all those workers, and rather contradicting of Malthusian economics. But of course we have so much better technology now. The oxen and the plough have been replaced by the combine and the skilled modern farmer. Immigration, has replaced the higher birth-rates, that in the past would have naturally grown or at least replaced, the national populations. Lower birthrates are a feature, and not a bug, of technologically-advanced civilizations. Nowadays, four out of five births reach five years of age, which is a complete reversal of medieval populations, and as long as more babies survive, there is less need to produce more.

Kids are expensive, as any parent can tell you.

What is Malthusian Theory.

We don’t actually have to dig down in the here and now, in order to realize that archaeologists of the future will be digging up skeletons with breast and bum implants, or teeth that sit on metal posts, or had electronic tickers for the heart, or a chip in the brain, or that men will be buried in their toupees, or that a skeleton might have three steel pins in an ankle. It does say quite a bit about the medical science of our day.

Still searching for the Ark of the Covenant.

We might even feel a little sorry, for the archaeologist who digs into some old mound and finds nothing but tires, tires, millions of tires, ladies and gentlemen. Tires waiting for recycling, and in too many cases, that will never happen.

They might even think of us as Mound Builders, which is apt enough.

The real irony is that these are not centres of worship, but symbols of desecration.

It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to realize that archaeologists, historians, scientists of the future won’t have too much trouble figuring out what we have done with our atmosphere, our soils, our water, our climate—and why. This includes our social structures and institutions that have enabled such obscenity, for surely that is what it is.

We have the best educated and the best-informed society in all of history. We have all of the information that we require, in order to make good decisions. And never, in all of history, have we been so wilfully blind, and to show such little wisdom in the care and maintenance of what is rightfully to be held in trust for all of humanity.

We hold this Earth in trust for future generations.

We should try and remember this of all things.

And in the meantime...

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

A Little Chunk of History.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

Paying Your Dues.

Laqfoil, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

Way back when, our journalism instructor at Lambton College was a guy called Geoff Lane.

He used to say things like ‘You’ve got to put your time in in the trenches in this industry.’ What that basically meant to us at the time was that we weren’t going to be hired off the street and immediately become the anchor on the nightly news.

We were going to be starting off at the bottom, and working for somebody else’s organization, which was a pretty good assumption. It was a minimum-wage, salaried position where they’d be running our legs off until we rose up the food chain, maybe five or ten years down the line. It’s a kind of weeding-out process, for only the fittest and most determined will survive that long. The rate of attrition is high.

“You’ve got to pay your dues.”

It’s true in any industry. They’re not going to give you your electrician’s papers until you’ve read the books, taken the course, passed the tests, and served your apprenticeship.

Only then can you look people in the eye and call yourself an electrician.

I went back to school in September 1983 because I wanted someone to teach me how to write. In the early eighties, I must have been writing. When I lived in Oakville, in 1988, I wrote and submitted letters to the editor to the Oakville Beaver, the Hamilton Spectator, and probably fooled around with some not-very-good fiction. I was writing in 1993, and none of it ever saw the light of day. Yes, it was bad, awful, horrible stuff.

It was pure shit.

I took out some of that stuff years later. I ended up finishing one book, and publishing it on my own; twenty-something years later. (I burned the rest out behind the garage.) Writing that crap was part of paying the dues. Every so often we sell a copy and that’s fun too…

At that time, when I was working, it was all shit jobs. I did industrial doors, even managed the place. I worked as a landscaper. I worked as a construction labourer, mixing mortar and hauling concrete blocks up onto scaffolding. I did drywall, and acoustic ceilings and steel studs and commercial interior demolitions and renovations. I dug holes in the ground in the blazing hot sun and put roofs on houses with snow flurries coming down or in between intermittent thundershowers.

Here’s a funny thing.

Never at any time did I ever see that as paying my dues. Hell no, I was just trying to survive. 

I was just trying to pay rent and buy food and keep a car on the road and shoes on my feet. It never ever occurred to me, that I was paying the dues.

I have never expressed it in those terms since then either.

It’s just something I’ve never thought of before. The connection isn’t immediately obvious.

To spend five or six years reading about the craft of writing—that may be construed as paying the dues. To write books, stories and submit them around to endless rejection, that might be construed as paying part of our dues. To self-publish, learn something about covers and formatting and editing and proof-reading, that might be considered as part of paying our dues.

Anyways, thirty-one years into this process, I get to look people in the eye and call myself a writer.

I knew what I wanted, ladies and gentlemen.

END

Discipline; Never Underestimate a Kid With a Dream.

Nothing can stop me.

Louis Shalako

A couple of days ago, I was crying in front of the computer. That went on for a couple of days.

Today, I feel all right. Yesterday, I was thinking back to one or two good lines in my recent novel, and laughing my guts out as I drove to the smoke shack. It was manic to some degree.

Life has its ups and downs, and yet we can’t let that stop us. This profession can be an emotional roller-coaster ride at times. Our own personality comes into play as well.

When I was having a bad day, I was still clicking on them buttons, editing that book or story, publishing this or that, making up a cover or just checking the emails.

It seems to me that we are just monkeys sitting in a room full of typewriters hoping against all odds to write Shakespeare.

It’s like a big lab experiment, and some little grey aliens are trying to determine our level of intelligence or creativity. These things are sent to try us.

And try us they do.

A button lights up, and we have to hit it, or hit them in the proper combination. If we do that successfully enough, a bell sounds and a banana pops out of the feeding chute or something; and there you go.

You’re performed your task successfully. You’ve gotten your reward. It’s a kind of feedback loop.

The same holds true for when you’re feeling pretty good and would much rather be elsewhere.

We still want that banana, and so we hang in there!

Much of my job entails waiting, waiting, endless waiting, for some page or program simply to open up. It makes the skin crawl sometimes.

Sometimes it’s all I can do not to scream at the thing.

And I can’t do it, can I? Think of the neighbours. Think of the little grey men and women in their little white suits and their big butterfly nets…

I’m not even allowed to scream, ladies and gentlemen.

 

***

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new mouse. The old one was atrocious for formatting even the shortest story.

I would practically be foaming at the mouth in frustration, (possibly even muttering dire imprecations), even suffering from some real pain, bearing in mind a compression fracture at T-6 vertebral level and the 2.5-cm benign tumor growing on there. I’m right-handed, the mouse is at a certain level, and as yet, I haven’t had time to whip up even the simplest prototype of an ergonomic writer’s cockpit, where all surfaces would be at the perfect height and angle to minimize writer-fatigue and injury. It just seems to cause pain in there, but then so did hammering shingles or pole-sanding a drywall ceiling. Things are better now.

No matter how good or how bad I might feel, the one thing that has gotten me this far is discipline.

It’s carried me a long way.

The truth is that I also had a goal.

Nothing was going to happen there unless I made it happen. This is a metaphor for all of life, as I am sure the reader would agree. Strange how the rest of my life has also gotten better.

Must be some kind of coincidence…right?

***

This is my younger self. That kid must have had some kind of faith, and he was as stubborn as all hell, as I recall. Some kind of faith that if he put in the time, the world, the fucking universe, would do the right thing...and it will. It will. Just you watch. You wait.

You'll see.

Just some fucking kid with a dream, ladies and gentlemen.

Thanks, kid.

If it wasn['t for you, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be where I am today.

Our goal, as you may recall, was to achieve our financial independence. Perhaps even break our psychological and moral dependence.

Our goal was to learn how to write fiction. Our goal was to write and publish a book—even if it killed us. 

Which it clearly hasn’t…and so we decided to keep going.

And we are in the process of succeeding, in spite of anything that the government, or society, or our fellow human beings can put in our way.

(That frickin’ Obama. Jeez! – ed.)

Let’s be honest: life happens to all of us.

We are succeeding, ladies and gentlemen, in spite of what our own perceptions also can (and do) put in our way. 

***

The difference is effort.

No honest effort is truly wasted, no matter how long it takes to pay off.

It’s the same as any other job. The only major difference is that I am no longer on piecework for someone else. I will never be laid off or run out of work.

I create my own projects.

I decide what gets to happen next.

I am my own man, and answer to no one.

On a Saturday night, where one person might go out and another might stay home, watching TV with family and friends, my mind is buzzing with new ideas and new insights on this big old machine we call the internet. 

The odds are that I am probably working, for working is my entertainment, I guess. I like it that much.

Every so often, we manage to crack one small variable in that larger personal algorithm, and then we see some real progress.

The learning curve doesn’t flatten out or anything like that—not unless you want it to.

But once you get a little ways up from the ground, you can see a long ways and everything down below takes on a whole new aspect.

It’s a pretty good feeling, as I’m sure the reader can imagine.

All it really takes is the discipline to keep at it.

And never underestimate a kid with a dream.

END

Here’s the latest in the Maintenon Mystery Series:

Architect of His Own Destruction, by Louis Shalako.

***