Anyone who knows much about me knows how much I revere the late John Hughes and his brilliant canon of movies. The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Uncle Buck, Pretty In Pink, Vacation, Christmas Vacation, Mr. Mom, The Great Outdoors,  Home Alone, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, She’s Having A Baby—the list goes on.

I intentionally omitted one particular movie (and it is one of my very favorites): Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I cannot pass Thanksgiving without watching, quoting, and just plain enjoying that heart-warming, witty, acerbic, HILARIOUS flick. There is a veritable cornucopia of deliciously funny dialogue and quintessentially quotable one-liners.

However there is a particular short discourse that my wife and I probably quote at least a dozen times a year, out of the blue. If you’ve seen the movie (or even if you haven’t), picture two men, riding in the back of a pickup truck in the middle of Kansas November, in a pile of hay with a tooth-gnashing Cattle Dog:

Neal Page: What do you think the temperature is?

Del Griffith: One.

Usually we are quoting this beneath the balmy Colorado sun, blue skies, and temperatures well into the 50s, 60s, or better. Not this week. Not today.  And it’s supposed to get colder.

Now if you actually are a global warming “alarmist” (and I am not judging you one way or the other if you are), you could probably argue that this is the polar ice cap moving slowly southward. The next Ice Age approaching. And it might be. However my high school English teacher responded today that up in big wonderful Wyoming, where I grew up, it was minus 25 today. And that gave me pause to remember the first week I returned from college—December of 1983:

For the entire first week it was—and I am not exaggerating—55 degrees BELOW zero, straight temperature. The wind chill was colder than 100 below. I actually called a radio station in Los Angeles (we could pick up AM stations at night, way out there in the boonies). They put me on live when they came back from commercial. I remember the DJ saying it was 64 at the beach that night and that he had a caller from a place that was juuuust a bit colder.

So by my calculations, one degree in Denver really isn’t all that much to talk about, after all. And how can I possibly complain? Friends just a hundred miles north in Cheyenne said it was minus 22 today.

I don’t know if you are a fan of the movie Point Break with Patrick Swayze (before he got sick), Keanu Reeves (when he was still cool), and Gary Busey (when he was still within at least a few cards of a full deck). A back-story in the flick has to do with “the fifty-year storm”—when Mother Nature basically comes around full-circle again and decides to show we mere humans how insignificant we really are.

My gut tells me we are either experiencing (or getting close to experiencing) the fifty-year storm. Part of me thinks it’s far worse than that. Not global warming-big; Armageddon-big. One thing is certain: we are insignificant when it comes to the forces of God and Nature. When it gets to this kind of cold, or Katrina kind of stormy, or Japanese tsunami time—well, that’s when we all relearn just how quickly we can be wiped out of existence.

On that point, various species of dinosaurs roamed the earth for approximately 165 million years (various species were coming into existence and going extinct from around 250 million years ago to about 65 million years back, when there was a global event that wiped out all life larger than an amoeba). “Modern” humans are postulated to have been here, even by best-case scientific views, for around 200,000 years. I once heard a comparison that went something like this:

If you put humans and dinosaurs on a typical one-year Gregorian calendar, with one year representing the age of the planet, dinosaurs lived from the beginning of the year until about the middle or end of September.

Humans haven’t made it past New Year’s Eve.

The salient takeaway being that for us to disappear—from a purely scientific point of view—would be an earthly insignificant event. Some people believe we have earned our extinction. And then some. I tend to think we probably have. I look at the world, regardless of the frigidity, and I am not convinced we’ve made this a better planet on which to live. And yes, I am inclined to think we’ve done more damage than good (particularly when compared to any other species that ever lived).

Then again, without many of the advances in medicine, understanding of the human genome, vaccinations, treating disease, etc. the human race probably would have died off. Which doesn’t really prove anything, I suppose, other than the fact that we are a quite successfully self-sustaining virus.

From a purely selfish humanistic perspective, innovating things like, oh, I don’t know—indoor heating, cooling, and plumbing, really should garner us at least another five or ten thousand years. Kind of a homo sapiens-biased, self-congratulatory theory, isn’t it? Hmm. Seems I’ve painted myself into a kind of anti-existence corner.

Can a blog take more of a totally fatalistic tangent from John Hughes movies to the end of the human race?

Probably not. Of course I never really promised I was pro-human. I am. I just think blogging about our place in the chain of existence probably never ends all that well. Not if we’re being honest, anyway.

I also think the best thing blogs can really offer, when you get right down to the fact that (like a-holes) everyone has an opinion, is food for thought.

Oh, and thoughts of the never-ending summer.

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The blank page is dead…long live the blank page.

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Author known to use spontaneous satire, sarcasm, and unannounced injections of pith or witticisms which may not be suitable for humorless or otherwise jest-challenged individuals. (Witticisms not guaranteed to be witty, funny, comical, hilarious, clever, scintillating, whimsical, wise, endearing, keen, savvy, sagacious, penetrating, fanciful, or otherwise enjoyable. The Surgeon General has determined through laboratory testing that sarcasm can be dangerous, even in small amounts, and should not be ingested by those who are serious, somber, pensive, weighty, funereal, unsmiling, poker-faced, sober, or pregnant.) For those who enjoy and/or revel in the utterance of profanity, the author reserves the right to substitute “fish” for “fuck” without fear of repercussion, mental reservation, or purpose of evasion.