We celebrated our grand daughter's 8th birthday this evening and watching the joy in her face and hearing the laughter in her voice as she opened her presents was almost enough to get my mind off the world situation for a little while, if it hadn't at the same time magnified my concern for her future.

Hours later I find myself still sitting here, in the dark now, except for the bright white page in front of me, with the ticking of the living room clock slowly counting off the minutes, and reminding me that only a couple of hours from now it'll be time for me to get up and get her off to school and that what I really need right now is sleep. Ah, sleep, beautiful sleep. And I'm gonna get right to it, soon as I can find that switch that turns off my mind, or what's left of it.

Right now I'm busy trying to come to terms with the fact that the future is likely to be a very bad place for that sweet innocent little birthday girl, now sound asleep and dreaming of puppies and princesses just down the hallway. As much as I want to believe we'll find a way out of the mess we've made of this world, and in doing so, leave the world a better place for her and all the little ones coming up behind us, I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's just not going to happen.

I'm afraid we've already lit too many fuses, any one of which has the potential to destroy us and all that we could have been. Which one finally does us in is anybody's guess at this point. Will we continue to overpopulate the planet until we simply end up killing each other in a fight to the death battle over food and water? Will it be the effects of climate change that brings about our destruction? Or maybe a nuclear war that will makes our planet uninhabitable for anyone that is unlucky enough to survive being immediately blown to bits? It doesn't take much imagination to come up with many more scenarios, none of which are pretty.

But then again, maybe all the dark political realities clouding my pov lately have made me overly pessimistic, tainting my views on everything else as well. Hell,maybe we'll actually come to grips with the fact that 7 billion people is already several billion too many for this tiny planet to support and we'll take responsible action on that, or maybe mother nature will take matters into her own hands and solve that problem for us. And maybe we'll actually somehow manage to put the brakes on climate change before it's too late, not likely but it is possible. And what the hell, as long as we're dreaming, maybe we'll even be able to avoid WW3, even less likely in my opinion, but possible.

And man oh man, if we did indeed manage to douse all those fuses then surely our problems would all be over. And the human race and all of our fellow creatures could live in peace.

Because I'm sure that by then, humans, being the intelligent creatures that we are, will have elected governments all around the world that can be trusted to be fair and just and determined to live in peace with one another. Governments that would act only in the best interest of the people and the planet they live on. You know what I'm talking about, a government of the people, by the........... yeah, you've all heard of that one.

And even if for some strange reason we fail to achieve the kind of government that we all know we need, we can always hit the streets and blow the whole fucking thing up and build it all over again, making sure of course, that we get it all just right this time. Hell yeah man, that'd work for sure. Damn, now that I think of it, what the hell was it I depressed about anyway?

And now I may actually be tired enough to fall asleep. Thanks for listening. Good morning and good night everyone.

There is supposed to be a video near the top but it's not showing up in the preview, too tired to try and figure it out now.