I have spent countless hours staring into the vastness of space, often totally straight but probably more often in some altered state or other.  At one point in my life, I drove from LA to Joshua Tree National Park in the high desert almost every weekend where, lying in total darkness by the pool of the Joshua Tree Inn, I truly felt at one with the universe.  I had read the theory that everything in the cosmos shared like matter and that the minerals and the gases and the biological evolutions were, in fact, one.  It kind of makes the question as to whether life exists on other planets seem ridiculous.

Embracing that belief has emphasized the frivolous nature and misguided focus of my happenstantially designated species.  We humans have the potential to imagine, discover and create spectacular beauty.  We make music, we dance, we sing and write poetry and can touch each other physically and emotionally with kindness and caring and comfort.  BUT…we are too easily distracted by the want for more, even when the balanced equation leaves others without enough.  We have accepted the false notions of race and appearance and geography and religion and nationality as incompatible barriers to coexisting in harmony and mutual benefit.  We’re really, pretty fucking stupid.

I’ve used my weekly soapbox to rail against the inanity of human action.  I can somehow grasp the vastness of the cosmos and yet, neither text nor mentor, observation or experience has provided me a clue as to how beings that share the same DNA choose to act so awful toward one another.  Fatalistic philosophers propose that since every atom is a critical cog in the muck of existence, the dark needs the light, the good needs the bad and somehow, on some smeary celestial chalkboard, there’s an equation proving the reason for Ted Cruz or Marjorie Taylor Greene.  I realize that tampering with such things may have potentially cataclysmic repercussions…but what the heck…that’s my genie wish.