When we awoke the other morning, we at first thought it was a police helicopter heading toward a sleepy city that never sleeps. But it kept rising on the horizon above the dowdy apartment buildings and tire repair shops on the east side of the street without coming nearer to our abode on the west. Then it vanished as that lucky old sun -- which has nothing to do but roam around heaven all day -- gave light to our planet.
In all our to’ing and fro’ing, we lit a cigarette and stopped to ponder if the universe were expanding or contracting. Will Venus (not being astronomers, we assumed it was Venus), the morning star mistaken for a man-made airborne vehicle, shine for us in perpetuity, or will it end in a whimper, not a bang? As goes Venus, so goes Earth. Eventually, in a gazillion years both will become frozen ice balls when the fires of our hydrogen-fueled Apollo die. This is the cosmologist’s version of doomed! doomed, I say!
But in the short term, we must focus on more important things. We begin our agonizing decline. China and the old Europe, as an ex-secretary of defense called it, excoriate Bernanke and the central bank of the U.S.A. for “quantitative easing,” i.e., buying long-term government debt to boost the money supply. It’s the only card left to play. It’s like seeing a return of a perfect serve and rushing to send a lob over your opponent’s menacing grin at the net. You’ve got to try, man.
And try we shall. The inevitable end of life doesn’t mean we should neglect this sporting life in which we find ourselves today.
Our beloved Temple Owls failed us last week, but we expect them to rebound against the Miami (Ohio) Redhawks tonight -- two carnivores of the air who keep the rodent population down.
By the way, there’s a Miami, Oklahoma, too, home of Heisman Trophy winner Steve Owens, he of the crimson and cream who was big man on campus in our freshman year long ago when we sauntered to our English class and got an F on our first essay. We’ve never been the same since.
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