You may have started out as unremarkable composites of nickel and iron, cast out from your birthplaces and sent hurtling through the cosmos like so much space detritus casually tossed into predictable orbit, but today you are all shooting stars!

Obviously, we went out into the desert to observe last night’s meteor shower, which explains why this comic is nearly 14 hours late, in case anyone actually noticed. It was a really nice display, although being way out in the desert on the other side of the mountains (so that they blocked a lot of the city light) and not even starting to look up until after midnight probably improved the viewing. We have a place we go on BLM land and no one ever goes there. It’s weird that no one goes there, because it’s the best place for a lot of nighttime in the desert activities, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone else there.

Someone joked about what meteors might be thinking, if meteors could think, and I maintained that it would be “AAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Because if you can think, we assume you can feel, and if you can feel, I can’t imagine the process of being ablated while tearing through the earth’s atmosphere is a pleasant one. After a thousand years of hanging around, smashing into anything at high velocity would be a shock. Although maybe being ejected from a comet is heartbreaking enough. Maybe they’re happy to burn up and fall to earth as perhaps a tiny granule of iron. Maybe it’s nice to be grounded again, even if you lose a huge part of yourself in the process.

I need to stop anthropomorphizing space rocks and go acquire food.