Today, many people on this planet celebrate St. Patrick’s Day which, oddly enough, is day when drunk revellers imbibe in the name of a Catholic saint.

Are you willing to share your traditions with others who’ll shape the traditions to their whims, desires and traditions?

Hard to believe only 14,295 days are left and I want to spend this day in a cloud of oblivion, not eating, drinking or consuming more than moist air for my lungs.

Smelling the wind.  Feeling vibrations in my feet.

Looking at sweetgum tree buds.

Thinking about no time in particular.

Almost not caring about the arrangements of these words sdfps8′ 3ehp4nh’N#g;p3.

What do you do with yourself in a closed-loop system?

There is a stinkbug caught between the window screen and the window, finding a crack somewhere to get in but unable to find its way back out.

There are an unnumbered number of dead insects at the bottom of the window.

Some days I feel like the stinkbug, unaware that my time spent crawling on the screen, my antennae fully aware of familiar smells/vibrations but unable to get to them, is time spent not knowing I’m not going to get out alive.  Perhaps a spider hidden in a corner will find me and make use of me.

Otherwise…

Perfectly, happily, soberly aware I really know nothing.

My brain an Intel Celeron M running Microsoft Windows Vista Basic on a Compaq Presario C501NR Notebook PC, generations and magnitudes less complicated than the world’s fastest human-made supercomputer.

More than sitting on a horse and buggy counting on my fingers, in comparison, but comparison to what?

Who am I to deny any one of the seven billion of us the right to procreate?

Who am I to say billions of us will die for my benefit?

I’m not presumptuous.  I’m not the wealthiest or the poorest.

A racetrack or sports arena is more familiar to me as a place of worship than a place of worship.

If more people in the U.S. watch films and shows on the tellie than go to sporting events or participate in formal religious service, what does that say about what we call religion?  That is, how are we defining our definitions of morals and ethics for normal social interaction?

How does a child know the difference between fantasy and reality?

When did we start believing food comes in brightly-coloured bags and boxes, not out of farms and ranches?

When did we convince ourselves it’s all right to turn homes into chemical experiments on humans, plants, animals, insects and other living things?

What does it profit me to profit if I’m going to contract cancer from unintentional concoctions?

I’m going to die anyway, right?

Who or what entity is going to test whether the aerosols of chemical lawn fertilisers will mix with aerosols of underarm deodourant, hairspray, furniture deodouriser, kitchen surface disinfectant and cologne/perfume to create a force more invisibly deadly than anything dreamed up by military chemical warfare departments, because no one took into account the change to the microorganisms inhabiting our bodies and the poisons they’ve been, through no fault of any one person or entity, chemically genetically-modified to cover us and fill our pores with?

The Law of Unintended Consequences.

I didn’t get drunk today but, because I mentioned the phrase “St. Patrick’s Day,” someone reads these words and decides it’s okay to have one or two extra litres of beer to show he’s more manly than anyone in the room, stumbles out of the pub, trips on the curb and bangs his head, ending up in a hospital emergency room where he meets a nice nurse he decides to introduce to his forlorn son, their love convincing the father to give up drinking heavily because he can finally forgive himself for not taking good care of his wife while she was dying of cancer she got while visiting her sister’s family near a chemical waste dump they didn’t know existed behind their house that was built in the shape of a stinkbug on an idea an architect got from reading random blog entries one day.

We are an ignorant species so let’s keep looking for ways to increase our wisdom and not just our collections of esoteric information that we cleverly yell out while watching television trivia game shows.

If you knew exactly where a large chunk of galactic material was going to hit Earth’s atmosphere thousands or millions of years from now, would you figure out how to change Earth’s rotation ever so slightly to keep the resulting sonic boom and burning debris from hitting major centres of your species’ population, knowing the destruction of trillions of other microorganisms would have a small but not detrimental effect on your species thousands of years later?

How big a picture can you work with without resorting to using literary devices like magic, superpowers or time travel?

When the timescales of your species have little effect on galactic timescales at which you operate, what does one life matter?

Finding the humour in that scenario is the challenge of my lifetime.

14,295 days, as we call them, to get it right.