Insanity

Do you ever feel like life, or at least self-awareness, is really just some cruel game dreamed up by a bored god looking for some cheap entertainment?

Today I learned that there is talk - serious talk, mind you - of detonating a nuclear weapon in the Gulf of Mexico to plug the oil leak. For the record the American government is saying no way, but there are plenty of people who seem to think this is a good idea.

Summer is here. We're actually having record heat this spring, and the rivers are overflowing their banks because the snowpack in the mountains is melting so quickly. I've been passing the time with travel. A couple of weeks ago Gerard and I spent five days in southwestern South Dakota, exploring the Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, Deadwood and other cool places. It's beautiful, South Dakota. The wildlife there is extraordinary - our first morning we weren't a hour out of camp when we saw herds of free roaming bison, pronghorn, mule deer, wild turkey. Later in the day we saw bighorn sheep and a mountain goat. Unfortunately, however, South Dakota doesn't think native predators are as good for tourism as herds of bison, so they've quietly allowed the grizzly bear and the wolf to remain exiled. That means humans have to round up some of the bison every year and ship them off to meat packing plants.

Last weekend we hiked about ten miles through a mountain ghost town called Homestead Meadows. The decaying remains of cabins dot tens of hundreds of acres of open meadow and woodland near Mountain Lion Gulch. It's easy up there to forget about florescent lighting, office cubicles, artificial deadlines, Sara Palin and nuking the seas to plug oil spills.

Tonight when I close my eyes, I will go home.