The fascination with science resulted in the Pontiac the stoned passengers rode in.

I've been thinking about this conversation for several days now; but truth be told, we've all thought about it before, one way or another, stretching back through our family trees. It's what we get for having evolved that colossal pile of gray matter stuck in our skulls.

But that part of the brain that is uniquely human is stuck on top of other bits that came form our family tree, but back to apes, and the primates, mammals, amphibians, fish... It's cobbled together with all these bits of the flotsam of billions of years of change. It's amazing it works as well as it does. With all those synapses and neurons and strange chemicals running around it is nearly chaos up there. At the edge of chaos is a fractal landscape of shifting patterns. And that's where our thoughts reside.

Rational it is not. But we can aspire. Observant, creative, intuitive, capable of extremes and subtlety, yes. Yet prone to selective observation, creatively confusing intuition for reality, from the many little lies we tell ourselves over and over to the big lies that wind up hurting others. We tend to be the absolute heroes of our own internal dialog, even when engaged in victimhood. We don't like to hear our ideas are wrong, we've stubborn patterns of thought, it's not easy to kick them out of their groves and into others. I like to see my thoughts as strange attractors, bound to return to similar results unless the basic formulas are changed. Our thoughts ride a sort of space time fabric, pulled into the gravity wells of the thoughts we've thought before.

Through experience, the more we realize how big this landscape of experience is and we try to find comfort in it's infinity. Also, the gravity wells are deeper, the strange attractors more statistically defined, the grooves deeper - like a well-played vinyl record.

And that's just the contents of one skull. Start arranging more skulls as partners-families-tribes-clans-villages-cities-states-nations and it's the same thing: fractal weirdness at the edge of chaos: patterns within patterns;seemingly inescapable, but certainly evolving through time.

Perhaps that's a bit too much philosophy from a simple geologist who grew up riding in the back of a crowded station wagon. Over the years, due to the slings and arrows of my life, the various things I've learned and experienced, I don't really search for Meaning all that much anymore. At least not with a capital "M". I like to learn but know I'll never know all that much, in the big scheme, anyway, but I'll suck up much as I can while I'm here. If that perspective is out the back of a station wagon, so be it.

But most of all, it is the conversations we have with each other in that station wagon that make it all decidedly not futile. Some are looking forward, some backwards, some sideways.