Old World Swine

Overpopulation!! Run in Circles! Scream and Shout!

On a forum I frequent, Christian Pipe Smokers, there is an ongoing discussion of the concept of "overpopulation", spurred by the posting of a graph which shows the rapid growth of the last century as a dramatic spike, which it is.

The thing is, population growth is not a matter of mathematics. Children do not arise from the sacred union of Mathematics and Statistics. They are each the result of the free actions of human beings.

Population growth does not drive itself, but is influenced by many factors, just like immigration does not happen as the result of people accidentally drifting over the border in greater and greater numbers. Each comes here as the result of a specifically chosen and purposeful action, or series of actions.

Tracking statistical trends will always result in absurdity if not checked by common sense. It's a bit like me worrying that, since I'm painting twenty hours a week now, where last year I only managed ten, in a few years I'll be painting 320 hours a week... almost twice the number of hours there are in a week. Or worrying that in another decade my daughter will have to cope with the challenges of being 11 feet tall.

Where are all these starving people supposed to come from? How will the Earth manage to produce such an abundance of organisms it cannot support? This seems illogical, to me. Widespread, catastrophic famine could only be caused by a sudden dramatic decrease in the available food supply.

We are aware that the population of the entire planet could fit into the state of Texas with 1000 square feet for each individual?

Taking My Own Advice

It's been a long winter, already. The recent record snows, with their resulting snow days at area schools, have made for some strange weeks where time has seemed almost to stand still and the months are broken into uneven clumps, making it difficult to settle into a regular schedule. Deeply overcast skies have a way of magically turning entire days into protracted mornings, wherein the day just never quite manages to get going.

In addition, I have been more or less buried in work, for which I am grateful, but which monopolizes my time and yet rudely refuses to make me rich. I have spent a great deal of time - increasing amounts of time - with my head stuck in a computer, but have had less and less internet time available for such leisurely and enriching activities as reading or writing (blogging). I have been painting very little.

So, it was in a state of some mental fatigue and ennui that I stepped out onto our porch the other day (sixty degrees!) and somewhat guiltily sat down and lit my pipe. It was only a few minutes later that I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner, for failing to take my own advice. I had grown numb because I had forgotten to take time away from my work obligations for these humanizing pursuits... that is, sitting and smoking and thinking. Not thinking about things - problems -  as if to solve them, but contemplating things.

I contemplated the squirrels. I contemplated the rolling clouds, each the color of gun metal, but with a halo "like burnished bronze", and the pale turquoise sky behind it all. The setting sun was like a candle flame. One could look directly into it as it quivered at the horizon. There was the warm sound of wind in the bare brown trees. A wedge of geese honked overhead and a local hawk arced by me not ten feet away. I could hear his wings part the air, and could even discern a difference in the sounds made by the wing feathers of different types; some whooshing and some making a distinct whistle. He thinks he owns the place. The pipe was warm in my hand.

The effect of the whole scene was like being wrapped in a blanket... while having your scalp massaged.

While the spiritual value of work should not be forgotten, we are not machines. We need time to ease our brains and contemplate what God is doing in nature. I believe we NEED this dialogue with nature just as we need food and air. As many of us in the modern West don't get this proximity to nature in our work, we must take time away from our work to get it.

This is true for me, anyhow. Perhaps I'm a little odd, but I think not that odd. Do yourself a favor; pull your head out of your computer and take a walk. Is it cold? Wear a jacket. Rainy? They have special coats and boots made for that sort of weather, too, I hear. At least get out on the porch and leave your smart phone in the house (no cheating!).

Back in the Freelance Saddle

Really marvelous pipe on the porch this morning. An idyllic morning, with the sun coming up and slanting through the tall oaks, but not as beastly hot as it has been lately. The churchwarden pipe I was smoking (that's a long skinny pipe kind of like they were smoking in Lord of the Rings) has taken a while to break in, but it now smokes beautifully. Definitely in the top 3-4 enjoyable smokes I can remember.

This was after morning prayers (The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and some other prayers, via Corpus Christianum) and really put me in a proper frame of mind to tackle a day of freelance art.

I have a pile to work through. Plans to (possibly) teach in the public schools seem to have pretty well fallen through (barring some kind of miracle), but I have come upon a good source of reliable and not-too-taxing freelance graphic art work that is helping to take the edge off, financially... plus, I've been selling some paintings!

More as I get in the swim of things and the rhythm of the new school year. One big plus about being self-employed is that I can drop my daughter off at high school every morning. I enjoy every minute in her company. I'm also here for the dogs and, well... lots of other stuff that comes up. It's nice to be able to structure your own days. There's dignity in it. Have to stay on top of things, though. Wasted time is a monstrous thing.

God Invented Weekends

I love being a Catholic. The photo above was not set up at all... just a collection of stuff that happened to be there this morning: my favorite pipe, some smoking paraphernalia, prayer book, Rosary and G.K. Chesterton coffee mug. Later tonight, I suppose I should take another photo, only there will likely be a glass of wine instead of the coffee.

There are hedges that need trimming, and half a hundred small chores that cry for attention, but The Boss jovially insisted I take the whole day off and drop by His House later to see him.

Sunday is also a great day to read all the poems Pavel Chichikov has sent through the week. Like a good meal, it takes a little leisure to give them proper attention.

Today (Sunday, July 11) is also day four of the Belloc Novena.

(cross posted at The League of Bearded Catholics)

It's International Pipe Smoking Day!

Pictured above is one of my international pipes, smoking (clutched in my stubby fingers... it's no wonder I never excelled at playing the guitar!). This is on our screened porch, which is a marvelous pipe smoking venue, amenable to peaceful contemplation among the tall oaks. During the winter months, I have taken more often to the Man Cave or, as it is affectionately called in our house, The Den of Manly Pursuits (or DMP, pronounced "dump") for my smokes.

The Dump is also where I keep most of my books, with a special shelf being given over to the works of Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc and Chesterton. At least three of these Four Patrons smoked a pipe. I don't know about Chesterton, but judging frim the time in which he lived, it would not be at all unlikely that he smoked a pipe occasionally, as well. I have personally only seen photos of him with cigars or cigarettes.

Sounds like a good day to drop in at my local pipe shop.

(Cross-posted at The League of Beaded Catholics)

That's Better...

Ahhhh.... feeling nearly human again after doing mortal combat with a virus for a couple of weeks. Many thanks for your patience, and a special thanks to the gracious patron who purchased the painting form my online store yesterday.

Huzzah! Now I can buy alcohol, tobacco and firearms!

This seems to be a week for pipe smoking. The painting that sold is a pipe painting, and I also want to give a shout out to a couple of pipe forums I have enjoyed crashing around in while I was too sick to do anything productive.

The first is the Christian Pipe Smokers forum, where there is always a satisfying blend of curmudgeonly affection and fragrant clouds of grudging camaraderie. There are even a few very agreeable resident atheists and agnostics. Esteemed reader Del (with whom I was once privileged to share a pipe and a pint) turned me on to the site.

In response to one thread, in which the origin of matter was being argued, I recently posted thusly;

First, we might be able to talk more intelligently about the nature of "matter" if we can ever actually find any.

We keep slicing matter into smaller and smaller bits and, while I don't understand it clearly at all, I do understand that it would be very presumptuous any longer to think of matter at any level as something "solid". It seems likely as not to be a state of energy, or a whole panoply of energy states...

A healthy dose of humility along the lines of admitting "We really don't know what the hell matter is" would keep people on both sides [of the creation debate] from making unfounded sweeping judgments.

Another observation is that if the universe were not so ordered, we would never have known how disorderly it is.  That sounds glib, but it's true.

Incidentally... I'm not a big fan of ID "science", because it ultimately seems like a kind of "bait and switch". I definitely believe in a designer, but I don't have high regard for those who pass off ID as hard science. I reject the idea that there is some ultimate choice that must be made between ID science on the one hand, and atheistic science on the other.

Even given that God exists, there will never be any kind of equation you can write out on a blackboard that will end in "= God". It is not a question that mere empirical science is equipped to answer, either in the positive or the negative. But those who think that a lack of scientific evidence for God = a lack of evidence altogether are badly mistaken. There is philosophical evidence - pure reason - that does attest to the existence of God. Check out Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica , for a start.

It's a bit silly of the ID folks to talk as if there is a scientific discipline that could ever prove the existence of God, and it's every bit as silly for atheists to talk as if "science" could in any way be used to disprove the existence of God.

Now, speaking just for myself, as an artist... I don't know why I would be thought especially crazy for looking at the world and recognizing the character of a work of art.

I don't think anyone on the forum would insist that this post or the others must be meaningless and random. So, we can know by experience that meaning of some kind really exists, at least in our communications here. Our words have meaning, road signs have meaning, the Pieta has meaning, "e=mc2" has meaning... how is it that Bergman's The Seventh Seal is meaningful, yet the whole universe is meaningless?

The alternative is to say that our communications (and other things we find meaningful) only seem to have meaning, but really don't. For some reason, we have a sense of meaning, but there really is no meaning.

That seems to me like a colossal feat of denial and self-deception, but it would at least be consistent. Saying that we only project meaning on to reality is the same thing. No one really lives that way or thinks that way, yet some people will talk that way to avoid thinking about the possibility that our lives really do have meaning.

The other forum I have enjoyed lately is the Smokers Forums, a pipe and cigar forum moderated from the U.K.. It's more densely populated and cosmopolitan than the CPS forum, and I don't feel qualified to jump in very often, as I am a novice smoker (only a couple of years of occasional pipe smoking). These guys are like, professors of the pipe.

Finally, tonight is the monthly meeting of The Ozark Pipe Smokers, and I'm looking forward to going. I haven't smoked at all - have had no desire to smoke - since I first got that nasty head cold a few weeks ago. As I'm doing much better, today, I'm anticipating a couple of tasty bowls and some good conversation.

If you're in the area... see you at Romeo's!

More Small Laws

Someone, please TELL me that this new, insane ban on "flavored" tobacco does not apply to pipe tobacco.

Good grief... the gub'ment now decides that tobacco can't be flavored? Will flavored alcohol be the next target of these Orwellian measures? After all, some alcoholic drinks are made with fruity-'licious flavors that might appeal to kids.

"When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." - G.K. Chesterton

Pipe Delinquents & Fly Fishing for a Good Cause

A couple of new (new to me, anyway) pipes.

Our local pipe club, The Ozark Pipe Smokers (TOPS), met again last week. Great meeting, as usual. Great bunch of guys, smoking the pipe weed and shooting the bull, and in between trying to wedge in a few minutes of "business" in order to give at least a gloss of official necessity to the whole thing. We sat indoors for a while, but the weather was so amazingly perfect that we went outside and smoked on the sidewalk by the cobblestone street, looking like a bunch of over-age delinquents, loitering, unsettling the citizens and corrupting the youth with our public display of vice.

I managed to trade a small pipe painting for a nicely reconditioned GBD Topaz pipe (pictured at right) and a tin of Dunhill London Mixture. I also won, in our monthly raffle, another "estate" pipe, a heavily used Ben Wade Standard (and there was much rejoicing).

The Ben Wade needs plenty of work to get it reconditioned, but that will be fun. I got lots of free advice on how to go about it properly, and look forward to fiddling with it in my spare time. I've got enough pipes now that I can begin to think of it as the beginnings of a "collection".

The next day I bought enough tobacco to last me for months or maybe years (at the rate I smoke), but I have learned that one of the advantages to having a surplus of tobacco is that it leaves you plenty to share with others. The guys in the pipe club are very generous with theirs... this last meeting I tried the London Mixture as well as a blend called A Shortcut to Mushrooms.

Don't worry, there were no real mushrooms in it.

One of our members, an avid fly fisherman, is involved in a fund raising event that supports a program called Reel Recovery, which provides fly fishing getaways for those fighting cancer at various stages. Check it out and consider giving them your support (visit the Reel Recovery website).

Coudn't Help Myself

Pipe & Tobacco Tin #1 - (Copyright Timothy Jones, 2009)

I have been wanting to do a series of pieces like this. The pipe club - The Ozark Pipe Smokers (TOPS) meets tomorrow night. Hope they like it!

I'll have to start collecting some more pipes and pipe-smoking paraphernalia (tobacco pipes, that is) so I can have more to paint.

It's International Pipe Smoking Day!

No exposition needed on this first picture, except that the smaller figure with the speech balloon looks kinda like Ronald Reagan.

I only include this picture to make three observations;

1) That's a pretty clever way to do a portrait
2) This image would probably leave Rene Magritte speechless
3) It is not safe to smoke around turpentine-soaked-rags. Do not try this at home.

Link to the International Pipe Smoking Day website!