In life you have these moments. I don’t have the vocabulary to categorize, define and then describe them to you other than to state that they are a perpetual source of deja vu. You keep coming back to these moments in your life when you need to contemplate what’s important.
For me, I suppose it’s the realization that when I’m on my deathbed, I know I won’t be wishing I spent more hours at the office, got promoted up the corporate ladder one more notch or had more money to retire on. I really could care less about that paradigm of selling my youth to The Man in exchange for a nice wad of dough to sit on when I’m old. That stuff’s going to be incidental. It’ll happen for me, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of my existence, mostly because my life has meaning apart from my ability (or lack thereof) to accumulate material things.
One moment I’ve returned to is May 7th, 2004. Back then, I, MK and some buddies of ours were travelling back to Alberta from Coachella, California, and we decided to head on through the Grand Teton national park, and hit up Yellowstone as well. We drove all day and night and at 7am pulled up to the park gate to await the season’s opening. I felt very warm and fuzzy - special, even - in realizing that not only were we the first car of the season that year, but we were arriving a day before the Great Medicine Wheel ceremony, something that had caught my attention at that point in my life. I think it was due to my Cassandra Complex. I’m always on the watch for random weird stuff to happen. Maybe one day my inside information will help humanity avert a disaster simply through my blog making it to the top of Digg.com. But I’m not holding my breath. It’s not like I stockpile MRE rations in my missile silo or anything - this is more like Stephen Colbert’s threat down. I’m always on the lookout for the next Black Swan, or highly imporobable statistical elephant that comes along and skeweres everyone’s forecasts, mostly because I think forecasting is BS.
I get a lot of existential angst from the possibility of the the entire North American economy getting wiped wiped out by the Yellowstone SuperVolcano. It’s so funny to listen to economists debate tenths of a percentage point on GDP growth when you have this idea of an Extinction Level Event tucked away in the recesses of your memory. If that thing ever exploded, all the crops of the Midwestern states would be pretty much kaputz, along with precious animal habitat. But, on the bright side, I suppose it would give us some shade, and perhaps reverse the trend of global warming towards something approaching the last Ice Age. Cool. Literally.
She’s gonna blow eventaully. Maybe not in this lifetime.
Nevertheless, mark my words anyhow: Yellowstone will blow, and it’ll be aweseome.
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