The Maryland Vital Statistics Administration released a graph of drug- and alcohol-related deaths between 2007 and 2015. The good news is that deaths from overuse of benzodiazepines and other sedative drugs have fallen slightly. The bad news is that deaths from overdoses of heroin, prescription opioids, fentanyl, alcohol, and cocaine have increased. We do have a fully developed culture of drugs, and our menu of deadly components far exceeds that of the ancient civilizations.
 
Oh! Yes. The Greeks and Romans used drugs. I suppose people have sought mind-altering substances since the first human tripped on a mushroom. “Hey, Gork, you know what? I ate this thing last night and next thing I know I’m riding a mammoth through the village. Did anyone see me do that? I can’t find any tracks though I did seem to step in some dung. Look here, it’s still on my foot.”
 
What’s our problem? Is it the world as it is? Do we wish it to be otherwise? In 1896 A. E. Housman captured the idea in “Terrence, this is stupid stuff.” Here’s part of the poem:
 
To see the world as the world’s not.
 And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
 
It’s always going to be “the old world yet.” There’s nothing we can ingest, breathe in, or inject that will change that fact. The place we vacate mentally is the place we wake to when our full rationality returns. Sorry. This is what you get for living on Earth.
 
“Hey, this isn’t going to become one of those ‘you-can-do-better-power-of-positive-living’ lectures, is it? You’re not going to say ‘just don’t do drugs,’ are you? You know, some people just like the feeling or mental state that drugs provide. They’re not esca… okay, maybe they are a bit.”
 
“No, I don’t have any answers. I do know that we all face harsh realities, and I also know that preparing for and anticipating them is better than any form of escapism. I don’t personally choose drugs as an escape or as a way to ‘enhance’ the place where I live. But that’s just me.
 
I confess I do like living on this planet, and I’m glad I chose it over all the other heavenly bodies in the Solar System or even over all those many recently discovered exoplanets. I also confess that I’m probably relatively simple-minded because I am easily fascinated by the composition of the planet, including its many organisms and processes around me. However, now that I think about it, I would advise people who want to escape to read that six score year-old poem by A. E. Housman. The pervasive theme of this website is predicated on ways to face harsh realities that life offers almost daily, and Housman did a good job of foreshadowing that theme. I’ll end with these lines from Housman”:
 
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
 

 
 
 
 

Pyro (fire). Cepahlus (head). Dubius (Doubtful). No one has seen the vermilion flycatcher called Pyrocephalus dubius on the island of San Cristóbal in the Galápagos since 1987. Its existence is doubtful. Though only recently discovered, the species is already believed to be extinct.
 
The tiny vermilion flycatcher seems to have gone the way of the Neandertals. There’s speculation about causes. Rats introduced to the island by humans might have eaten the birds’ eggs. No one knows for sure, but we might suspect that humans practice the arithmetic of subtraction: Wherever we’ve been, we’ve disrupted whatever preceded us.
 
What if, just what if, some 200,000 years ago some Neandertal scientists—I know, no Neandert(h)al was a scientist as we define scientist—discovered Homo sapiens only to discover within decades or a millennia or two that the new species had disappeared “shortly” after its discovery? Of course, that didn’t happen. In fact, we Homo sapiens types discovered Neandertals only to find that a short time later they became extinct.
 
We can really change a place, can’t we? Humanity seems to be as effective an agent of extinction as an incoming fiery bolide seems indubitably to have hastened the demise of the dinosaurs.  

Wheat farmers make their money on the basis of falling number, the result of a viscosity test. The presence of alpha-amylase, an enzyme, alters the viscosity of wheat slurry through which the fall of a stirrer is timed. A falling number below 300 seconds portends bad news for farmers who might have to take a hit on their crop. Prices can drop by well over a dollar a bushel and can drop below the break-even point on the basis of the falling number. At the end of the summer of 2016 there’s some concern that the year’s Idaho wheat crop has falling falling numbers.
 
Everyday wheat-eaters are probably unaware that an agricultural economy rests on a simple viscosity test of some boiled wheat. And the test is neither time-consuming nor difficult. What’s the practical difference between low and high falling numbers that is of concern to wheat consumers? A low falling number caused by too much alpha-amylase results in the production of more sugar that, in turn, makes a dough more sticky and gummy, and, therefore, less desirable for human consumption.
 
Aren’t we a bit spoiled? In hunger, I would think that any wheat will suffice. That we have desirable levels of alpha-amylase speaks volumes about how far we have separated ourselves from mere subsistence. Most bread-eaters have to have special quality wheat without even knowing what gives wheat that desirable quality. At the same time that we well-fed industrialized populations recognize wheat quality in the bread we consume, we hear constant calls for sustainability and for—as though we could get “back to Nature” in the sense first proclaimed by nineteenth century Romantic writers—a simple life. Simple? My gosh! This is the gap between the satiated and unsatiated. We test for viscosity in wheat slurry! Is there some hypocrisy in our desire to “save” the planet while we live on it, use it, and require its soils and rains to produce wheat with low alpha-amylase?
 
So, thinking we are “getting back to Nature” and “saving the planet,” we drive our electric cars home to our solar-powered houses where we eat bread made from wheat with a high falling number. Are we modern Marie Antoinettes? If the falling number falls, should we send the wheat to the Third World? “Your Majesty, the people are complaining that their bread is unpalatable because the dough is sticky and gummy. We sent them the high alpha-amylase wheat. We tried to help them—at a price, of course—but even in their famine they seem ungrateful.”
 
Do we, like Marie, reply, “Well, if they don’t like the high-amylase bread, let them eat cake”? 

In 1347 a philosopher named Nicholas of Autrecourt burned his own books in Rome. He had to. Someone had convinced Pope Clement VI that Nicholas was spreading heretical thought. As a result of the burning, we don’t have a complete view of his work. Too bad. Nicholas was a proponent of a conservation principle, that a rearrangement of atoms was the reason for both the newness of material objects and their aging and decay. Well, who can blame the Pope? He wasn’t a scientist and the educated advisors weren’t, by today's standards, really that educated.
 
Of course, history books tell many stories of book burning, and in every instance, the conflagration of ideas erases something we might have been able to use to further our knowledge of ourselves and our world. Book burning is a relatively common occurrence if one considers censorship of ideas its virtual form. Worse, obviously, is people burning. That’s happened numerous times and happens today. We can think of Giordano Bruno’s murder by fire as an example. Like Nicholas of Autrecourt, Bruno had some unpopular ideas that bumped into the culture du jour.
 
There is something worrisome in the desire to burn books—and people—for their ideas. And that is the potential in all of us to burn not only the ideas of others, but also our own ideas. What could I mean by that?
 
It’s taken you years to get where you are mentally. Along the temporal journey you acquired numerous ideas that you probably altered as you encountered new ways of thinking. Just going through the maturation process alone changed you, and in maturing, you look back at what you were quizzically. “Why did I think that? Why did I do that?” But you can’t look back with regret over the ways of thinking that carried you through your “dumb” years. You wouldn’t be who you are without having gone through ideas you now find untenable concepts. You don’t have to burn the “books” of your past. You should keep them for study and reference. They are the context in which you understand any “new book.”
 
Everyone takes to a book something of his or her past. That’s a reason that you might read a book differently from anyone else, including the author. And, since you were the author of your own “books,” written years ago, you now “read” and interpret them in light of a past that includes their very writing.
 
Our species has always had book burners and people burners. In many instances, they were “one and the same.” If you have a desire to strike a match, use its light to illuminate, rather than to burn, the "books" of your life.

​Amorphous Place: Depression as Disorder
 
Order. Face it. You like it. You crave it. You are an example of it when you are healthy. Order.
 
Think of its forms, the forms of order. There’s control that is manifest in imposing will upon thing, process, and life. Problem is that any control that imposes order is difficult to control. Permanent control is impossible. Fallen dictators attest to the process. Incarcerated abusive spouses attest, also. We like personal control while we disdain the control of and by others. Yet, there’s that underlying desire for personal and social order that gives us meaning and security.
 
There is also some natural physical order, order in origin beyond conscious control that is manifest in, for example, the evolution of a mature temperate forest. The ecology evolves under checks and balances that display no consciousness. Problem is that any order involving some equilibrium is, in reaching equilibrium, already on the verge of disequilibrium, on the verge of some disorder. And every overarching and macro order might span specific micro disorders. One has to go to the quantum level to see some undisturbed order, the elements in their columns and rows of the periodic table. If disorder occurs there or in the four fundamental forces, then it’s goodbye to all order. Change the strength of the gravitational or electromagnetic forces, and you make an un-makeable universe.   
 
So, we live in a world with at least two kinds of order: Natural and anthropogenic. We can do little more than disrupt the natural kind by cutting down forests, for example, or by splitting the atom. Yes, we are disorderers, but one could argue that we, like everything “natural”—everything that is in the universe—are part of the natural order. That makes our disordering Nature ironically part of the natural order.
 
There’s little doubt that anthropogenic order is the product of conscious control. Our difficulty in maintaining it lies in our twofold psychic nature: A conscious nature and an unconscious one driven by, well, you name it: Everything from hormones to cultural archetypes, from pressure to survive to ennui, or from natural disasters to sunny, low-humidity days under blue skies above green grass.
 
Countering an ordered life is the disordered one, and little in human makeup disorders more than depression. During the tenure of depression care fades, energy wanes in some entropic fashion, and even the craving for order—and, thus, release from depression—dissipates like a cloud above a whistling teapot. Depression is the antithesis of order. Depression is an amorphous place. It is a disordered one because it scatters what once was both regular and, like the elements, periodic.
 
Do you find it at least a bit interesting that depression, the harbinger of disorder, is ironically periodic. How can we characterize it: Waxing and waning, coming and going, rising and falling? Or, at least its effects seem so. Order in disorder. Isn’t that just like our human world? We can’t even mess up messing up.
 
Is there some solution to the disorder of depression? Let me throw something out there: Put something in order, anything: Pencils on a desk, socks in a drawer, food in the refrigerator. Step back. Look at the product of ordering. Think about the process of putting some things in order, making micro-order beneath overarching macro-disorder. Calendars might work. Even the depressed can see dates on which something will happen. Organize a week. “Eat salad on Monday; eat cereal on Tuesday” or “Take out garbage on Monday; do laundry on Tuesday.” Micro-order within weeklong macro-disorder.
 
Too simple? We can guess that no logical argument will reduce depression. Most people enduring depression know they are depressed. But being in a place of disorder makes changing attitude difficult. Some of the depressed might not realize they stand in an amorphous place, however. There’s no way to force someone to care about a disordered existence. But a little bit of ordering might just open the door to a more ordered life while escaping the periodic disorder of depression.
 
Think of it as a Linnaean problem, you know, doing what Linnaeus did, looking at the vast diversity of life and figuring out how to place it into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species. He had an overwhelming task. Life seemed disordered with all its strange animals and plants. But starting with some basics, such as those categories that define the kingdoms was a start. And the phyla next. Grouping them, he saw further arrangements from the classes on down. And the process might have been at times, inductive. This species seems most like that, and together they seem like another, and so on building to genera, families, and eventually to kingdoms. He must, like Mendeleev seeing an arrangement that made sense in periodicity have found some joy and satisfaction in seeing orderly relationships.
 
Depressed? Put something, anything in order. Then something else. And so on. The amorphous will morph into order, the antithesis of depression’s disorder.

Who likes the sound a dentist’s drill makes in the mouth? The very thought of a visit to the dentist is enough to cause anxiety in many people. Of course, there are “outs.” Novacain is one. Nitrous oxide is another. Halcion pills, yet another option. All “outs” are devoted to two causes, the elimination of pain and the anxiety associated with a painful experience.
 
Was I lucky? As a child I had a dentist who convinced me that I did not need any sedation during the drilling. Maybe he was a sadist. I don’t think so. I believe those many years ago that Dr. So-n-So (I have no recollection of his name) truly believed in the process of “mind over matter.” He taught me to relax. He talked incessantly while he drilled, telling one unrelated story after another. It worked. With the exception of getting a root canal, I have never needed any type of sedation in the dentist’s office.
 
I don’t have his stories stored in memory, but something makes my brain go into a relaxed mode in the dentist’s chair, a place most people dread. My process can be as simple as concentrating on relaxing my hands on the chair's armrests. Do I feel pain? Of course. I haven’t eliminated the pain. It’s still there, but attitude seems to work its magic. I know that the drilling is temporary. I know that the end result is long term tooth health. I also know that I don’t have to feel the prick of the novacain needle nor experience the drowsiness of nitrous oxide. The dentist finishes. I jump up from the chair. The process was not unendurable, and I feel I have conquered a human frailty, at least temporarily with the exception of my one limit: A root canal.
 
Of course, my experience is not yours. You didn’t have my dentist when you were very young and impressionable. That’s okay. You can make use of the various kinds of sedation the dentist offers. You’re not weak because you use one, just as I am not strong because I don’t. I’ve had decades of practice since the days of my childhood office visits.
 
But my little anecdote does convey a message. Sometimes the lesser of two seeming evils or hardships isn’t an evil of any kind, though it might be a temporary hardship. Sometimes an apparent “evil” or hardship is just an opportunity to learn who we are by challenging our limits. 

Fossil hunting is both a profession and a hobby. It has led to an unraveling of Earth’s Phanerozoic history, the time of “visible” life that stretches back over a half billion years. Because the fossil record contains the bias of erosion, destruction, and burial of rocks, a bias that makes the record incomplete, paleontologists and hobbyists do not have a perfect retelling of life. Not all ancient life has been preserved, and among the fossil lineages, there are gaps either because nothing in the time period was fossilized or because those individuals that were once preserved were later destroyed.
 
Enter Brachiospongia. Now sponges are the simplest of animals. No nervous system. No tissues. Just a couple of layers of specialized cells all somehow acting in unison. No means of locomotion. Sponges just sit filtering water for microscopic food; they are sessile creatures, encrusting whatever hard material is available or standing solitary. Some are very colorful—though they usually lose their color quickly when they are removed from their marine environment.
 
Fossils of Brachiospongia digitata and B. turberculata James might be mistaken for a starfish. There is a central disk from which fingerlike lobes protrude. Both species are Ordovician in age; that puts them way back in life history, sometime between 485.4 and 443.8 million years ago. At that time Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ontario all lay on or near the equator, and all were covered by tropical waters. This was Brachiospongia’s environment.
 
So, there is a fossil record of Brachiospongia in North America. Its fossils are found nowhere else in the world except in Scotland. Scotland? That’s across the Atlantic, isn’t it? Not then. There was no Atlantic. Since the Ordovician, the place has moved. At that time it was either attached to or very near North America.
 
Geologists are used to seeing widely separated fossils of a genus or species because they know that sea-floor spreading has moved the continents—and is still moving them. All places have in their long histories moved. We see the effects of movement today in earthquakes, such as those that occur along the San Andreas Fault or those that devastate places like Italy. Fossiliferous rocks move with the moving seafloors and neighboring continents. Thus, Brachiospongia fossils of North America and Scotland were at one time neighbors whose marine residences, now preserved in rock, moved.
 
Here’s a human analog: Birds of a feather flock together. Wait! That’s not human, is it? Okay, people of like minds flock together, often becoming sessile in their thinking. Changes to underlying ideologies are often as slow as sea-floor spreading (in Iceland, it’s a centimeter per year) interrupted by convulsive earthquake-like revolutions of thought that become locked in place until the next convulsion. But the general trend is slow and inexorable, and the process is a repeating one. We’ve established the “continents” of thought, and most ideologies are fossilized in those “rocks.” True, we might find some separated by continent or country, but their origins lie in the deep human past. And just as Brachiospongia might be mistaken for a starfish fossil, some ideologies might be mistaken for superficially similar forms.
 
By the end of the Ordovician Period, most, if not all the modern phyla (the body types or forms) had been established. And long ago, in human terms, the ideologies some consider to be “new” were established and even fossilized. But the Orodovician is known for another event, an extinction. Brachiospongia didn’t survive. Its dead remnants moved passively with spreading seafloors. Because of the time involved, those fossils are widely separated, but they are still related, and they were of singular origin.
 
How have the variations of your fossilized ideology spread across the planet? How has it been mistaken for something it was not? What extinction processes might be at work to bury it in the rocks of human history? 

You walk into a place you’ve never entered. You look around. Much of what you see makes sense. Things that belong on the floor are on the floor. Things for the walls, on the walls, and the ceiling stuff, too, is where you would expect it. It all seems to make sense.
 
Of course, someone could rearrange everything. You know, put the ceiling stuff on the floor and vice versa. Such an arrangement would certainly catch your eye. But why? Well, as you know, you’ve come to expect certain arrangements that seem to be “orderly ones.” You recognize arrangements (sets) by use and usefulness and by the laws of nature, like gravity, all contexts of meaning. The absence of such contexts signals meaninglessness.  
 
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we’ve been writing about meaning. We’ve run the entire philosophical spectrum of explanations. Meaning derives from culture. Meaning derives from a set of natural laws. Meaning derives from language. No. Check that. Language derives from meaning. Meaning is variable. Meaningfulness is dependent on mind. No meaning is independent of human consciousness. The universe is imbued with meaning. Or maybe not. Sometimes our thoughts about meaning seem like light beams bouncing in a room full of mirrors and crystals. Interference patterns occur as thoughts contradict and cancel one another.
 
Meaninglessness is a problem of identity. I know who I am because I find meaning in thing and process. If neither the arrangements of the material world nor the processes at work in the universe have discernible order, then identity of any kind diminishes or disappears. Identity requires meaning, and in turn, all meaning is a matter of arrangement, that, in its turn, is dependent upon a background, a context, a “world.”
 
Meaninglessness is the background against which we see the meaningful, and, by extension, our own meaningfulness. Meaninglessness is the context of identity. It is the place without arrangement on which arrangements are superposed.
 
Now, your argument: “I can walk into a self-contained room, see the arrangement of everything, and not detect any chaos or meaninglessness. The room has meaning by and in itself.”
 
“No,” I counter, “the room into which you walk is one of many into which you have walked, and it lies in a larger universe of thing and process that are the context for any room. You look out at a world of seeming chaos and meaninglessness. Chaotic natural disasters, chaotic relationships, chaotic random acts of violence. And you identify yourself as ‘not part of that scheme.’ You find security in ‘knowing’ whatever makes sense. Isn’t that the reason we all find ourselves at a loss when death intervenes in a relationship? Even a living dissolution of a relationship can disturb the most secure identity because every relationship develops a behavioral set, an arrangement of connecting actions that serve as process. Breakup and death nullify arrangement of thing and process.”
 
Meaninglessness envelopes meaningfulness and threatens it. But that’s the good news. As I have said elsewhere, “Give me chaos, and you make me a god.” You, too. You can create. You can put random thing and process in any arrangement you wish, save those fundamental things and processes that underlie your existence: The four fundamental forces of nature, the fundamental composition of the universe, and the process of dying.
 
You’ve been in the process of creating meaning out of meaninglessness all your life. You have arranged and rearranged the room always with the goal of its making sense. When “things seem out of place” and “processes go awry,” you invariably attempt to order both. Your entire existence is making meaning out of meaninglessness. That is a meaning of meaninglessness.

Within a few years after Colonel (He wasn’t a real colonel) Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, an oil boom hit the area that includes Wild Cat Hollow (from which we get “wild catters”) and the boom town Oil City. If you go to the museum in Titusville, you will see, in addition to a film on the discovery and models of the technology used to extract petroleum, a number of black-and-white photos and daguerreotypes of the region. Those photos show a nineteenth-century landscape denuded of its trees and covered in a “forest” of derricks. The derrick forest floor is black with oil. Oil Creek was polluted. By today’s US EPA standards, the place was unsuitable for human habitation.
 
Ninety to 100 years after the environmental devastation of the Titusville area, the United States devastated Bikini Island and five other Marshall Islands with 67 nuclear explosions, leaving those islands dangerously radioactive and uninhabitable. The gamma radiation impregnated into the islands by the atomic blasts registered far beyond the 100 millirem/year considered as a safe upper limit for human exposure, making the islands unsuitable for habitation.
 
In the decades following the oil boom, the Titusville/Oil City region changed. Oil-consuming bacteria did their job. Rains did theirs. Streams did theirs. Plants did theirs. And some people did theirs. Today, the area is once again forested by trees rather than by derricks. Oil Creek is far more water than petroleum as it empties into the Allegheny River. Happy little bunnies and frolicking deer run through the woods (Okay, this is a bit too Disney a description). Really. There are forests that show few signs of any boom and accompanying devastation except for an occasional rusting old portable rig covered by vegetation. Hunters hunt. Campers camp. Kids roam. The area is habitable. The local refinery keeps pollutants in check according to US EPA regulations.
 
Recent measurements of the Marshall Islands affected by nuclear blasts have shown a surprisingly analogous recovery. Five of the six islands, according to a report in Science* that were once too dangerous for humans now have a millirem count less than 40 per year. By comparison, the granite of Central Park in New York gives a background millirem count at the EPA’s upper safe limit of 100. Seems that, except for Bikini Island, which still reads 184 millirem/year, those other islands are once again habitable.
 
This is not an argument for devastating an environment by denuding, polluting, and blasting. It’s partly a note that sometimes we do cry like Chicken Little that the end of the world is upon us. Also and demonstrably, Nature can heal deep physical wounds in the absence of awareness, but humans cannot heal social ones in the presence of consciousness. Obviously, we don’t live long enough to mimic Nature’s unintentional healing, but given the choice to make our human “world” habitable both physically and socially, we invariably seem to choose renewable destruction.   
 
*Patrick Monahan, June 6, 2016. Science online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/some-us-nuke-testing-sites-are-now-less-radioactive-central-park   

Breathless anticipation: Movie sequel. Next ride at Universal Studios or at Disney World. New rollercoaster. Next political leader. And, not to be outdone, the August 23 blog on this website.
 
Before a short break in blogging, I announced that I would post the next blog on August 23. No doubt my millions (scratch that) tens of readers anticipated. Or did they?
 
Anticipation. Let’s see. Although there’s not been any scientific quantification on the subject worth noting, anticipation is probably 90% of both pleasure and pain. The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that in the 1530s the verb anticipate meant “to cause to happen sooner.” By the seventeenth century, the verb meant “to be aware of (something) coming at a future time.” If we go to the Latin root, we find “to take beforehand” (ante, “before,” and capere, “to take”). And the word differs from expectation enough that the two aren’t really synonyms (ex, Latin for “from,” “out of,” and spectare, “to look,” and specere, “to look at”).
 
Anticipation. The daily problem we face. We do more than expect. We often attempt to “take possession beforehand.” That gets us into trouble. It also throws us into a future perfect that rarely occurs. Future perfect: By the end of the day, I shall have accomplished this or that or something else. By the end of the day I shall have acquired a thing. By the end of the day, I shall have convinced him (or her) of whatever. Future perfect: Accomplished even though it hasn’t happened yet. Or, with regard to this blog, I shall have written a perfect little essay even though there is nothing in my head worth a blog.
 
Perfect. In the medieval philosophical sense, the word meant “full,” “complete,” and it was applied by the Church to the universe because a Perfect Being could not create anything less than a Perfect (no gaps of any kind) World. Seems that the medieval has stayed with us. We keep anticipating a future perfect even though no previous future perfect has been completely “full” or “complete.” We are seekers of completeness, and we believe we can take possession ahead of time, that we can anticipate. And—this is not quantifiable—our anticipation is 90% of that future perfect.
 
Anticipation: You have to pee. Really, really bad. You are at least ten minutes from the nearest restroom. You make it into the restroom before Niagara washes your legs. Ah! Think of that moment of entering the restroom. Ninety-percent of relief? A future perfect? By the time you leave the restroom, you will have relieved yourself. An act completed in the future becomes the focus of the present, that is, in the anticipation of the event.
 
Anticipation: How many times do we “take possession beforehand” in our approach to others? How many times do we think in future perfect terms? How many times does the completed act not match the future perfect?
 
Yet, we still anticipate. How’s this? You and I can anticipate a time when we shall not have taken possession beforehand, a time when we focus on the incomplete present rather than on an impossible future perfect. 

Oh! And look! I published this on August 22.