Billion Year Old Carbon

Inspirational song: Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)

I am getting too old to work thirteen hour days, especially when over four of those hours are spent driving on highways. I am so tired I can barely turn my head (which made the interstate portion of the final drive home even that much more sporty). I had a lot of time to talk to myself or my steering wheel, and to ponder the mysteries of the universe. I was feeling like a very small, insignificant speck on the swirling electron cloud of matter that is this earth. I was thinking of the way people come in and out of our lives, how lives come in and out of existence, and how that random crashing of atoms back and forth into meeting and diverging substances is such a force of chaos. All of that, and nary a whiff of the local Colorado delicacies to be found anywhere near me.

I remember being frustrated and rebellious as a teenager, wanting to do something that was morally suspect, and justifying it to myself and my peer group by saying something that amounted to, "In 400 years, who is really going to care what I did here in small town Oklahoma, at this time on earth?" My friends called me out on it, knowing that what I was trying to get away with really wouldn't fly, and it would eat me up inside if I did it. They were right. But at that moment, I felt much as I do right now, like just a random collection of barely-contained atoms, every bit as replaceable and interchangeable as everyone and everything else in the history of time. At times like these, I wonder anew at how a temporary bag of stardust such as myself could possibly become self-aware, any why was it necessary to do so?

I'm running into the same old brick walls. Professionally I'm spinning my wheels in the usual rut, with an offer three-quarters ready to go on a house that three-fifths of the family loved, but aborted because one of the decision makers got seriously cold feet. Personally I'm in limbo, unable or unwilling to move forward but lacking the ability to go backwards. It would be a whole lot easier to survive this collaboration of stardust if it had just been assembled into a chair instead of an Anne. Is it too late to become a chair?