Roadside Journal: June 22, 2025

By Chuck Woodbury
Founder, publisher and wise, seasoned human being

Get real about what’s worrying you!

Having a bad day? Look at the NASA photo below. That’s the Artemis 2 spacecraft on its unmanned (and unwomanned) mission to the Moon and back. This photo was taken as the spacecraft passed behind the Moon. The Moon is the nearest object in the photo; the distant one is Earth, where you and I live.

I look at this photo when I am feeling down, or even feeling sorry for myself for one reason or another. You might want to do the same. That little blue orb is where we’re doing our worrying. My guess is at any given moment you and I are worrying, a few billion other Earthlings have bigger worries. I bet you will work yours out.

You and I are lucky we were even born to experience life on our beautiful, lonely speck in the Universe. Whatever our problems, they mean nothing to the cosmic big picture. It may not seem that way at times. I’ve been there and I know the pain. I learned that it helps that when we are down to just remember that soon we will be back up. This photo can help.

Close encounter with a cactus

I was walking through the desert near Tucson, Arizona, and the sun was low to the west getting ready to set. Right ahead of me, three times my height, stood a saguaro cactus. And there I was, my shadow, nearly upon it. So I waved and took a picture.

What a waste of time!

See below. That’s a screenshot from a YouTube video. There are dozens just like it. Each one shows a celebrity as he or she looked when young and then again when old. In this case, it’s Barbara Feldon, who in the ’90s played beautiful, sexy Agent 99 alongside Don Adams’ on the TV spy spoof “Get Smart.” I want these young/old videos to go away. They often sucker me in. They waste my time. They depress me — when I’m watching them and then afterwards when I think about all the time I wasted. They’re just clickbait — a cheap, sleazy, lazy way to get traffic to make money.

In this case, so what if Barbara Feldon is no long cover girl material? She’s still beautiful. Age happens! If you’re young and exceptionally beautiful or handsome, enjoy the ride. Beauty fades faster than any young person ever imagines. I laugh at the ads for creams that remove wrinkles: The models are gorgeous and in their late 20s, already fretting about aging. What a joke!

We’re lucky we’re not reptiles

We humans are lucky we are not reptiles. A reptile does fine in the hot summer, but not in the winter. The cold-blooded creatures are useless when the temperature dips below about 60.

Some scientists say we could have evolved from reptiles if things had worked out a little differently way back when. If we had evolved from reptiles, people living in the tropics would rule the world. The Russians would be wimps, because they’d be frozen up eight months out of twelve. In the United States, you’d be relatively okay if you lived in Florida or southern California.

Dating would be tough. If you made a date with a nice lady, and then it got very cold, you might show up late. She’d be mad, and so you’d probably end up arguing all evening in front of an electric heater. The term “heated conversation” would take on new meaning.

Nobody would snow ski, but water skiing on Arizona’s Lake Powell would be popular.

Power failures would be disastrous, especially for people sleeping with electric blankets. They’d be frozen until the power returned; if it never did, they’d be bedridden until spring.

Perhaps the worst thing about being a reptile would be that we’d have scales. While that doesn’t sound very attractive, the phrase “Boy, she has great scales” would become popular at the beach.

I feel very fortunate I did not evolve from a reptile.

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