I don't believe I was meant to live in an urban area. You can't see the stars at night. Driving across the flats of Ohio earlier, I was struck by the wideness of the sky and the brightness of the stars. So I found an empty field to park in, climbed up on the hood and lay looking up at the sky for a long time. Not as long as I would have liked, but long enough. Tonight, an incredibly intense Venus was just below the crescent moon and The Pleides were just below and off from Venus. It was a lovely night.

I won't bore you with the thoughts and ruminations I had, except perhaps this one. I remembered a time when I could pack my life into my truck and leave. All the important things that made my life, well, <my life>....they could all go into the cargo hold of an SUV. At the time, even that seemed excessive--I was trying to get it down to stuff into a backpack. Kundera talked about the unbearable lightness of being, but that has not been my problem. Rather, I feel the insufferable burden of commitment.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

[on a related but slightly different note, i want to write congress to get them to legislate that any federal interstate that has an off-ramp, should also have an on-ramp at the same location. After all, who wants to wander around the farmland of rural Ohio...after dosing up on starlight?]