You should've been here when I pitilessly mocked a beam of light that was streaming through my window. I really pilloried that ray. I was in a particularly foul mood, just sitting at my desk with my head in my hands quietly moaning, as I often do, when I noticed this ray of light hitting the base of the floor lamp to my left. This ray of light was making a smudge of brightness, a sort of weak oval of sunlight, the kind of blotch of sunlight that, if it appears in the middle of the living room rug, is usually discovered and exploited by the cat, since cats have a talent for finding warm blotches of sunlight to curl up in, or remember that scene from Salinger where Franny Glass sees just such a bright blotch of sunshine and considers lying down in it herself. I think that's right when she has her little breakdown. I don't remember.

Anyway, this blotch of sunlight wasn't on a rug or a sofa or anywhere it could be even a little bit useful to anyone. It entered my room and ended up on the dusty metal base of a floor lamp. Look at you, I told this beam of light, you've come all this way, what a spectacular voyage you've made, and look how ignominiously your incredible journey has ended. Welcome to earth, chump. You were born in awesome conditions in the crucible of a star 93 million miles from here, your origin is in the magnificent engine of the sun, the source of life on our planet. You are royalty. Great arcs of plasma celebrated your birth. Your wondrous beginning was an event of impressive spectacle. You exploded into being and shot off into space, at the speed of you. You traveled an enormous distance in mere minutes, 8 minutes, and in that brief duration such vistas you beheld! But then you had the misfortune to enter my little room, your short life of dramatic intensity abruptly terminated when you crashed into this insignificant object. And that was that. A lamp! Talk about coals to Newcastle on top of everything else. Pathetic. Just think, your traveling companions might be this very moment illuminating Michelangelo's David or some other object of reverence, while you, by having the poor luck to be aimed the tiniest degree askew, are doomed to cash it in as a barely-noticed smear in the anonymous room of a mean and furious individual such as myself. A cat won't curl up in you, a cat would wrench its back trying to take advantage of you, don't think for a minute that even that modest dream is in the cards, because it's not. Such promise you had. Those first few minutes set an impossibly high standard, your future must've seemed so bright. I'm sure you imagined nothing short of sustained and uncompromising success, a life of travel and glamour. And look at how it ends for you. Your photons must be bitter, and who can blame them? Those photons were struttin' their stuff, they were like the rockstars of subatomic particles, and then blammo! 93 million miles and then brought to their knees by an ugly lamp in the nondescript room of someone like me. Suckers.