In the new New Yorker there's a review of a new biography of Willem de Kooning in which the painter is quoted as having once remarked to his wife (after gazing at the night sky), "The universe gives me the creeps." What a hilarious and perfect thing to say, especially if you imagine it uttered in a slight Dutch accent. I love having my feelings validated by a figure of international renown. The universe gives me the creeps too, Bill. Can I call you Bill? You're dead, what do you care. Bill it is. It's not the human environment that Bill and I are talking about, it's the universe as a whole. The way it's structured, its component parts, its physical laws and so on, the way things fundamentally are, according to the breathless rhetoric of broadly gesturing science popularizers wearing turtlenecks. There's something just basically off-putting about the universe, it makes my flesh crawl a little bit. Like I sometimes might gag a little thinking about it, or shudder, and hope no one at the zoo or planetarium sees me. I think the people who run the zoos and planetariums and natural history museums and places like the Exploratorium want you to feel awe and fascination at the revealed inner mechanisms of the universe. I feel it sometimes but mostly it's not so much awe as apprehension and dread. It's a fleeting feeling that's difficult to describe, just fugitive moments of revulsion that bubble to the surface of my mind and evaporate. I don't think Carl Sagan would understand me at all. You can take just about any fundamental principle of the universe and I have some kind of queasy problem with it. Like gravity for instance, or the way matter clumps together in certain ways, or the atom. I think about gravity when I'm trying to fall asleep at night. The wrongness of gravity has kept me awake I don't know how many times. One time in 7th grade I overslept and ran to school as fast as I could and I had to sign in in the office because I had missed first period, and in the Reason For Tardiness box I wrote "Insomnia caused by gravity." They called my mother, it was a big mess. I got accused of "smart mouth" a lot back then.