Alternative Universes

"Quantum physics is the physics of possibilities. And not just material possibilities, but also possibilities of meaning, of feeling, and of intuiting. You choose everything you experience from these possibilities, so quantum physics is a way of understanding your life as one long series of choices that are in themselves the ultimate acts of creativity."

-Amit Goswami

These wakeups on Peg's work days are getting tougher, simply because the days are growing shorter and it just feels less natural to shuffle around the bedroom in darkness than awakening after the sun rises.

Still there's a little light, not like the pitch black until nearly eight a.m. that awaits us in December, if we get there.

I was thinking about "what ifs" this morning, but before going there figured I should report on the latest in the bat saga.

Last night as we were making our way down the hall to the bedroom I noticed a black blob on the blind next to P's side of the bed. It proved to be--you guessed it--our bat, apparently taking a breather in the air conditioning. I went back to the laundry room to grab the broom so I could swat the little bugger into oblivion, but Peg intervened.

"Poor little guy. I bet he's exhausted."

This is a bat. You know, the kind that carry rabies and crap all over your attic.

But P was having none of my plan to execute the amazingly calm flying rat, who just hung there while we debated his fate only a few feet away.

Peg found a bedsheet and handed me one corner, the plan being to catch the bat and safely release him into the parking lot. We moved quickly to gather him into the sheet before he realized what was up. Oddly, there was no flailing, or any other effort at escape. Peg then handed me the sheet with the bat in it, and pulled open the front door so I could go outside and send him on his way.

But here's the weird part--when I tossed the blanket out into the parking lot, nothing flew out that I could see. Nor was there a bat carcass hiding in the sheet, which I flipped a couple times to see if he'd hidden in a fold. I'm pretty sure we got him, but it's like he just disappeared as soon as he was corralled.

So there's that.

Yesterday I read a piece that posed the offhand question of how the pandemic might have turned out if the nation's response was being managed not by Dr. Fauci, but by RFK, Jr. The inference was that there might have been no vaccine, or maybe little use of it by the population, and the plague would have run its course the old fashioned way--spreading through the entire population, killing the weak ones, until we achieved herd immunity for a time. Globally, studies show that nearly 20 million more people would have died in that scenario.

That got me thinking about things that haven't happened, omissions from our reality brought on by the choices we've made as a country over the last couple years. We haven't had the support of any of our historical allies in this ill-advised war with Iran, because DJT insulted and ran them off a long time ago. So we're losing this war because of a choice to become a lone wolf. And the choice of going to war over nothing but the Epstein files has sent a ripple through our economy and that of the rest of the planet that has sent us spiraling back to the oil shock induced stagflation of the '70s. It didn't have to be this way.

One wonders how different our medical staffs, construction and hospitality workers look with the immigrant chain that supplied so many of them largely dried up.

In a larger sense, what hospitals, primary care resources, transportation infrastructure, and a whole host of other things that would make life in this country better for the people who live here are missing or falling apart to pay for military adventures and tax cuts. That's an alternative reality I imagine most of us would prefer to live in, but elections have consequences and so here we are.

Time to clean up for a quick call in a few minutes, then off with Dean to the vet to check his ears after he spent chunks of yesterday digging at one ear and crying. We're flying the cats back to Florida tomorrow morning in the Columbia, and I'd hate to put him through climb and descent with goop in his ears.