Your toothpaste, floss and deodorant are aligned

["Michael McGeachie" <mmcgeach@>]

Remember in 2003, there was this big cosmological confluence of planets or
stars or something?  Some kind of event where the nearby planets all lined
up from our point of view, on Earth, and then starting at 7pm or so you
could see this big bright star in the sky, sorta under the moon.  I think it
lasted about a week.  And that's pretty neat I suppose, and only occurs once
every billion years or something, and that would be impressive, if, of
course, I'd ever looked at the sky before to know what I was or wasn't
seeing.  But maybe that's not my fault.  If there wasn't all this pesky
infrastructure and architecture and street lights obscuring the sky, maybe
I'd have seen it once before.  I can imagine cavemen, from a 70s B-movie,
having a much less encumbered view of the night sky, and perhaps learning to
recognize certain patterns of lights up there, that came out every night.
To them, this sort of thing must have been magnificent.  

Maybe I can relate to what that must have been like, by comparison with a
similar experience I had.  Early last week, you see, I ran out of
toothpaste, dental floss, and deodorant all on the same day.  And at first I
didn't realize what I was witnessing, because I was pretty confident that
remembering I was out of everything would be easier than remembering which
thing it was I was out of, when next I was shopping, and this lightened my
mood and distracted me somewhat.  But then I thought about the cycles I was
witnessing: I must run out of toothpaste every 12-14 weeks, and dental floss
sooner, and similarly deodorant must have its own harmonic cycle, but
somehow, on this particular night, they had all aligned.  The odds against
it must have been astronomical.  But yet the patterns of use and refilling
of tubes and containers that greet me each night, composing the pastel
background in the portrait of my quotidian routine, had shown me their inner
harmony.  Each separate immutable cycle had, somehow, mystically, come
together in the Grand Cosmic Dance of the Toiletries.  And this, I
suspected, would have little impact on the stargazing Cavepeople I imagined.
But who cares what they think anyway?  Cause see what I think of your stars?
Not much, that's for sure.  Yeah.  So we're even now, Cavepeople.


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