Borrowing a computer from work, it’s a restuarant and that’s where they keep all the best computers and meat, it’s common knowledge really, so I’m able to wile away my late afternoon with this blathering and public airing of my internal demons, minor thoughts all the while putting steak in my pants.

Yessiree…this borrowed computer stuff is grand if nothing else.

Anyway…

One of the thoughts I had while driving acorss the godforsaken desert of southern California was that this was one big planet. If you wanted to be picky about it you could claim that the Earth was a comparatively tiny rock in a sea of expansive largess. In a universe so large we can’t see across it, so large it takes billions of years for light to just get to use from other galaxies, then yes, this planet is a tiny insignificant speck.

But to paraphrase a quote from, I think The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this is where I keep all my stuff so it’s pretty damn important. And I am so tiny, moreso since I started exercising again. What does this mean?

It means that driving across the desert, wandering up a mountain, traversing a valley where the mountains in the distance were 40 miles away and they were large in that perspective, this is one big fucking planet.

[note: Not meant in the context of a science fictiony “pleasure planet”. Yeah, dude, you want to get laid you go to Earth man, they’ve got these “people,” that’s what they call them there, that will fuck anything!

It’s just an emotive interjection so calm down and remember…the best place to get laid is Epsilon Delta-6. Everyone knows that. Soon the tourists will destroy that place, like they always do, and we’ll have to hyperjump all the way out to the Nagranine arm just for a little fun in the 12 suns.]

It’s a big place when you’re driving at 80 mph (130 kph for you nonAmerican types) and it takes hours to get anywhere at all.

And while I’m thinking about that, how amazing is the modern world? For a little while there, I was on my cellphone calling people thousands of miles away, actually talking to people while I’m driving, driving at a furious pace, across a land of unimaginable hostility and my only discomfort was sitting for so long and maybe being a little sweaty.

While driving in those bad nasty places, I couldn’t help but think of the past, of the settlers who trekked from the eastern seaboard, across the mountains, the rivers, the plains, more incredibly high mountains and then, when they might have thought they were done or maybe close to a place where they could stop and live their lives, they saw a vast searing desert.

I imagine that out of the mouths of more than one person traversing the continent there was uttered a magnificent, echoing, “OH FUCK!”

I had the same reaction and I only had a few hours in that dessicated land. Only a few hours of sweating in my truck, zooming down a highway, and sometimes stopping for a tastey beverage.

I love the modern age! I love technology. I love not struggling to survive. I love modern medicine, chemistry, electrical and mechancial engineering. How could you not be enamored of a world where the biggest worry one might have is that they’re eating too much?

This giant planet, a tiny bit of which I’ve traveled, is so damn big and wonderful. How could you not love everything about it…except the ugly desert. We could do with a lot less of that.