Love in the Time of Climate Change (28 page)

We've come up with names for our dart-throwing alter egos. The A/P prof is “The Grim Reaper.” The natural history prof is “Dartwin” (get it? “Darwin”?) Given his incredible inconsistency and overall inaccuracy, I suggested Dartlose. He told me to fuck off.

I keep changing names. I haven't found one yet that I'm truly comfortable with. If I lose a few weeks in a row, I blame the name, cast it aside, and think up a new one.

“Dartagnan” (named after the Three Musketeer's wannabe D'Artagnan) got me through most of last semester until I went into a tailspin. “Doctor Dioxide” was meant to intimidate, which it did at one point for five consecutive Wednesdays. Currently I'm “Methane Man,” which, particularly after a lunch of leftover bean burritos, can instill fear in the hearts of my fellow players.

We keep the targets in a formal binder, autographed by the week's winner. The natural history prof is talking up developing a website. He's convinced it could go viral.

As previously noted, he is certifiably insane.

This semester has been an exceptional one for targets.

The A/P prof did fabulous work with “Bad Things That Begin with the Letter D.” He had graphic pictures, assigned a point value to them, and arranged them with great artistic flair onto the board. It was an instant classic—dysentery, diphtheria, deafness, degenerative optic myopathy, delusional disorder (wow—a double D!), dementia, delirium, dengue fever, dermatitis, depression, Down syndrome, distemper, and dwarfism all came to life with terrifying images.

My suggestion to add the three climate-change D's (delay, deny, and dismiss) was met with derision. Mixing of issues was a definite don't.

So much to worry about with the letter D! Who would have thought?

I had a stunning come-from-behind victory courtesy of three Diarrheas in a row, each worth fifty points.

The natural history prof spent hours on a marvelous “Aquatic Invasive Plant Species From Hell” board featuring such ne'er-do-wells as purple loosestrife, Japanese knotweed, water chestnut, and phragmites, plants that take over wetlands and drive down biodiversity. He turned around and used it in class the very next day, flinging darts while loudly cursing their names, much to the delight of his students.

My focus was always on, who would have guessed it, The Issue. Given the overwhelming amount of climate-change shit there is to hurl darts at, I'm never at a loss for material.

I'd have to say my best work yet was last semester's three-part series entitled “Dire Consequences,” which I spent most of winter break working on, with wonderful assistance
from Jesse. His computer proficiency, along with excellent pen and ink skill, created collages of compellingly destructive images that you couldn't wait to have a go at. Drought, famine, sea-level rise, hurricanes, typhoons, and mass extinction all had a prominent place.

The only thing more depressing than the board was my complete inability to hit it. I came in dead last on every one of those games. Curses!

This weekend, with Jesse's and a good bit of weed's help, I devised a fab “Darts to the Deniers” board. It featured some of the many villains, those climate–change-denying Neanderthal corporations, politicians, and pundits who perpetuate the myths and misinformation so prevalent.

Fox News: Their motto? No lie too big to air!

Exxon/Mobile: We don't care. We don't have to care. We're Exxon!

Shell Oil: Three cheers for the melting of those pesky glaciers! Now we can drill wherever we want!

Keystone XL Pipeline: Aquifers be damned. We'll ship that dirty tar sands oil whether you like it or not!

ABC News: One feature (count 'em, one!) on climate change in the last year.

Wall Street Journal
: Four fifths of their last year's letters, op-eds, editorials, and articles misleading on climate change.

Mitt the Flip (“I Love Coal”) Romney: what more can you say?

Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma): Global warming is “the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.” Whoa, bro! Is there any gray matter left in there?

The entire right wing of the Republican Party: What's not to love? I don't want to stereotype, but it's oh-so-hard not to!

Last on this board (and we're just scraping the surface of bloodsucking leeches here) was my hands down favorite.
For sheer lunacy, audacious impudence, and unbridled ignorance, it's hard to top the Heartland Institute.

A leading climate-change-denying organization, they launched a crazy billboard campaign in the Chicago area featuring the convicted Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and the mass murderer Charles Manson. Next to their billboard-sized pictures, making them look somehow even more insane then they actually were, was the text “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

I kid you not.

If I was driving and I had seen that sign, I would have run off the fucking road.

I had worked hard on this board and I was damn proud of it. It was my shining moment, my
Mona Lisa
, my
Venus de Milo
. Just looking at the images made my fingers quiver and my pulse race.

“Prepare to be annihilated,” I announced in as menacing a voice as I could muster.

It was epic struggle, a game of games. With one dart to go, the three of us were tied. Tied! I had driven myself into a frenzy, which, combined with seething rage against the deniers, had left me shaking.

The last dart. Winner take all.

The A/P prof got a direct hit on the evil empire, Exxon. Good for 30.

The natural history prof landed one right smack dab in that asshole Inhoffe's ear. Also good for 30.

Tie score. I hadn't won in weeks. The pressure was excruciating. All I had to do was hit that infuriating Heartland Institute logo and the game would be mine. One dart to close it out. One dart to seal the deal.

Focus. Focus
. I took a deep breath, leaned back and … shit!

The dean walked in.

He hated our dart games. He thought it unprofessional,
inappropriate, and nasty. He had no appreciation for our creativity, our artwork, our dart-throwing dexterity.

We, however, knew the true story. Just like the botany professor, the dean totally sucked at the game.

He glared at me. I was startled, unhinged, and in mid-throw. I turned, tried to check my arm, but before I knew it the dart, with a mind of its own, lazily arced out of my hand.

My colleagues gasped.

“Holy Christ!” the dean yelled, hopping up and down. “Mother of … Jesus! What the hell, Casey!”

There was the dart. Sticking straight out of his shoe, imbedded in his foot, sunk deep into the big toe.

He reached down and yanked the sucker out.

“For the love of …” He hopped, slammed shut the door, gave a final terrified look through the window, and limped out.

There was a stunned moment of silence while I realized the extreme severity of the situation. What had happened was catastrophic, calamitous, unthinkable. With a sudden burst of inspiration I divined a way out.

“Do-over!” I cried. “No fair. I was distracted! I demand another throw!”

“Bullshit!” my colleagues yelled in unison, already psyching themselves up for sudden-death overtime.

“He walked in! That game was mine!”

“Bullshit!” they yelled again.

“Bastard!” I fumed. “Son of a bitch!” I slumped into a chair, crisscrossed my legs and hunched my shoulders, totally depressed by the injustice of it all. I watched as the natural history prof's dart struck straight to the heart of Heartland, and begrudgingly high-fived him as he ran his victory lap around the conference room table.

Toeless boss or not, the games must go on.

I
DON'T LAY AWAKE AT NIGHT WORRYING
about too many of my students. Most enter PVCC with a solid educational foundation, they're not too deep in debt, they talk lovingly about their families, and they have a clear vision of where they want to go. They see their community-college years as a stepping-stone to a better and brighter future. They're already off and running.

Then there are those students who can't quite seem to make it out of the starting gate.

This semester, once again, I had Warren in my class. It was his third time taking my Intro to Climate Change. I had flunked him twice, and he was hard at work on a third F.

It wasn't that he was stupid. Far from it. He was an extremely bright, personable kid with exceptional writing skills. When in class he was an active participant, articulate, vibrant, full of life and energy.

Outside of class, he was a walking disaster.

Anything bad that could possibly happen to a human
being, short of paralysis or death, happened to Warren with alarming regularity. He was a magnet for misfortune, a connoisseur of catastrophe. Calamity stuck with him like flies on turds.

I'm pretty adept at sniffing out BS, teasing out truth from fiction. Generally I give students the benefit of the doubt, but there are times when I have to call them on their sob stories.

Not so with Warren. There was no way he could possibly make this shit up.

His excuses for missed work, classes, and exams were definitely not your boring, run–of-the-mill, lah-dee-dah, crap-happens scenarios. They were a significant cut above. They hovered in the Hall of Fame of the totally bizarre, almost too strange to be true. He deserved his own column in “News of the Weird”. If his life were a reality TV show, he'd be a megastar.

Of course this wasn't why he had flunked my class twice. Along with his uncanny bad luck, he had profound issues with procrastination. He had a remarkable inability to get work in on time, if at all. His ongoing bouts with the law and the ludicrous resulted in far too many absences, making him impossible to pass.

While I'm not one to gossip about my students overmuch, it was hard not to tell Warren stories.

“I saw that your favorite student made the paper yesterday,” the botany professor said, cornering me at the copy machine. “Care to fill me in on details?”

“This is a good one,” I replied, closing the copy room door, happy to oblige.

A herd of Australian fainting goats had fled their farm enclosure and made their way into the open door of a neighbor's apartment, wreaking havoc on house and home. Damages included a chewed-up laptop, belonging to—you guessed it—Warren.

There was even a picture in the
Glenfield Recorder
.
Warren, a broad grin on his face, holding the remains of his computer in one hand, petting one of the culprits with the other. Certainly a one-up on the classic “dog ate my paper” routine.

Last semester, he was attempting the Heimlich maneuver on some poor soul choking on a pork chop in the restaurant where he worked. The guy's wife, returning from the bathroom and thinking Warren was some punk gangsta attacking her husband, tased him. He fell over backwards and smashed his head, requiring fifteen stitches. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

The semester before, he was mistakenly arrested for indecent exposure and charged with urinating on baby Jesus in a Christmas crèche scene. The real culprit turned out to be the priest, who had imbibed a little too much of the communion wine and then mistaken the King of All Kings for the holly bush behind the church. How anyone could mistake Warren with his tattoos and piercings for a man of the cloth was beyond me.

Not surprisingly, all of this had led him to a rather delusional world view, which he was fond of sharing with me and anyone else whose ear he could bend. His somewhat scattered knowledge of The Issue, all three partial semesters of it, fit rather nicely into a paranoid paradigm.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. We were in the middle of a discussion on the albedo effect and how loss of glacial ice meant less reflected sunlight leading to greater warming and then even more loss of ice. A classic positive feedback loop.

I asked if there were any questions.

“Then I guess the Mayans really were right,” Warren volunteered.

“About the melting Arctic ice?” I asked.

“About the end of the world. Looks like we really do have only a few weeks left!”

“Oh my god,” said Jenny, one of my more outspoken
students. I could see her rolling her eyes. “Please tell me you're joking!”

“I'm dead serious,” Warren continued. “December 21, 2012. It's the end of the Mayan calendar. They saw this shit going down thousands of years ago. Time to pay the piper.”

“More like time to change the channel, Warren,” Jenny replied. “Too much sci-fi TV.”

Warren, along with the rest of the class, laughed. Remarkably, though incessantly reeling in his world of chaos, he maintained an astonishingly cheerful countenance. He would recount his frequent flirtations with disaster with a shrug and a smile. He was a popular kid. The ribbing he received from fellow students was good natured.

And one ever really knew how seriously to take him. Like with the Mayans. It was unclear whether or not he really was a true believer, or just out to pull our collective legs.