The Sunset Also Rises

Three or five nights ago I was headed home, east, and it was one of those evenings when a lot of low clouds made the sunset really colorful. It was only about a quarter visible, and very pink, and I hit the grade into Calimesa which is pretty long. Traffic was good and I was knocking along at 70 or so. It's kind of steep and ten seconds in I noticed, in the rear-view mirror, that the sun was rising again. I could see almost the entire thing. It reminded me of the time I started at the fire station as the sun set, on my bike, and then rode as fast as I could up to the boneyard. I raced up the rock that I liked to hang out on, and the sun had not quite started to set there. So I watched it. When it got below the horizon, I took off again for the gravel pit up the road. I didn't quite make it, so I kept going up the road and took the trail that goes to the rock where the windsock is. I climbed up that and watched the sun start to set, again. There was nowhere higher to get to in a reasonable amount of time, so I watched the rest of it from there. Then when I was 16 and I had to work while the rest of the family went on vacation, I got up to go to the heliport and watch the sun rise. That might be the first time that the Earth's rotation really sunk in (in a practical setting, at least) and I realized that if you traveled west at just over a thousand miles an hour, sunset would last forever. So in a Concorde you could watch the sun set slowly for hours. Or in a fighter jet you could watch the sun hover in the sky for a while, maybe 45 minutes or so, because I don't think they carry enough fuel to maintain that speed for very long.

Tonight I heard a twentysomething complaining to his friends that he was unable to impregnate. "I'm shooting blanks, dude. If I had a shotgun, and I was in World War One or World War Two, I'd get killed because I'm shooting blanks, dude."

It sounded goofy at first, but then I realized how often I talk about things like "spinning my wheels" and "grinding my gears." It would all be metaphorical if I weren't a Transformer.