Well, after 85 trips around the Sun (31,825 spins around the Earth) the voyage certainly does seem to have been a pretty dizzy experience. Personally, if I’d understand how strange a lifetime was going to be, I believe I might have chosen to get off at the very beginning.

However, here we all are, my class of 1956 from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, and a few million (or is it billion? I forget) other people looping the loop – all waiting to find out what really comes next.

Let’s see. 95% of the time there’ve been endless wars by our civilized planetary society, fighting to become either rich or famous, or hopefully both. Desperately struggling for love. Myopically searching for meaning. Hoping to achieve the Rolling Stones’, “Satisfaction.”

This Earth-based living is, indeed, a unique experience: billions and trillions of exploding stars, careening asteroids, hidden planets, lightning and booming thunder, us gravitating to a ball of rock and dirt, with deeply-buried hidden fireballs now and then bursting forth into space.

And us dreaming of endless life beyond this here and now as it turns us on our heads daily, bumping our thoughts against one another like billiard balls whacked by invisible stabbing pool cues.

It does not seem to have had much point to it for me, except if we’d actually learned how to treat one another the way we’d really liked to have been treated. And the richest religious leaders always the closest allies of the richest politicians.

Anybody ever considered it might be the richest confidence game of a sub species of humans not as pious as they sell themselves to be? Or, rather, smart enough to play the rest of us naïve enough to let them get away with it?

You ever think about anything like that?