By Bob Gaydos

Hawk, watching me watching it

Following my own advice, lately I’ve been trying to maintain a sense of serenity in an increasingly untidy world by being more conscious of what’s going on in my own chunk of it. What’s going on around me and what can I do, as physicist/author Thomas Campbell says, to reduce the entropy?

In the simplest terms, which is all I’m qualified to offer, Campbell’s book, “My Big TOE (Theory of Everything)”, uses physics and mathematics to explain, among other things, that consciousness is fundamental in the universe, and that the goal of the Larger Consciousness System is reduction of entropy, or disorder.

       As part of that system, I feel I have to do my part. So I focused on my world. No politics.

     Well, the biggest news story around here has been a massive fire that has consumed acres of forest around Greenwood Lake, a lovely spot which sits on the border of New York and New Jersey. The fire has raged for days in this area, which has been uncharacteristically rain-free for weeks. I’m trying not to speculate that global warming, which some people say doesn’t exist, has had any part in this change of weather pattern.

 The positive news is that no homes have been destroyed as of this writing and no evacuations have been necessary thus far. 

    However, an 18-year-old parks employee, helping with the massive fire control effort, was killed when a tree fell on him. A tragedy. And I’ve seen no account of the significant toll the fire has surely taken on the wildlife that call the forest home.

       Connecting those dots, it has been all too easy to notice the toll taken on wildlife in my neighborhood by the confluence of mating season, the end of Daylight Savings Time and the steady increase in land development and consequent reduction of forest space for deer to live  free and safely.

     A 10-minute drive this morning produced three deer carcasses on the side of the road. Another drive the other night, about 15 minutes, resulted in close encounters with half a dozen deer.

      Four friends of mine have had direct contact with deer this season, the result being one totaled Subaru, one dead buck and three trips to the repair shop. Fortunately, none of my friends was hurt.

       Counting raccoons, squirrels, foxes and other wildlife just out there looking for some food, there were more than 35,000 animal-related crashes in New York State in 2023, according to the Institute for Traffic Safety Management & Research. That’s about one every 15 minutes. 

      My limited contribution to reducing the entropy in this regard has been to utilize my cataracts-free eyes gratefully and diligently when on the road. Really, it’s more like self-preservation.

     As I was writing this column, I noticed a hawk sitting on a branch of a tree out back. Consciousness, I said to myself. So I sat and watched the hawk as the hawk sat and watched whatever was going on in our patch of New York.

     Not much. The dogs, much too big to be prey for this predator in any case, were in the house. There were no squirrels, chipmunks or rabbits to be seen. We, the hawk and I, sat and watched for 15 minutes. Very patient bird.

      Then, suddenly, he or she took off, flying swiftly to our neighbors’ property and an apparent target of opportunity. Out of my sight. Not sure I had much effect on the entropy there.

     But, as fate, or synchronicity, would have it, just as the hawk flew off, a bulletin from The New York Times popped up on my phone. Donald Trump was planning to nominate Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

      Talk about potential entropy. Stefanik went from being a fairly normal middle-of-the-road Republican to a number one Trump stooge and apologist literally overnight. No qualms. No apologies. No explanation.  Like that hawk, just waiting for her opportunity.

     Yeah, it’s politics, but she’s from upstate New York and strongly supported George Santos, the phony disgraced congressman from Long Island, when he ran for Congress. We like to keep our portion of the Empire State free from such, umm, entropy sources.

      Sorry, readers. Sorry, Mr. Campbell. Guess you could call that a slip. Creature of habit. 

By Bob Gaydos

The monolith in Utah. The first of three that have mysteriously appeared.

     They’re here. 

      Who’s here? Where?

     Them! They’re here. Well, actually, they seem to be everywhere.

       Who?

       Them. You know, the ones who planted a 10-foot tall, three-sided silver monolith into the rocky ground of an isolated section of southeast Utah populated only by bighorn sheep. Not to mention another monolith in Romania and another one in California. What a week. No sooner did one disappear than another appeared. It’s like a game of musical monoliths, without the music. As far as we know.

        What do you mean?

       Well, the three monoliths all popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, in remote areas of the planet, at the same time the Arecibo Radio Observatory, our famed ear to the universe, was falling down on itself in Puerto Rico. It’s almost as if there’s a silent message in the monoliths.

         But the Utah monolith was gone two days after it appeared — what’s up with that?

        Well, it was reportedly carted off by a bunch of preserve the wilderness types. “Leave no trace,” you know? Their thinking is that some artist planted the monolith in a desolate part of Utah, but that it really belonged in a museum. A lot of people made the connection with the “2001”  monolith. A joke, they said. In any event, the wilderness group apparently tracked it down — like a lot of other people – knocked it down and took it away, rivets and all. The removers also supposedly said they didn’t think it was safe to have a lot of people wandering around in such rugged, isolated country looking for the object.

       Somebody supposedly also took pictures of the whole removal operation and some people wrote media reports on it. Everyone said definitively that the monolith wasn’t the work of extraterrestrials. After all, it had rivets.

        Now, I’m not a big conspiracy guy, but I’m also more inclined to go with synchronicity over coincidence. And, our government has been known to hide information pertaining to possible connection with alien contact. No one knows who planted the Utah monolith and no one checked on the crew that removed it. And no one knows how the one in Romania appeared and disappeared. Or where the one in California came from.

       So what are you saying?

      Think about it. The planet is a mess right now. Pandemic — a million-and-a-half deaths. Global warming. Widespread hunger.  Economic instability. Polluted waters. Constant war. Racial strife. Trump.

       Too much entropy. Disorder on a global scale. The universe, we believe, prefers order. It might have grown tired of waiting for our tiny part of it to figure things out and sent some clues to help restore some sense of order. I think they may have finally lost patience with us. I mean, time may be relative and all, but even the universe apparently has its limits. Enough is enough, you know?

      What could the message possibly be? Maybe, take a break from killing each other. Stop polluting your air and water. Learn to live with all forms of life so you don’t kill yourselves with disease. Share your food. Educate your young people. Live by the rules your religions profess. Love and respect one another. We are all in this together.

        The message and the means to lowering the entropy may well have been contained in one or all of the monoliths, but we couldn’t decipher it. Or not. The monoliths may simply have been planted to get our attention off the chaos we have caused. But by whom?

        I live in an area known as the UFO capital of the Northeast. Pine Bush, N.Y. I know no one has reported seeing any UFOs in connection with any of the monoliths, but who says extraterrestrials have to travel only in ways that we earthlings can imagine. Maybe they don’t need rockets to move through time and space. Maybe they look like us. Maybe they’re not green. Who knows? In any event, I wouldn’t mind seeing one of these monoliths appear in our neighborhood. Smack dab in the middle of Main Street in front of Pudgy’s’ pizzeria. I can pretty much guarantee there wouldn’t be a great rush to tear it down and cart it off to who knows where. Some people around here are serious about learning about intelligent life not of this planet.

       We earthlings are predictably set in our ways of thinking of many things, including extraterrestrial intelligence. Little green men and UFOs. They don’t use rivets. Or stainless steel. But why not? How do we know? Yes, maybe these really were just clever pranks by an international — synchronistic? — conspiracy of artists. Maybe we should then thank them for reminding us of our infinitesimal place in the universe and how we’re destroying it. And, maybe we should try to think about where the idea for such a conspiracy came from in the first place. Maybe Arecibo wasn’t the only way to receive messages from elsewhere. Maybe the universe has other ways of communicating. Maybe there’s a message right before our eyes.

         Never mind out there; maybe they’re here already.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is artist-in-residence at zestoforange.com.

By Bob Gaydos

Donald Trump is messing with my journalistic instincts. How do I know? Well, I never got past the headline of the Facebook post that informed me psychologists were diagnosing something new among their patients, informally called TAD — Trump Anxiety Disorder.

I never bothered to read the article. Of course they are, I said to myself. What took them so long? The whole damn country is suffering from it. We’re one, big, herky-jerky mass of resentment and anxiety just waiting for the next tweet to make us great again. Or have us at each other’s throats.

I recognize the symptoms in myself every morning when I wake up and remember that the sorry excuse for a human being called Trump still lives in the White House and millions of Americans are apparently OK with that. I’ve also been told that acceptance is the key to serenity and that I don’t have to like the situation to retain my sanity, just accept that it is. So I’ve now given up trying to figure out or reason with the Trumpsters. The universe and history will deal with them.

But as someone who has been trained and conditioned over time to write about such things as a colossal upheaval of the moral underpinnings of the supposed defender of democracy, equality and justice on the planet (i.e. the United States), I also feel obliged to try to write despite the angst. To report, if you will, on the latest outrage. But really …

There’s no keeping up. Pick a topic. Is it Korea, Russia, the wall, trade wars, utter incompetence, lies, NATO, Iran, hush money for sex with porn stars, China, lies, kneeling football players, the queen, racism, ignorance, attacks on reporters, lies, Hillary, tax cuts for the rich, boorishness, caging immigrant kids, nepotism, the budget deficit, witch hunts, lies …?

It’s all different, yet all the same. Follow the bouncing ball. Three-card Monte. What did he just say? So, while I may have Trump Anxiety Disorder, I think I’m also suffering from what the mental health professionals call a co-occurring condition — Trump Fatigue Symptom.

It’s downright tiring writing the same thing over and over again: Dotard did/said something dumb or cruel, or both. Then he lied about it. Republicans didn’t care (they’ve committed suicide) and his loyalists cheered. End of story.

The end of story I’m hoping for, of course, is one written by Special Counsel Robert Mueller: Trump led out in handcuffs, along with his family and cronies. But I’m also looking for a good read in a chapter to be written in November — the midterm elections. If there’s not a big Blue Wave vote for Congress, TAD will become epidemic I fear.

Meanwhile, someone who cares about me and is curious about the true meaning of life (it’s not politics or baseball, I’m told), has steered me to some people who seem to have a pretty good handle on it. Eckhart Tolle. Mooji. Rupert Spira. Deepak Chopra.Tom Campbell. Thanks to YouTube, they are helping me to change my outlook, maybe even lower my anxiety level.

The key is simply to be, these enlightened men say. I am not my thoughts. I am not even my body. Consciousness (not the Dotard) is in charge. All I have is now. Be present. (Have lunch with my sons.) Meet everything in the moment. Be aware of being aware. (Do all-you-can-eat sushi every Sunday.) Lower the entropy (disorder) in a system (consciousness) and increase the cooperation, order, caring, even love. There are no coincidences.

This is all a virtual reality, says Campbell, a physicist. In that case, I want to be the player in charge of the Dotard’s avatar. I think I could bring plenty of energy to that experience, appreciate every moment and lower the entropy of the entire planet.

It’s working slowly.

Also, please vote Democrat.

rjgaydos@gmail.com