Lights and Fire

The day is done and the wind is revving like an awful motorcycle on a treadmill outside my door. I swear it's too dark to believe I'm awake in this room. There is not enough light, which makes the lambency of the lights themselves appear too bright. Yet, in the darkness I can't see anything other than the lights, so I end up staring at them as if I were a moth, or if they were stars. Simple solution: cheap china balls from Ikea. Maybe even put them on dimmer switches.

Jack sleeps and coughs and the sandy bottom of the airmattress shrieks with the floor at his every adjustment. His snoring makes me feel like I'm in a zoo.

I'm having a hard time grasping the fact that there isn't a single animal on this planet that can create a fire on its own. None of them have any use for it, and can survive completely independent of this element. Yet, it's been documented as one of the most essential components of human survival. I think I first realized this when I went camping in Arizona with James, and I remembered feeling like my entire existence was limited to a proximity of no more than six feet away from the campfire. The temperature was below freezing and I couldn't see anything beyond the fire's glow. It became my holy source of warmth and vision, my piece of sun in the death of night. I remember asking James, "won't this attract the attention of the coyotes?" We both pondered this notion for a moment, but decided that they had no use for the fire. Our scent already gave us away anyway. Then I realized their existence had no limits in the wilderness, while ours had a diameter of about ten feet around our tiny makeshift sun. Sometimes I'm surprised we survived through the early eras of humanity, when the whole planet was wild. It's hard to imagine that all of this wasn't designed--that there wasn't a Creator who balanced things out by giving something like fire exclusively to us, the planet's most handicapped species in terms of survival. It almost doesn't seem fair to the animals.