So for reasons that may or may not (they may) relate to the fact that I am working in a long-awaited book involving aliens, I have been reading a lot of Carl Sagan. Sagan has always fascinated me in a way that few other science communicators do: he presents science as not only fascinating--many science communicators do that--but as something that is intrinsically spiritual and humanizing.

There are other astronomers I find interesting, like Stephen Hawking or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who talk about the universe in glowing and effusive language, but they don't talk about why the mightiness of the universe makes humanity so magnificent. If anything, many of these scientists make astronomy devalue humanity, rather than the other way around.

Anyway, all of this to say: Carl Sagan is pretty great….

Yesterday was a really great day. Not for the world at large, because—yeesh—but for me, it was a really great day.

You see I'm a writer, but I'm also a person with severe depression, and I fight and fight to get words on a page, but it's SO HARD. I have been scribbling thoughts in a notebook for months, not getting anything close to good. (I even decided last week that I was going to give up on novels and try writing a screenplay instead.) But then something just clicked….

My family came back from a vacation today. We don't take a lot of vacations, what with the cost of everything and work and school schedules. But we're fortunate because we live in Utah, and Utah is amazingly beautiful. So we packed up the kids and drove down to a little Airbnb in Panguitch, a hub that allowed us to visit Bryce Canyon National Park one day and Zion National Park the next. And let me tell you: it was fantastic…

I've gotta tell you: I have been sitting here all afternoon, not wanting to write this newsletter.

It's not because I am reluctant to tell a great truth, or anything so profound. It's just that I simply didn't feel like it, and I have a headache, and work was busy today. (You may notice that this newsletter is coming out Tuesday evening instead of Tuesday morning because I was dealing with similar things last night.)

Let me tell you a story…

When I was young, I had an intense wanderlust. There wasn't anything in particular that I wanted to do--I wasn't obsessing about going to Spain or hiking the Appalachia Trail or working on a crab boat in the Bering Sea--but I had a real need to get out and do something. I remember vividly a conversation I had with my wife where I quoted to her some lyrics from one of our favorite songs, "What A Good Boy" by the Barenaked Ladies:

I wake up scared, I wake up strange

I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever gonna change