... and so the night ends.

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This fork of a Joshua Tree fell over some months ago; you can see how the stump is nearly horizontal. They store water in their trunks and can be incredibly heavy, and it just fell over from its own weight.

The upper part was laying across my driveway, and the trunk was hanging on the fence, so I had to cut it off. The stump was still partially rooted, so I let it be. Now there are a half dozen shoots, incipient new branches, sprouting from the stump.

As I was growing up I would sometimes be envious of those friends and classmates who already knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I still know a few of them and they actually have had the jobs they wanted to do, or moved to the places they said they wanted to live, done the things ... you get the idea.

During my lifetime more than one person has thought me aimless, or lacking direction for my lack of a clear vision for my future. To be honest, they weren't completely wrong; I'm making this up as I go. It took me a long time to become OK with that.

As a consequence, I have had more career changes than anyone else I know. I have hung drywall, delivered TV tubes (yes, tubes) and pizzas, but not at the same time. I've been a restaurant manager, a drug store manager, and a warehouse manager. I was a file clerk, a bookkeeper, and a tax accountant, often at the same time. In high school I hated computer programming, and that is essentially what I have been doing for the last 20 years. It's actually not so bad.

Joshua Trees aren't really trees in the sense of what most people think of as trees. They rarely go straight up for any distance, the branches stick out randomly in every direction, and the whole thing is liable to fall over at any time, where, if it has any roots left at all, it will start the whole mess all over again.

It may not know where it's going, but it never gives up trying to get there.

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