Earlier I made a lengthy entry all about city life versus country life but somehow when I went to post it, the writing disappeared! So I guess I'll just sum it all up by saying that I am a townie and did not like living in the rural area for seven miserable years. And fortunately, DH's offer to buy the property/house in the country was countered by a vastly larger sum, which we wouldn't even consider. Believe me, my earlier entry was MUCH better, but I don't feel like repeating myself.

However, maybe the following song lyrics express my feelings best:


You Belong to the City
- Glenn Frey

The sun goes down, the night rolls in
You can feel it starting all over again
The moon comes up and the music calls
You're gettin' tired of starin' at the same four walls

You're out of your room and down on the street
Movin' through the crowd and the midnight heat
The traffic crawls, the sirens scream
You look at the faces, it's just like a dream
Nobody knows where you're goin'
Nobody cares where you've been

'Cause you belong to the city
You belong to the night
Livin' in a river of darkness
Beneath the neon lights

You were born in the city
Concrete under your feet
It's in your moves, it's in your blood
You're a man of the streets

When you said goodbye, you were on the run
Tryin' to get away from the things you've done
Now you're back again, and you're feeling strange
So much has happened, but nothing has changed
You still don't know where you're goin'
You're still just a face in the crowd

You belong to the city
You belong to the night
Livin' in a river of darkness
Beneath the neon lights

You were born in the city
Concrete under your feet
It's in your blood, it's in your moves
You're a man of the street

You can feel it, you can taste it
You can see it, you can face it
You can hear it, hey, you're getting near it, hey
You wanna make it, cause you can take it
You belong to the city, you belong to the night
You belong to the city, you belong to the night
You belong, you belong...
======

Here's an interesting, dismal excerpt from a New York Times book review:

'Our Final Hour': Global Warning


Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, a professor at Cambridge University, one of the world's most brilliant cosmologists and a longtime arms control advocate, gives civilization as we know it only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century. The proposal for ''Our Final Hour,'' a breezy but deadpan recital of all the possible ways that the sky could fall on us, was so depressing, Rees has said, that his agent had a hard time selling it.

But that was before 9/11.

Humanity has progressed to the point where we are now our own worst enemies: adding to the backdrop of natural calamities that have always threatened us, technology, Rees argues, has now so highly leveraged the power of the individual or the small group that a biological ''unabomber'' or a mistake in a laboratory could wreak havoc only dreamed of by the Strangeloves of the last century, who held the forces of nuclear apocalypse at bay by war-gaming scenarios of mutual assured destruction. He says, in fact, that he has bet $1,000 that an instance of bioterror or bioerror will take a million lives before the year 2020.

But there are many things to worry about, some of which will be familiar to all: global warming, asteroid impacts and that old bugaboo nuclear war, which has been transmogrified by the end of the cold war; the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rees points out, has left the world awash in the raw materials, enriched uranium and plutonium, for some 70,000 bombs.

Others are novel. Engineering advances could lead to the creation of intelligent self-reproducing nanoparticles that could eat us and every other living thing on Earth, reducing the biosphere to what Eric Drexler, one of the pioneers of nanotechnology, calls ''gray goo'' -- the subject of a recent thriller, ''Prey,'' by Michael Crichton.

Certain physics experiments might be even more catastrophic, Rees reports. In principle they could disturb space-time itself, causing the laws of physics to twitch into a new form, like water suddenly freezing to ice, destroying our atoms and everything else. Since we lack a ''battle-tested'' theory of what happens at very, very cold temperatures, he says, we would have been right to be worried when a metal bar -- part of an apparatus to detect gravitational waves, ripples of space-time predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity -- was recently cooled to near absolute zero, making it what Peter Michelson of Stanford University called ''the coldest large object in the universe.''

As I've stated in other journal entries, why isn't it conceivable that HUMANS are a blight on the cosmos? And that we are doomed to self-destruct? Or at best, NOT populate the whole cosmos...so that our destructive forces are at least limited to earth?