Thoughts Negligible

At the center of a star, nuclear fusion takes the only two elements the Big Bang created--hydrogen and helium--and turns them, smashing passionately into each other, into heavier elements. To be sure, scientists estimate the universe's mass to be made up 70 parts hydrogen, 28 parts helium, and 2 parts heavy elements. Those heavy elements explode from the heart of stars when they die and are flung to all parts of the universe.



Now, find the "You Are Here" arrow that points about halfway from the bright huge center of the Milky Way galaxy (much like Andromeda shown above) to its edge. It's in the Orion Arm. A nebular cloud floats naked. This particular cloud is no more than two light-years across (a light-year is how far light can travel in one year, which is, astonishingly, about 9.5 trillion km). Made of a loose conglomeration of hydrogen, helium and heavy elements in gases, it begins to spin faster, faster still, even faster. As it spins it begins to collapse in on itself, drawing its scattered elements to a center (think of an ice-skater, how she spins faster as she draws her arms in). As it spins and the heaviest matter comes to the center, the center heats up tremendously. Spins still faster. A frost line forms as a star does, those heavy elements within the line condense and become solid and the light elements--again, hydrogen and helium--become gaseous. Outside the frost line, heavy elements remain gases and light elements freeze.

See the sun as the center heated mass spins. See a few collections of heavy elements condense, or solidify, under its heat, rotating around it like little gnats. There's earth. There's life. There's a hominid. Is that Adam? There's fire. There's a pyramid. There's you!

"If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow"

Ten percent of known animal species are parasitic, and I've been being effectively sucked dry by mosquitoes since Sunday. They're monsters that not even the repellent will keep away. I stay outside despite them. The sun has only got 5 billion more years and damnit if a few mosquitoes are going to keep me from enjoying its death throes while I'm here!

I remember learning one time that a third of the world's population is probably infected with pinworms. If you want to not sleep tonight, look 'em up.

Good Hamlet says, " . . . We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service - two dishes, but to one table. That's the end."

Last night I shot an armadillo. What better way to spend your summer? It had been digging up our precious green lawn, leaving blackened, open craters throughout, making a real mess. So last night about 11:30 I looked outside and there he was. One shot knocked him behind the wheel of my swing--my Pew in the Natural Tabernacle, as I call it, now desecrated with armadillo brains; he's still moving though. One more shot to stop. Buzzard food. No remorse. Ya know, it's either kill or have your yard dug up in this life. I'm a cold killer.

Annie Dillard says, "Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective mating and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus in they need not even mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator could be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?) It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death--emotions that appear to have devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence.

"All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."

You're going to have to grow some hide if you want to make it in this world. The world you're living in is heartless and hungry. You think I'm cruel for ending Steve (an aside: there's an armadillo that's always bustling around at the creek when I go down. One day I affectionately named him Steve the Blind and Deaf Armadillo. I could reach out and grab him before he knew I was around. One day he meandered right up to my feet. It remains to be seen if that was Steve). I'd never stick you with a needle and suck your blood, or live in your intestines and give you diarhea, colic, or hydrocephalus. I won't give you cholera or pneumonia! Everything is after you! And everything is after everything else!

"J. Henri Fabre . . . Describes a bee-eating wasp, the Philanthus, who has killed a honeybee. If the bee is heavy with honey, the wasp squeezes its crop 'so as to make her disgorge the delicious syrup, which she drinks by licking the tongue which her unfortunate victim, in her death-agony, sticks out of her mouth at full length . . . . At the moment of some such horrible banquet, I have seen the Wasp, with her prey, seized by the Mantis: the bandit was rifled by another bandit. And here is an awful detail: while the Mantis held her transfixed under the points of the double saw and was already munching her belly, the Wasp continued to lick the honey of her Bee, unable to relinquish the delicious food even amid the terrors of death. Let us hasten to cast a veil over these horrors.'"

Today I found two bird eggs that had fallen out of their nest, one cracked, and one appeared unscathed. Looking closer at the whole one revealed an entire side caked with ants. They were a blanket! Were they trying to incubate it, to let the bird hatch healthy and alive, to fly away with joyous rapsody once the ants had raised it and taught it to sing? I turned it over and when the blanket tore I found the egg was cracked. The ants were sucking on the yellow of the egg, maybe even trying to pry it open to get to the inside. Nature is cold and impossibly hungry.

Simone Weil says, "Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."

In Springer there was a wreck last week. A neighbor said he was driving west on the highway and found the smashed truck with a bloated body hanging out of the window. The obituary tells me Kevin Ray Kirk, 43, died in Springer May 14.

"I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things." - Isaiah 45:7

"Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE TRUE JUDGE"

Again, Hamlet says, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will--"

It's not a wonder that we die here; it's a miracle that we live at all.