I live out in the middle of nowhere. Well, maybe a bit off center, but pretty damn close, anyway. The sort of place where, on a good and windy day, if you scream as hard as you can in just the right direction, your neighbors might be able to hear you. Maybe.
During the day, it's like living anywhere else, I guess. Except, you know. More distant. But at night, it feels like living on a different planet. On clear nights, the stars shine with such an amazing beauty, it feels wrong to try and describe it with words. I sometimes feel a little ashamed of myself, because I'm not always as completely overwhelmed by this incredible celestial wonder as I maybe should be. It seems kind of bizarre to think I can live surrounded by something so fascinating, and yet only notice it every now and then instead of being totally enraptured by it.
I have a dog, a little one. A Chihuahua. He's not very bright, and he's too small to navigate the steps on the back porch. So I have to pick him up and carry him down on the ground, where he invariably bursts out of my arms and runs around the yard like a little black and white, four-legged rocket. In the fall when the dead leaves carpet the ground, it sounds like machine gun fire when he runs through them. And in winter, those rare seasons when ice and snow actually touch the ground, he's too scared to actually run, so he sort of pads his way around the yard. A dog scared of snow. It'd be funny, if it weren't so damn stupid. I guess it's kinda funny anyway.
He needs to go out about two or three times a day. When I take him out at night, that's when I end up sitting outside for an hour or two sometimes. Looking up at the moon, and the starlight. There's no other light around, not really; like I said, the neighbors are all too far away for the lights in their windows to shine too bright, and the county's emergency light only shines one night a week or so, so there's almost zero light pollution to obscure the night sky. If it's warm enough (pretty much from March until November, around here), I'll climb up on the roof of my car and lie back and just watch the stars twinkle. Chasing satellites, and tracing airplane lights, imagining distant alien civilizations. Composing stories of brave astronauts, thinking about all the scientists our there sending signals into that great black. Wondering if ever they'll maybe get some kind of answer back.
And contemplating how all those stars formed, each one starting as nothing but a little speck of hydrogen or helium, the miniscule gravity of those little clumps of matter slowly attracting more and more matter onto themselves over the course of countless millenia until finally their mass and their weight under all that increasing gravity sets them to spinning until they start getting so heavy, so dense, that the matter in their cores start to generate nuclear fusion and they ignite into enormous spheres of glorious light that will burn and shine for hundreds of millions of years.
(If you read that whole thing out loud, take a breath before you pass out.)
And I look up, and I wonder about humanity. Will we ever leave this world, really? Will our kind ever travel into that big black, the way we hop from continent to continent now? Will we ever, ever put aside our petty, childish differences long enough to work together to accomplish something so amazing? We could, I know it. If everyone woke up tomorrow and decided they were tired of all the bullshit, if we all could just put our minds and, yes, hearts, together, we could fly out into that unknown and make it ours within a lifetime. Not just like we've already done, a few manned space flights and a couple space stations and who knows how many satellites, but really conquer that wild frontier. We could find or build whole new worlds, create a whole new age of humanity.
I don't know. Maybe that's stupid and childish all on its own. Probably is, if someone like me thinks it's a good idea. But it seems to me the world needs this kind of stupidity a lot more than the kind it's already got. Can't hurt to dream, right?
Anyway. That's what I think about, out under the stars. While I wait for the dog to shit.
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