A Quick Spin

Night sweats: how metaphorical. Now I suddenly relate to this enormous, wild and unhealthy planet I have been riding for my entire life.

I manage to stay in my own orbit with no problem. I have many, many neighbors who lead similar lives. There is some slight evidence of scars left on my surface, resulting from an occasional rock hurled in my distant past, but those have healed and are almost forgotten.

Up on top of this massive place, around the northern pole, not much survives. I am sparsely afflicted, too. But as the traveler heads south, vegetation and other life forms crop up in abundance. Around where Canada starts, fir trees grow thick. Whenever I gaze at myself in a mirror, I fail to see my own corresponding Canada, due to a thicket of fur.

Just below, the consuming neck cries out to be scratched. Soon the entire body wants the terrible itching to cease altogether, or better yet, for it to be vanquished from the world. What sorts of life forms are taking over here? Why won't they be stilled?

Go south of that troublesome border where modest rumblings can be heard, and from there, laborious issues are dealt with on a daily basis. But this is where the analogy breaks down: I happen to have plenty of untapped gas in storage.

Still, I have quakes to deal with periodically. Eruptions come and go, unexplained and unexpected. There have been moments when my axis certainly wobbled. I suspect small aliens landed on me once, for they left tiny crop circles behind, which I showed to my friends (okay, that claim is false, but I did fall asleep one time while wearing a Levi jacket, so I apologize).

Drop down below my equatorial regions, and things become very foreign, even to my wayfaring eye. I rarely visit down there.

I happened to peer over my shoulder one day as I walked away from a mirror, and caught an accidental glimpse of where Australia might be located, were I the planet Earth. It was not a pretty sight down there. I imagine the Australians would prefer it if I stood on my head when I spoke, so that it could be accurately said that my words were now emanating from a discrete but different hole.

Oh, well. This personal version of global warming causes me enough sleepless nights as it is, so I won’t worry too much about their wild accusations.