What I Think About When I Drive

News of two more deaths this morning. George Carlin and a co-worker's brother. I don't believe in fate, destiny or supernatural coincidences, but I do believe in negative energy. I believe that, sometimes, negative energy begets negative energy. It's starting to creep in all around me and weave its long, shadowy tentacles onto every path I take lately. Not really. But it feels that way. I like my life and there are a lot of good things in it that work very well. It doesn't always feel that way, but it is true. I'm trying to be as careful as possible. I think about my grandmother being 96, thinking I'll get a call any day now with the message that she's not ... not ... I don't want to write the words. Not OK. Just because other people are dying all around me doesn't make it any more likely that her time is about to come. It should already be obvious. Every once in a while I think how fortunate I am that I haven't experienced a lot of (or, really, any) tragic, premature deaths of people who are very close to me. But, alas, I know that won't last very long, because every living thing must die.
I wonder if the universe is preparing me for the worst. I know the universe doesn't work like that.
Intuitively, I do know it. I think that every single experience, from the smallest experience lasting the most fractional second of time, to the length of any given relationship with another living being, form to combine the person each of us is today, like your own personal micro-universe. All the things that have ever happened to me are there, in my micro-universe, and they make up who I am, what decisions I make, and how I process information. And that would include those gene-type DNA things that happened to me way early on, I guess.
Thank you for joining me for my own personal science revelation today.