Oh well, another November has come and is more than half gone. This Monday (tomorrow) is my 5th anniversary at work. Whoppee. Can’t say that I exactly love my job. I’m not even sure that I know exactly how to do it. Somehow I’ve gotten enough done and avoided most trouble over the past 5 years. But the rules can change overnight in the crazy world of urban law enforcement. For now, it pays the bills. It’s all somewhat like a song by Steely Dan – a bit dark and cynical, but with a good beat to it. In fact, a line from a Dan song sums the whole situation up quite nicely: “I don’t really care if it’s wrong or if it’s right, but until my ship comes in, I’ll live night by night”. (I work a regular day job, but there ain’t many windows in the whole place, none near my desk; so it might just as well be night while I’m there.)

I still listen to a rock radio station most days, but I can’t say that it’s like radio was when I was a kid. Back then, there was almost always a song that you had to hear, that you could hardly wait until they played it again. But now, hardly any new tunes get my attention. I did experience an exception to that last week, when WDHA started playing “How Long” by Hinder; it’s a new song and a new group. It has a driving sound and angst-filled vocals, with dark choral harmonies in the background. But I had no idea what the song was about. So I looked up the lyrics on a web site, and here’s what it’s about: boy loses girlfriend to a guy he knows. Boy gets very upset about it. Ex-girlfriend tells ex-boyfriend that she still wants to be friends. Ex-boyfriend gives ex-girlfriend the finger. End of story.

Well now . . . . . there’s a new idea for a song. I guess that the standards are lower these days. But to be honest, a whole lot of guys can probably relate to it. It never quite happened to me, but millions of girls have told ex-boyfriends who they dumped that they want to be friends. And most ex-boyfriends play by the rules and say “sure, we can still be friends”. But deep down inside, the animal in you wants to make a disrespectful gesture. So Hinder is probably going to sell a lot of records with this one (oh, yea, wait . . . . . they don’t sell records anymore; it’s CDs and downloads).

On the more civilized topic of scientific research, I read this week that new astrological observations tend to confirm the notion that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. These observations also indicate that the mechanism through which this is occurring is a mysterious force that somehow increases as the universe expands. The more space there is, the more repulsion there is between anything within that space. Eventually that repulsion overcomes the attracting force of gravity, and things start flying apart. If this theory is correct, then eventually the universe will expand itself into nothing but a fine thin dust. Everything that happens now – the shining of stars, the formation of planets, the emergence of life, the recording of songs about ex-girlfriends – is all just a temporary effect on the way to the big rip. It’s up to us, and to maybe a handful of other planets where sentient life has emerged, to give the Universe any meaning it might ever have. Let’s hope that the other planets are off to a better start on that than we are!