For a long time I was continually harassed and pestered by memories of all the people who bullied me when I was in school. The merories would not leave me alone, and brought back all the pain I'd suffered back then. Finally, I was so furious and frustrated with it that I imagined myself as a small child, maybe 6-7 years old, then imagined beating that child to death right in front of the bullies, screaming at them, "Was this what you wanted?" They looked horrified, but it was too late. I wonder: did I beat my creativity and will to write to death in doing that? Is that why I can't write now?

For months I've been unable to write much of anything, including blog entries. But there's something that has been on my mind for a long time that I want to write about, and maybe not writing it out is part of my writer's block. So here goes:

A quarter of a billion years ago, at the end of the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era, the greatest mass extinction of all time occurred, nearly wiping out complex life on Earth. It may even have come close to doing in bacterial life, though the processes responsible for it stopped before that point. It involved intense global warming -- a rise of some 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the average global termperature -- as well as deoxygenation of the oceeans and a drastic reduction of atmospheric oxygen levels. The causes apparently included massive outpourings of magma from a region that is now Siberia, building the Siberian Traps, a great mountain chain, and releasing countless tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. When it was done, 70 percent of all species on land and 96 percent of marine species were gone, extinct, in the largest mass extinction Earth has ever known.

Could anything like that happen now? Maybe -- for one thing, the Sun is a good deal hotter and brighter than it was back then, so it wouldn't take as much in the way of greenhouse gases to achieve the same amount of global warming. But where would such gases come from? -- If you go out at all, you see them everday: cars, trucks, buses, and even jets flying overhead pumping out countless megatons of carbon dioxide, with more on the road and in the skies every year. One human being in one car is no threat. Billions of people on the road in as many as a billion vehicles per day, on the other hand, contribute enormously to atmospheric CO2. Add in methane from industrial processes and, lately, melting marine and tundra clathrates -- methane is a ferocious greenhouse gas, 25 times more potent in that role than carbon dioxide -- and water vapor (another greenhouse gas) evaporates from a warming ocean, and you have a witch's-brew which, added to every day over decades, definitey can make for global warming. And does.

What do I believe ought to be done about it? Certainly not a government-based "solution," which is bound to corrupt over time into a completely useless exercise in futility, much as the Soviet Union's food distribution networks and the rest of its economy went completely to hell well before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. If there is to be a solution, it has to be technological, and driven by the free market -- when government meddles in anything, it robs the world of the initiative needed for radical technological and scientific development and application, after all. So I don't see an immediate solution to the problem -- and if there is one, it isn't going to be governmental.

For which reason we may be staring mass extinction in the face -- a mass extinction that could do it for Homo sapiens, as well. Nor will going back to primitive technologies work -- it many cases, it isn't possible, and in others, the "solution" would be worse than the original problem. I think we're screwed. I pray I'm wrong, but so far I can't see how.

So why am I writing this, then? Out of a forlorn hope that at least it might kick-start my writing again. I'm sick and tired of not being able to write. Maybe writing this will help.

On July 30, 2006 there was a disastrous fire in my building. It took place on the sixth floor, and killed two people as well as rendering others homeless. It started in an apartment on the southern end of this building with a cooking fire -- the man had begun cooking something in oil, and fell asleep while it was cooking. He woke to a fire started bu the oil, and panicked, and tried to put it out, probably with water, the worst thing to do. There was a stack of plastic bags he'd accumulated near the stove, and it caught fire. The result was an inferno. The man ran out onto his porch and fell 50 feet to his death on the concrete.

Yesterday I talked with someone who had been here on the outside of the building when the man responsible for the fire burst onto his porch, all afire, and fell over the railing to his death. I can't imagine the horror the narrator must have felt. The story is sticking with me. I wish I could get rid of it. Nightmares like that I don't need.

They heat-treated my apartment for bedbugs (in the process killing my rubber-tree plant, but that's another story). I had to board my cat and stay out of my apartment for eight hours. Then I came in, opened up the patio door to cool the place down, got ready for bed, and crashed. When I woke up the itching in my hands and arms was gone. I thought maybe I'm allergic to bedbugs, and with them gone, no itch. But the itch is back, and I've got strange red blotches all over my legs. Something is wrong here. I'm seeing my GP tomorrow, and I'll ask him to get to the bottom of this maybe with q visit to an allergist.

I'm also having odd episodes involving experiencing a wooshing noise and a feeling of pressure on my head when I turn my head in certain ways or hear a noise. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it's very alarming. Mini-stroke? I'll ask him to check that out, too.

The itching on my arms and hands finally got so bad that I broke down and bought anti-itch gel at Rite Aid. It doesn't help -- I can cover my arms with it and they still itch and itch and itch. I use a hairbrush to scratch with because the bristles, which are set close together, do a better job than my fingernails do, with less pain. I'm still broken out heavily on my arms -- could be a medication allergy, or due to bedbugs, which I've got (they're treating my room for that next Tuesday). All the other anti-itch compounds at Rite Aid had exactly the same ingredient -- 2% diphenhistamine. No help there.

This is just to keep my account active. Nothing much to report.

I've been following the bombings at the Boston Marathon as well as I can on AOL News -- don't have a working TV. It's almost certainly a case of domestic terrorism -- if Al Qaeda or the like were responsible for it, by now, six or seven hours after the bombs went off, they'd have been braying their "triumph" all over the place. So somebody local did this. May they catch the bastard(s) soon, and hang 'em high!

I'm having a medication reaction of some kind that involves intense itching of my hands, feet, arms, and lower legs. And no calomine lotion here. This is driving me crazy!

Just keeping my blog active. LJ just dinged my credit-card for dues, so I'd better make it worth it.