Something happened about 14 billion years ago, or so our version of the story goes. Something happened, maybe from nothing, and here we are now. Someone much like me will likely be here long after I die.

That is the heart of the story. Entropy drives the drama.

I am too wrapped up in life to get hung up in existentialism--a quick peek at a patch of ground teeming with critters reminds me that rejecting anything human does not end the universe.

So while I keep trying to bring my lambs back home to the bigger story that drives science, I often fail when navigating through membranes and enzymes and all kinds of minutiae I am paid to impart.

Johnny Cash knew biology. Willie Nelson still does, and he lives it--you can fill up your truck with BioWillie Fuel.

We love for a lot of reasons, and we do not talk of love in biology for far fewer reasons, but when you get down to it, the business of spilling ourselves into others involves respiration and reproduction. Love is indeed the essence of evolution.






And all along the way, oxygen ultimately rips electrons from sweet sugar, reducing life back to water and carbon dioxide and heat, the same theme in Shakespeare's sonnets and in lurid dime novels. We're all driven by a slow form of fire.

Just ask anyone paying attention.

For the Social Distortion version, take a peek here.

My wife once walked on window ledges, I once pushed motorcycles to their limits.
We fell in love, survived anyway, and now we tell stories.

Mary Oliver wrote "Oxygen," a poem, one of my favorites.
I originally saw it in the New Yorker--you can find it here now.
(Thank you, lucychili!)