I drove down Broad street in the early morning hours today. You know, the time of day when people are just waking up and things are still surreal and suspended in an invisible ether that seems to permeate the night air? Yeah, that. Anyway, I was headed down the road in a semiconscious sort of ritualistic act I seem to perform more and more these days, when I almost run over a pair of birds. They, of course, flutter away as always, but it made me start thinking. As I pulled into the Starbucks parking lot, I pondered as people do when they've just stayed up all night reading: a kind of stupified and vaguely fake depth that, when viewed in retrospect, is almost sickening. Even through the pointless act of shovelling out bits of paper for a personalized latte that they probably knew I'd order the moment they saw me, I couldn't stop thinking about how beautiful the Earth must have been, the magnificent piece of work that the universe intended it to be, when it so furiously spat out the matter that just so happened to lump into a spherical mass capable of supporting life. And I simply walked back to my car, sipping on milk-diluted espresso through the mass-produced cups manufactured from unrecycled tree pulp(the owner of said pulp, now likely to be yelping in pain in thousands of franchised Starbucks stores nation-wide). I sat in my car, with the intricate guitar lines of The Mars Volta screeching in my ears, thinking about all of that, and how supremely we've managed to fuck up this world in which we've lived for the past 4.4 million years. Or maybe it's just the mental ramblings of a sleep-deprived eightteen-year-old striving to find some kind of meaning in the general existence of anything at all. Who knows; just thought you'd like to know.