Humans and boundaries

My PG (tourist) season has been full. Which is all to the good.

I've observed something over the years with our fellow creatures. If one concedes even a tiny bit, they continue to pound away at the boundaries until one cries uncle. Or not.

I had one such recently. My breakfast schedule is between 8 and 9 a.m. After she checked in she wheedled her way into making it 7.30 - a very early rise for me. When she did come down for breakfast she announced she was celiac. No gluten. I asked her why she hadn't shared that information with me before her arrival and she confessed I mightn't have taken her. So here I am pantry scrambling and freezer digging. On Day 2 she asked could she do her laundry even though on my profile I say no laundry privileges. I conceded ( I need my head examined!) to take her laundry and do it for her and later folded it and put it on her bed. On Day 3 I asked if she found her laundry on the bed and received the casual: "oh yeah, I guess, thanks". she never moved a plate off the table which nearly all guests do and left her bedroom tossed. And never purchased even a token in my wee shop. A forty something privileged white woman with a healthy bank account (she had shared that much).

Thankfully, she's in a tiny minority of humans who believe that I host for fun and pleasure and am there to fulfil any need they express.

She also helped me considerably to firm up my own boundaries and tell guests that early breakfasts don't work for me, I can't accommodate special dietary requirements unless given at least one week's notice and there's absolutely no laundry.

So I still learn from those who are in my path to teach me what to do but also what not to do.

Arrogance & Extinction

How arrogant of us to think we can live forever, albeit in a more flimsy format. A forever V2.0. Which adds another level of arrogance to the whole scene.

At the accelerated rate of the plundering and subsequent exhausted demise of this planet, some other, more superior being is going to want us to rape and pillage theirs?

See what I mean about arrogant?

Even if possible, who, outside of this tiny earthly realm in their right mind would welcome us?

Wasn't it Stephen Hawking who said we should lie low, we shouldn't be searching for other planets, other beings, for if they find us they will annihilate us as the pestilential plague that we are.

We come up with the means to control our breeding but do we use it? No. We continue to overwhelm this tiny place with a population that is, in most cases, poverty-stricken and starving. We can't even perform the simple task of feeding and housing what we create.

And can we get along with each other? Take a good look around. Animals, birds and fish get along better than us, sharing resources. That is, when we don't exterminate them like we do each other.

We allow paedophiles and misogynists to dictate the terms of our one and only earthly life with the instructions to breed till we drop and exhibit hatred towards others who do not share these 'values'.

We allow rampant corporatocracy to pollute our brains, our land, our woods, our very water and who then proceed to sell the remnants back to us at inflated prices.

I am reminded of all of this as I watch, with horror, the whole deadly plume of crude overwhelming the Gulf of Mexico and wending its way up the Eastern seaboard and maybe right up to Newfoundland.

And what do the supposedly best brains on the planet do? Leave the foxes of BP in charge of the Atlantic hen-house. The foxes who failed every single competency test in the drilling and management of oil-wells.

We are an appalling species. We are not entitled to be in this life. Not to mention any 'next'.

I predict we will be totally extinct within 100 years, maybe less.