Babel-ing.

It was quieter here, much more peaceful, when Cecil the puppy, if he can still be called a puppy, was asleep on the floor, his hind leg and nose occasionally twitching as he dreamed (and yes, dogs DO dream--I googled it, plus Stephen King described it in at least two of his 587 novels). Now that he’s awake, he first made sure that everybody else--Xena, Wendy, Muffins, Chewie, Evi and Sabrina, not to mention ME--was awake as well. At the moment he has one of my old shoes and is bashing it against my computer stand. No, this is not annoying. Well, not TOO annoying.

I would take him outside if it weren’t 30-something degrees with a wind gusting out of hell, or maybe Nebraska.

Just another (mostly) house-bound day. Winter, or oncoming winter, or almost winter, or warning-shots-over-the-bow of winter tend to make us hunker down inside until we get acclimated and go about our more-or-less normal business.

Those of us who are housebound AND without television tend to wander about online, flit more or less mindlessly from Sports Illustrated (and the Iron Bowl, the Alabama-Auburn football game) to Salon to somewhere that something on Salon sent us, to sometimes really bizarre places where we find “alternate universes,” in a way--whole worlds outside the world we normally inhabit. People, or whatever the inhabitants call themselves in those worlds, are looking at us from the outside, scrutinizing and theorizing and hypothesizing and mostly just guessing, based on their own alien experiences . . . Us. Much in the same way that we scrutinize and theorize and hypothesize and mostly just guess about “them,” those from other worlds.

I watch Cecil on the floor, his hindleg jerking and his nose twitching, and imagine that he is dreaming (he IS), then free-associate, try to imagine what he is dreaming about, envision him dreaming of chasing thrown sticks or wrestling with Nina, one of the other dogs, or terrorizing (in a playful way, of course) the cats, and then it hits me that I have NO way of seeing his dreams--Cecil is not me, he is not even human. He sees his everyday wakeful life in ways I cannot really even imagine, and thus his dreams likely are very different from any I could imagine.

Then I go back to web-wandering and learn that an American aircraft carrier group may or may not have been stationed offshore of Syria (many “news” reports say it is; the Navy web site says the carrier group is currently ported in the south of France, Marseille, and all the sailors are having a great time there).

One site or another or a few say that “Barry” Obama is about to pick a fight with Syria, for some reason or other.

Another site or two or three claims Turkey is fixing to invade Syria.

Still another one says that Ukraine is being set up by the “great powers” (U.S. and Britain, specifically) to become the new “Libya,” that we--the great powers--are laying the foundation to take over Ukraine and its oil on some humanitarian pretext or another.

What is unnerving is that I cannot muster enough documentation, online, to prove ANY of them wrong, even in my own mind.

From my perspective as a photographer, somebody who is accustomed to looking at subjects from different angles, different . . . perspectives, and from my perspective as a human being who grew up in a large family, I know that opinions--perspectives--have a tendency to vary from one person to another.

I’m beginning to understand where “the tower of Babel” came from, and even that God was made nervous by the fact that all the people of the world of the day shared a common language, could communicate meaningfully with each other, and so decided to jumble things up a bit by inflicting a multiplicity of languages upon “His people.”

So many different languages, so little communication. For some divine reason, God (well, God of the Christians and Jews; I don’t know about Allah or the assorted gods of the Hindu religion, or any of the myriad others currently ruling the myriad separate earths we all simultaneously inhabit) didn’t want us to be able to communicate with each other.  Somehow He perceived human communication with each other to be a threat to His own power, or so I gather. So He decided to splinter us by splintering our once-common language. “Divide and conquer.”

Mind you, I’m not a biblical scholar, and in fact have spent the last 52 years or so paying as little attention to the Bible as possible. (I tried once to read it cover-to-cover, but got bogged down in the “begats”). It’s interesting, though. As a biblical non-scholar, I’ve never tried to view today’s corporate world through a biblical lens--but as I read today about the Tower of Babel, etc., I kept remembering how many of my employers have had strict rules when it came to employees communicating with each other. We were always expressly forbidden to discuss salary with each other, for instance. I always wondered why, but didn’t worry about it overmuch. Now I see that our bosses were just trying to follow a page out of God’s “stick-it-to-’em” book.

But I digress. Of course.

In the course of all my web-wandering and maundering today, I came across a whole lot of what I can only characterize as “really interesting shit.”

But I found no reliable answers even to simple questions, for instance “Where is the USS George HW Bush” currently floating?” One source says Marseille, France; another few sources say “off Syria.”

Sad state of affairs, when you cannot trust your OWN press, much less that of any other nation, and when you cannot trust your elected representatives or virtually any one else to provide you real, “spin”-less information.

Maybe I should go back to watching dogs dream.