The Cosmic Narcissist

Almost every crayon-drawn family portrait in America, carefully sketched by the family’s resident kindergartener and hanging on the refrigerator, is decorated in the upper corner by a beaming golden sun, colored in happy yellow, exuding warm rays, and bearing a smiley face.

And the sun frequently is a benevolent, welcome friend. But the sun has a dark side.

The sun doesn’t shine kindly upon the Arabian Peninsula; it rages down upon it with malevolent ferocity. This isn’t the cheery Kellogg’s Raisin Bran star in the sky above Qatar; this is the full fury of an inferno that can sizzle an egg on a sidewalk 93 million miles away. The sun screams heat at the earth with such intensity that it’s difficult to conclude it isn’t deliberately trying to kill everything on it. Even the very air is burnt and ashen on the horizon. The sun seems incensed by anything that exhibits the audacity to breathe or bloom, burning or singeing it all. The sparse scattered desert scrub and stubborn sidra trees endure somehow, their greens muted by a thin tan dust. How dare they. The sun holds a murderous grudge against the invisible water that makes it possible, somehow sustaining this defiance from deep under the parched, barren soil.

Why carry on? Why endure the wrath of a sun-god intent on killing you? Why ache to stretch roots, why sip greedily at every drop within reach? Why dart between bush and rock, from auto wreck to cactus in search of food? Why live here? North American geese migrate when the weather changes; what keeps the oryx and gazelle, the sand cats and honey badgers, the pigeons and the bats within this furnace with the confidence of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?

The impertinence. The resilience. The madness of rebellion. The tenacity to fight on in the face of what appears to everyone else to be utter, purposeless futility.

Why?

Because fuck the sun.

That’s why.