Won’t worry about what I don’t know    

Every once in a while, I marvel at the miracles that occur daily in the life of a human being.

Whether you believe that life was divinely inspired and showed up out of nowhere, or that we are all descendants from the same electrical chemical connection that spawned the first amoeba, you have to admit, being alive in the 2020s is a pretty cool thing.

I am in the window seat of an airplane on my way to Las Vegas. Less than a foot to my right, the wind is rushing over a long piece of metal 30,000 feet above the earth. If my body were out there for even a few seconds, I would freeze to death and asphyxiate simultaneously while falling and eventually landing in some barren corn field.

Yet less than 0.16 inches of metal keeps me from that fate. And in that metal, amazingly, is a window just to make sure I can keep an eye on things.

Instead, I sit here in a nice high-back chair, typing away a bunch of drivel that possibly no one will ever read. I have my peanuts and chocolate pieces to keep me completely satisfied and, if I really want, some nice lady will walk down the aisle and give me water.

So, 12 inches to my right, total frozen and windy havoc. Three feet to my left, that same nice lady is asking me if I want some M&Ms.

            I can’t imagine living in another age. This one is just too cool. 

For instance:

This morning I turned two switches on two different machines, and one washed my clothes and the other washed all my dirty dishes. I was taking a shower while they did the work.

How the hell the water ever got to my second-story shower I will never know, since there is no electrical pump in my house to push it up there. On top of that, the water is hot, thanks to a gas-powered heater that would be so inconvenient that we put it in a closet to keep it out of the way.

Somehow, gas is pumped from a well maybe thousands of miles away and ends up being automatically lit by my water heater (without exploding) just so I don’t have to take a cold shower. I don’t have any idea where that gas comes from, how it gets into the house and how it hooks up to my gas heater. Apparently, we find that the gas line is so inconvenient that we bury it underground.

I drive a 5,000-pound piece of metal by igniting a gas explosion in my car while I listen to music created 40 years ago by some guy who is now dead. He sang into 66 pounds of metal and plastic, and somehow his voice was recorded forever, and then it was blasted over the entire world through something called sound waves, and I really can’t figure out how all those sound waves don’t interfere with each other. 

I mean, I can just turn a piece of plastic a little to the left and I can hear an entirely different song created by an entirely different guy.

And don’t get me started on television.

If people would just take a few seconds and realize what a miraculous age we live in, they might just start treating each other better. After all, all these things are miracles.

But the biggest miracle is that I just took a breath. And my heart beats without me even thinking about it. And I can go to sleep and somehow know to wake up. And I have these thoughts.

Where the hell does all that stuff come from?

My toe hurts. I wonder why.