The best way to see where unintended circumstances will lead you is to take a cynical approach to your serious disposition.

Then, the future is the moment you’ve been waiting for, planning, biding your time and biting your nails about.

You needn’t worry that nothing will happen.

I was once famous on a local scale.  In junior high school, I actually had a fan club.  Sure, the club members were mostly gay guys and socially awkward girls but there were club buttons and other regalia to celebrate my celebrity status.

In high/secondary school, I was somewhat popular but I didn’t know it.  As the president of the school’s drama club for two straight years, along with appearances on stage as an actor and singer, I attracted a small following that I didn’t even know existed until I got on Facebook a few years ago and a few women my age wanted to start fantasy relationships that I saw had started in their thoughts many, many years ago.

I knew there were some people who looked up to me when I won the four-year U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship to Georgia Tech.

It was as if I had led a charmed life the first 18 years of my existence and didn’t appreciate the relative ease with which I breezed through my public school days until I left the small town and its suburban tracts for the big city.

I look back at all that, two-thirds of my life ago, and understand why I believe I am comfortable dying at any time.

I have always been happy to be alive, accepting whatever comes my way, but at the same time wanting to stay ahead of my ennui, the situational depression that dogs me like a hungry animal scenting my fear and chasing after me.

I see news headlines pop up about one subject or another that concerns populations of people out of eye and earshot and I wonder what’s going on.

Why do religious people fear nonreligious people, for instance, or vice versa?  I am perfectly comfortable in my belief that the universe both was and was not created by a supernatural being (God, in my subculture’s parlance, who miraculously created a son on Earth named Jesus (pronounced “Hey, Zeus!” of course)).  The labels we choose to describe a series of events that took place long before any of us or our ancestors could read or write is whatever we want them to be.  Our behaviour toward each other is still as important whether our origin story is called “God created the heaven and earth” or the “Big Bang.”

It is the noise or clutter that jams the airwaves with whatever people deem important enough to promote themselves and their ideas for a better life.

For others of us, one’s set of beliefs takes a second seat in the second row to hard facts like how gravity is variable across the surface of large celestial bodies but averages out sufficiently so that mathematical equations can be converted to algorithms to guide spacecraft around and land them upon distant planets, moons and other satellites.

We can fill our spare time with noise and clutter — the chattering class’ favourite topics du jour.

However, let us keep our longterm goals clearly, distinctly and loudest in our thoughts and actions.

The Mars mission continues!  Every idea counts, such as Ad Astra.

And entertaining diversions such as Europa Report.