Little known fact - Some might say I have dark sensibilities.

Thinking seriously about it, I’ve been that way since childhood. When I was five or six, my parents bought me the Childcraft Encyclopedia set. By the time I was seven I had read the entire set, some volumes more than once. But one segment in particular stuck with me. It stuck with me so significantly that I had an aggressive impulse to share it with my kindergarten class for show and tell. Most adults would find this amusing, had my shared subject not been about the death of our sun and the end of life as we knew it.



I began by explaining that our solar system’s sun was a medium star and depending on the size of the star, its inevitable death would come about accordingly. Small or dwarf stars, as I had recently learned, would just fizzle out and collapse. Large stars would explode into super novas, destroying everything in their wake. Our sun, a medium star, would swell so large that it would engulf Mercury and Venus before shrinking into nothing. As for our Earth — it would survive, but life on this planet surely would not.

I then went into detail explaining how the sun’s incredible growth would scorch the planet until every living thing ceased to exist. And if, by chance, anything on Earth did survive the heat wave (understatement), it would then be subject to an unyielding winter. Once the sun dies, there’s no more heat. No more energy. No more anything.

Now — as a kid, my sense of time was a bit distorted and I was under the impression that this was all going to happen very, very soon. My concept of 3 billion years could easily have been confused with end of the week. So naturally, I was alarmed and I made it a point to make sure everyone I knew shared my extreme panic.

“And this is all going to happen…tomorrow!”

Needless to say, none of my Catholic school teachers were very impressed. I had basically read the Book of Revelations to a class full of six year olds. And ever since then, I’ve always been “that guy”.

-Lex