I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1,000 miles an hour,
and roaring through space to nobody-knows-where,
to keep a rendezvous with nobody-knows-what,
for nobody-knows-why,
and all around me whole continents are drifting rootlessly over the surface of the planet,
India ramming into the underbelly of Asia,
America skidding off toward China by way of Alaska,
Antarctica slipping away from Africa at the rate of an inch per eon,
and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can’t even understand, and which you can’t even buy anyplace so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day,
while off to the north of me the polar ice cap may
be getting ready to send down oceanic mountains of ice that will bury everything from Bangor to Richmond in a ponderous white death,
and there, off to the east, the ocean is tearing away at the land and wrenching it into the sea bottom and coming back for more,
as if the ocean is determined to claim it all before the deadly swarms of killer bees,
which are moving relentlessly northward from South America,
can get here to take possession,
although it seems more likely that the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere may collapse first,
exposing us all, ocean, killer bees and me, too,
to the merciless spraying of deadly cosmic rays.
I am sitting here on this spinning, speeding rock surrounded by 4 billion people,
eight planets,
one awesome lot of galaxies,
hydrogen bombs enough to kill me thirty times over,
and mountains of handguns and frozen food,
and I am being swept along in the whole galaxy’s insane dash toward the far wall of the universe,
across distances longer to traverse than Sunday afternoon on the New Jersey Turnpike,
so long, in fact, that when we get there I shall be at least 800,000 years old,
provided, of course, that the whole galaxy doesn’t run into another speeding galaxy at some poorly marked universal intersection and turn us all into space garbage,
or that the sun doesn’t burn out in the meantime,
or that some highly intelligent ferns from deepest space do not land from flying fern pots and cage me up in a greenhouse for scientific study.
So, as I say, I am sitting here with the continents moving, and killer bees coming, and the ocean eating away, and the ice cap poised, and the galaxy racing across the universe,
and the thermonuclear thirty-times-over bombs stacked up around me,
and only the gravity holding me onto the rock,
which, if you saw it from Spica or Arcturus, you wouldn’t even be able to see, since it is so minute that even from these relatively close stars it would look no bigger than an ant in the Sahara Desert as viewed from the top of the Empire State Building,
and as I sit here,
93 million miles from the sun,
I am feeling absolutely miserable,
and realize,
with self-pity and despair,
that I am
getting a cold.