Consciousness Streaming

Sometimes I can't help thinking that I'm sitting on a big ball of dirt spinning at thousands of miles per hour and revolving even faster around a gigantic mass of flaming gas.

I can't stop thinking about the thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of people tapping on keyboards at the same time I am, composing millions of words that only a few people will ever read, if that.

I just can't keep myself from thinking that every minute there are scores of cars swishing by out there on Kennedy Boulevard ("Somebody going somewhere to see somebody about something," as my grandmother used to say), and that every one has real people inside. And that each person has a story to tell that might be one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.

Then I think about what Carl Sandburg said: "There is only one man in the world, and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world, and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world, and the child's name is All Children."

And then I think, I really don't exist, at least not in the way that I think I do. And that you think you're reading somebody else's words, but you're really not, because you made me up for some unfathomable reason. So there.