Thoughts on the Lost Finale

Hello everyone! It's 12:08am on Monday, May 24th and I'm getting ready to go to bed after watching the series finale of Lost on ABC. I decided to post up a quick response to the end of this show, as well as a tribute to the show in general. The finale was great; not fantastic and not without fault, but neither was the rest of this show and I believe that the writers were able to capture the most vital aspects of the show in the last 2 and 1/2 hours. The finale was epic and encompassing and left you filled with wonder and awe (truly satisfactory substitutes for curiosity and knowledge). I was very impressed with this show in general. Although I only watched it for the first time a year and a half ago (and have been desperately clawing through DVD box sets and Hulu updates to get caught up ever since), I feel that a major part of my life has been shaped and influenced, however indirectly, by the sorts of questions and concepts this show forced me to confront. The acting was brilliant, the sets were brilliant, and above all else, the music was beautiful.

If you have avoided Lost because you feel that it is not your genre of choice, I urge you to watch a few episodes and experience the wide diversity of themes the show touches upon. If you have avoided Lost because you hate broadcast television and prefer the quiet, intellectual prowess of cable shows like Dexter, I would urge you to give Lost a try; you may be pleasantly surprised to find that it has comprehensively and consistently escaped the majority of stereotypical cliches that harangue network television programming. And if you have avoided Lost because you feel it is too complicated, I urge you to get a Netflix account or dust off your BitTorrent tracker of choice because once you start watching this show, it is very hard to stop. Luckily, I feel that the writers have provided an ending that satisfies and delights. Watch this show!

Good night,
Andrew

The Work Bench

Hello,

I've opened up a new blog (don't worry, NOT a replacement blog), that I hope will serve as a place for me to chronicle all my DIY projects this summer. Please head on over there and give it a look!

The Work Bench

Best,
Andrew

Thoughts on Poetry

This post was originally titled "The Meaning of Poetry"; I just stumbled upon a blog that was filled with some pretty inspiring material. I knew it was inspiring because it forced me to think about what was being said outside of the context of myself. What I'm trying to say is, I stopped thinking about myself for a few minutes to read this blog. Afterwards, I started thinking about myself again, but for a few brief minutes I didn't. I don't like to think that my narcissism is at the pathological level -- I mean, I don't think it actually is, but I don't like to think about it either. The budding anthropologist, the evolutionary biologist within me says the following: Narcissism is vital to survival. Narcissism is simply the term humans invented when, upon looking backwards from their long journey of altruistic progress, were shocked to see that no matter how far they traveled from their primitive pasts, still had their roots firmly grounded in a reality sharply defined by the laws of nature. Eat or be eaten. We hate that, don't we? We have to. We don't like to think of ourselves as animals? This is where my thinking used to stop. I loved to think of us as animals. It would explain so much of the way my parents used to act when the doors were close and they didn't think we could hear them yelling at each other. It would explain the basic pleasure I used to derive from stealing food from my brother. Maybe the only reason I stopped was subconsciously I realized he had grown big enough to break my bones, to punish me for interfering with his own survival processes. This is where my thinking used to stop.

But now I can't help but reflect that we ARE different. We care about each other and we building gigantic monuments to commemorate the heroic actions of members of our community who travel thousands of miles away to get blown up by a mine -- defending too many people for us to explain. Definitely us, thought, right? At the end of the day, we can't think about the fact that our society has grown too fast for our sense of community to keep up.

On this train of thought, contemplating the defining characteristics of mankind, I started thinking about poetry. Our brains our firing constantly. Even comatose, disabled, vegetated people lying in beds in forgotten hospital rooms have brains that are constantly active. Synapse to synapse; microscopic lightning strikes. These storms brew and subside and boil and roar softly and loudly. Occasionally they force open the floodgates of our mind and we speak what we think and suddenly we have performed magic. Our bodies have transmitted electrical currents in one organ into sound waves in another and through this action we have increased the size of our population to 7 billion people. Our population is approaching the magnitude and complexity of our own brains.

What is poetry but the venting of excess thoughts. Some people say poetry tells a story. I say, the only story that is told through poetry is the singly story of human existence: we communicate our inner-most thoughts, opaque and diffuse reflections of the mechanized action of our brains, in the hopes that one word in a thousand words will be heard by someone else and change the way that person thinks. Poetry is not beautiful or simple or elegant. Not in its true form. It's merely a precision, targeted attack of thoughts. It the breath-taking cloud that occurs when a sonic-boom surrounds an ICBM.

I had originally titled this post "The Meaning of Poetry", but I decided to rename it "Thoughts on Poetry" for two primary reasons: 1) To fit the internal organizational vernacular that is consistent throughout this Titanic blog. 2) To show that, at the end of the day, I don't really know the meaning of anything.

A day in the life of a spaceman

His day began when he woke suddenly to the icy cold air and his ears burned with screaming, and there was not enough oxygen left. Much later, the man slammed the button, locking the door, and turned exhausted to slump on the floor next to the blinking panel. There was not enough oxygen left. Five inches of clear plastic lay sheathed in metal and rubber and outside of this the blue planet lay still and silent and beautiful and the stars rotated in their thousand-year orbits and everything was very quiet. The filters cycled softly and the rhythmic hum of computers wheezed and coughed and sputtered and the air was very clean, but there was not much of it left and the cabin was very cold. The man panted, slowing his breaths and rested his head against the steel door.

“For the love of god Sherman!” The voice shrieked and frantically clawed upwards from the ice and silence and penetrated two layers of re-enforced aluminum and the sound was pushed and prodded along in its laborious journey across the increasing vacuum by a sudden violent pounding on the door. Against wild thrashing, the door did not budge, and the man closed his eyes, weary from the ordeal. There was not enough oxygen, and there was not enough time. “For the love of god Sherman!” The voice cracked halfway through, punctuated by a low muffled sound as bones and flesh and clothes slumped defeated to the surface of the cabin on the other side of the door. The voice continued, low and moaning, but the man did not listen. He could not listen. He had a job to complete and he would not allow her to get in his way.

After awhile he felt his strength returning, ebbing back into his bones and muscles like a cautious ocean returning to shore. He pulled himself to his feet and maneuvered unsteadily in the low gravity of the room. Catacomb pillars pressed in from all sides, and everything was steel and plastic, but there was a single window that perforated the hull and through its thick and stodgy surface, the vibrant and energetic stars danced and threw their refracted beams of light carelessly and laughed at the plight of the man in the cold. He pulled himself to a station and forced practiced eyes and hands over a console blistering with controls and gauges and screens and buttons. His attention was drawn through the thin air to a cluster of instruments in one corner of the console. Moisture from the air had condensed on the surface of the glass during the disaster and had flash frozen when the heating systems shut off, when he closed the door. He scraped his fingernails across the surface in a stupid and unwieldy attempt to defrost the display. Peering through the microscopic glacier, he squinted in the dim light at the position of the dial, frozen in position. He smiled weakly and exhaled a breath of relief. There was not enough oxygen left, but not everyone needed to die.

The air traced lightly around his padded suit and legs as he pulled himself into the nearest chair. As he swiveled around to face the closest window, empty candy wrappers and playing cards formed an orbiting debris field around his cold and stationary body. He tried thinking about the long journey that awaited him, but he could not focus on the details. He tried thinking about his family, only several hundred miles beneath him, but he could not remember their faces. Instead he focused on the movement of the stars and planets. Sudden slamming on the door behind him jarred him awake, but taking a quick peek at the display in front of him reassured him that there would still be enough. “Sherman!” the voice shouted through layers of metal and rubber and thin air. “Sherman!” the door cried out, the screaming slowly subsiding into low moans. “SHERMAN! You don’t have to do this! Please don’t do this!” The voice penetrated deep and he remembered. It was her.

He hadn’t known her two weeks ago, and they had different specialties on board, so it was very difficult for him to ever get a chance to know her very well. He remembered her red hair and her eyes that would often dart up from sheets of calculations, gauzy and red-rimmed from coffee and stim-packs, but the center was clear and piercing and he felt stupid to talk to her, so he didn’t. The voice continued, arguing and debating with an empty mantle of silence. The voice argued about possibilities and calculations and alternatives and slowly it grew quiet and muffled, and the only sound was in the man’s head, and he replayed scenes and sounds from his childhood, which seemed to come easier to him than those from his adult life. He could not think about her or her desperate pleas. He could not alter or stray from the path. He recognized the cruelty of the situation, but he had performed every calculation flawlessly and had considered every possibility. He knew with absolute certainty that there was not enough oxygen for everyone. He hoped enough remained for one person. He had to be sure. The scientist in him was curious, although the part of him that had grown small gardens in college and later in life was horrified and turned away and examined the beautiful scene slowly rotating in absolute cold and silence to the galactic rhythms of impenetrable and innumerable scale. And the two halves of him spent their various energies and utilized their various faculties, and so the man passed the time, unperturbed by the low and soft feminine wails, the rocking ocean of tears and sobbing occasionally peaking with white crested waves that rose in volume and broke upon magnificent levels of emotion and then were lost again amidst the quiet and constant din of despair. The door was locked and the lock had been sealed and there was not enough oxygen left, and the man knew that, and so nothing about the situation was changed by the crying.

Using tiny movements of his eyes, the man raked his trained vision across the displays and smiled inwardly at the increasing concentrations of oxygen. Yes, there would be enough. Yes, now the plan had sustainability; had life. All was not lost, and this fact stimulated his mind and he rose out of the cold darkness and promptly fell, his weak legs crumpling beneath him. He laughed softly at the ridiculousness of the situation. How long had he been sitting there? Four minutes? Five minutes? He checked his watch, but the hands had frozen almost instantly when he had locked the door several hours before. Continuing onwards, he crawled slowly, pulling himself over the floor to the other side of the room and crawled up the very wall of the console and leveraged himself to a sitting position, his shoulders burning with the exertion. He checked the screen. A swirling matrix of lights and information restlessly assembled into an organized fashion and the man waited and saw that his window of opportunity was very slim indeed. He could not think about the numbers now, the advanced math he had spent his life mastering slipped quickly away from the surface of his brain. He was no fool; he had written them down hours before. His thoughts flashed briefly to his home. His wife had always despised his predilection for planning, a subtle but dark hatred at his quiet and meticulous manner. He lived in his mind, and now he lived only in his mind, and he thought no more of anything beyond the present as he awkwardly fumbled with his pocket and retrieved a crumpled piece of yellow notepaper. Half of the small sheet had been stained red, but it was not his blood and so he was not overly concerned. He shifted his weight and squinted and read the numbers and laboriously entered them into the panel, each consecutive depression of the keys throwing up a tiny sparkling shower of ice particles and dislodged accumulations of crystallized dust. The computers seemed slow. They seemed to share his feelings of morbid lethargy. After a short eternity, the computer beeped once and glowed a comfortable shade of green and the mission was complete. The numbers ticked down and the man turned around slowly as he sunk once more to the floor of the room, carefully modulating his breaths. The window now lay across the room from him and he resigned his mind to the quiet contemplation of the intricacies of the galaxy beyond, his view of which was restricted by the size and position of the window to several square inches. It was a pitifully tiny space, but it grew in the vacuum and gradually encompassed his entire vision, and as the blackness of the picture naively courted and danced with the dim shadows of the room at the edge of his vision, the scene of a handful of scattered stars erupted in their full beauty and showered the deepest parts of the man’s mind with the sheer scale of their magnificence. They put on a show that was unlike anything the man had ever seen before.

As the filters slowly cycled and the numbers ticked down slowly on the screen behind him, the galaxy was free and joyous and gay and the man became the first one of his kind to witness the true parade of colors and spectacles that lay behind the opaque and distant surface. He saw the birth of stars and the death of worlds and the entire cosmic spectrum existed, for a very short moment, as an intimate and warm personal drama; of family members interacting with each other as they went about their daily lives. The numbers clicked to zero and the screen flashed red and emitted a loud beeping, but the man did not see the change in color or hear the beeping, and he had forgotten long ago about the sound of the woman pounding on the other side of the door, and he did not notice the low and terrible shaking as the hull split cleanly in two and the door that had once separated the kitchen from the bathroom now separated both from the very essence of space, and the smaller portion of the metal box swung away in a low arc and disappeared into the cloudy, brilliantly blue depths of the planet below and was lost amidst a fountain of superheated flame and gases as the atmosphere, grumbling its angry acquiescence, allowed the saved ship-half to re-enter the thick and humid air below. This saved ship-half with its minimally tolerable concentrations of oxygen returned to the wetness of the planets oceans, and the life inside was saved for future nights of coffee and red-rimmed concentrations and laughter and sex and births and deaths. Floating in an eternal orbit above, the spaceman in the other half bore witness to none of this, and the screen behind him flashed twice and automatically turned off. His gaze remained fixed on the small window on the other side of the room as he, in absolute silence and amidst a galactic festival of color and light and beauty, returned home.

Full Speed Ahead, Maniac Twins! (Pt. 4)

I pulled myself out of bed and pulled on a pair of casual slacks and a shirt, over which I pulled a sweater sporting logo of my alma mater. I soon discovered that the sun rose very early in that area, and that even though I walked out of my building to find the camp still caught in the lethargic throes of sleep, the sun was already high and shining quite brightly. It was a hot morning, and the gravel and red dirt crunched under my feet as I walked down the main road and explored the complex a little. My phone had accumulated a large number of messages during my trip the day before, and I spent some time pacing the perimeter of the camp, checking and erasing messages.

The entire complex, as I later learned, had been built from the relegated ashes of an old industrial complex, something that the Navy had used. The land was very flat in all directions, and I could view the beach from a small bluff that was within walking distance from the barracks. For days on end that summer I would meander down the dusty road that connected my set of buildings with the beach, and when I finally reached the coast I would sit down on the white sand in the shade of looming bleached palm trees and stare out at the ocean. It was a large and mysterious body of water that lay off shore, neither Atlantic nor Gulf waters. Many times large thunderstorms would blow in from the southwest, and gigantic gray clouds, darkened with their rainy burden, would appear as if by magic, rising from the horizon like ghosts levitating out of a forlorn cemetery. Camp Daisy was a little less than an hour south of Cape Canaveral, and numerous that summer I got to witness a rocket launch. Both times they were spectacular, and since they both happened at night, the fiery explosions and rocketing combustion of jet fuels illuminated the dense cloudbanks that loitered off-shore. I found the entire experience to be very exciting, and even from my sand-dune throne underneath the albino palm trees, I could feel the air quiver from the energy of the launches.

I don’t want to give you a false impression of the nature of my stay in Florida. I found time to admire the natural, sun bleached, wind-swept beauty of the shoreline only during brief periods of respite. Upon arriving I was almost immediately conscripted into the services of a small engineering team that was working on fuel mechanics. At that point, these people were mostly private-contractors. I found that I had gotten myself involved in the beginning stages of a lengthy contract labeled Project Titan that had the primary aim of designing a satellite that was to be launched into low-orbit surveillance around its namesake, the most intriguing moon of Jupiter. The project had been started in the late 90’s by Nasa, but funding had been cut and the project aborted and moved into the basement of the Department of Defense. Apparently, a sub-committee swept up the project in a wide-scale search and rescue of abandoned ideas. On federal orders, they distributed the project to a variety of private contractors and research institutions with the simple idea of choosing the lowest, most cost-efficient bid for a program re-design. Jill couldn’t speak highly enough of this plan. In tones that reflected her exuberant mood and accompanied by a fierce concert of gestures, she would cry out, “The de-centralization of project oversight is essential in maintaining the intellectual integrity of privatized resources in the space program.” She always had something like that to say, and I began to predict, with uncanny accuracy, the type of inspiring or dramatic adjectives she would choose for her next tirade.

The end result of this bureaucratic musical-chairs was that a small firm from California proposed a bid that was a few million dollars shorter than the next guy, and that the federal government had proceeded to make an offer, whereby the funds and resources outlined in the proposal would be guaranteed by the federal government, and all research would be subjected to the oversight and review of the US Air Force. In addition, all research and testing would occur on US military property and there was an additional stipulation that all automobiles involved in the project must be domestic. I remember being very deeply touched by the irony of the situation; we were developing the newest breed of space technology, and we were being told in no uncertain terms that our automobiles must be domestic brands. It was these sorts of decisions that originally prompted my decreased respect for any sort of institutionalized collaboration between the military and the government and the private sector, and Jillian Weinstein capitalized on that fact very quickly.

I was assigned to a small team working out of an old airplane hanger that lay at the far end of an old cracked airstrip lined by palm trees. It was located about 15 minutes away from the camp, and I would often walk there in the morning carrying nothing but a knapsack and several gallons of insect repellant which I used liberally to ward off the hordes of aggressive mosquitoes. On my first day of work, I came dressed in a suit and tie, but quickly learned to wear a simple short sleeve dress shirt, shorts, and shoes. I also learned to do my laundry twice a week, or else the stains from sweat and the constantly pervasive moisture and dirt would become permanent very quickly.

I was working with 8 other guys; most were from the universities or professional industry, but a few were military-types. I found it funny that you could tell who was from the military not by their haircut or the way they dressed, but in the way they programmed their computers. Their code was simple and terse and tended to use unusual strands and language. Civilian engineers tend to flourish their code with unnecessary aesthetic touches. Military engineers wrote programs that were built like tanks; completely ugly but extremely tough. At that time, the project was still in its nascent stage and my team had been assigned to testing the position-control thrusters that would keep the satellite locked into a steady orbit over the relatively mysterious rocky geography of Titan. Our biggest worry was the electromagnetic poles. Very little data had ever been collected on the strength or location of Titan’s poles, and our biggest concern was flying our satellite straight through a magnetic storm and having everything on board knocked out of commission. So we spent a lot of our time in the hangar playing with giant magnets. Like curious school children we giggled while removing metal belts, cuff-links, and (in the case of one military engineer) knives, before entering the testing room were we would place instrumental pieces of the thruster apertures in the middle of large electromagnets and flip the switch. As a result, a large part of the initial work I performed at Camp Daisy ended up being very mundane; we would flip switches and laugh at explosions of sparks and dying machinery and as we played gods controlling domains of circuitry and computer chips we carefully took notes, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of our various creations and modifications. Like gods, we had little mercy for inferior machines and I cannot tell you how many innocents we would ruthlessly smite everyday in that rusty hanger at the end of the airstrip in Florida.

Full Speed Ahead, Maniac Twins! (Pt. 3)

I must have fallen asleep during the flight, because the next thing I remember happening is a jolt as the plane touched down. The lights inside had been dimmed, and outside the airport was cloaked in a sea of black – impenetrable except for the steady blinking of guidance lights. I grabbed by bag, my jacket, and my briefcase and stepped into the aisle and out of the plane, followed closely by the blonde (whose name I was still unaware of), and Dr. Dagen. Outside, on the black tarmac, a sleek SUV was waiting, its parking lights glowing warmly against the ground. It was a warm night, but windy and as we walked across the empty airport a breeze swept up around us and my back crawled with shivers. Outside of the truck a slight man was waiting. He was wearing a dark suit and looked very professional. I nervously slicked my hair back and extended my hand. Taking it, he called over the still rumbling engines, “Hello! I’m Mr. Shepard, we spoke over the phone.” I nodded and smiled. He continued, “And Ms Weinstein! As lovely as ever.” I turned to see a look of friendly recognition on the blonde’s face as she warmly embraced Mr. Shepard. “Robert,” she said in her wonderfully awful voice, “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Jill?” Laughing, he replied, “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Robby?” Turning to Dr. Dagen he extended his hand for a firm handshake and salutations. We are now standing in a semi circle on one side of the truck and the wind was whipping our jackets, and suit tails, and ties, and skirt hems (in the case of the blonde Ms Weinstein) into a furious squall of textiles. Opening the rear passenger door, Robert Shepard motioned for Dr. Dagen and myself to climb into the backseat, which we did. Jill Weinstein circled around the car and piled into the passenger seat and Mr. Shepard took the wheel and we were off.

Turning in her seat to address Dr. Dagen and myself in a style very similar to that of a teacher attempting to educate two difficult boys, she began to explain her connection to Mr. Shepard. She told us of their time working together back in the 90s, when the government was big and bold and she flourished her stories with arm waving and hands and Mr. Shepard punctuated her narratives with polite laughter and precision grunts. Between the two of them I was able to assemble a pretty good picture of the sort of work both Robert Shepard and Jill Weinstein were involved in. You see, they had worked together, many years before in what Jill described as the “second space race – that which we contest with our own inhibitions” and which Robert described as “increasing collaboration between intergovernmental agencies in ascribing new policies regarding the development and utilization of space-flight technology”; I felt that Jill’s description was more exciting but far less instructive, ultimately. After several minutes of narrative I felt the tide of the discussion begin to tug pointedly towards Jill. Again, she dominated in speech. I noticed that Dr. Dagen had fallen asleep in the seat next to me, his head tilted slightly to the side while soft Germanic lilting phrases stumbled out of his sleep-inebriated mouth. Robert Shepard also began to grow silent, and I realized that I was in a car being driven by a man I didn’t know to a destination unclear being lectured by a woman who had talked to me for a very long time, but who I knew very little about, ultimately.

“And what’s more, there are people out there who believe that space is a dead end. That we should cut the funding. Do you realize what our defense budget looks like? I could hide four shuttle programs in the budget for new laser-tracking systems and no one would notice. Mind you, I am not advocating any sort of fraud. But can you believe the sort of ignorance that pervades the upper reaches of our country? To limit the entire scope of our creativity, of our knowledge, our inventiveness to a single point a Galaxy full of information? It’s quite ludicrous.” I was on the verge of overcoming my significant bashfulness and expressing my own similar outrage (albeit on a topic I had until moments ago never before considered), when Robert Shepard interrupted her. “We’re here Ms Weinstein so I would recommend that you stow the conspiracy theory stuff for the time-being.” At that moment, Robert seemed to become very much a military man, and I realized that I was very much unaware of what sort of people I was traveling to meet. It seemed very obvious to me that Dr. Dagen was a university-type, just like myself, and that Ms Weinstein seemed to despise institutions in their entirety, so I began to consider her a free-thinker; a radical who floated between the cracks (a conclusion that I would later reflect upon with a certain degree of irony). I couldn’t seem to place Robert in the mosaic of military-industrial-political complex I seemed to have gotten myself involved in. This was the first step in my journey of understanding the space program. It is a very complicated and confusing world in which many different sorts of people work together. I can only remember at the time being quite struck by Robert’s military undertone.

We arrived at a place called Camp Daisy at around 1 o’clock in the morning. It was very dark and I couldn’t see much of it, but I remember that there were a lot of dirt roads and very bland looking buildings and security checkpoints. We drove straight through the compound to a building with glowing lights and windows and it looked much more homely than the other buildings. It even had a small patch of flowers outside which helped to make it look less administrative. As we were parking Robert explained again how Mr. Bento was sorry he couldn’t meet us earlier that day, but that he himself was on a transatlantic flight from a European conference and that he wouldn’t be arriving until late that night himself. I was prepared for a few nights stay, and was very proud of myself for packing so lightly. It seemed that Dr. Dagen had a similar packing setup with just one bag and a briefcase and I was pleased with the succinctness that us “university-types” employed in getting ready for a short trip. Jill Weinstein was a completely different matter: she had brought several bags and pieces of luggage and we helped her to unload her bags and move them inside to a room that was marked with a polite sign: Dr. Jillian Weinstein, Consultant. I found a similar room for me and also one for Dr. Dagen. After I had settled in and took a stroll outside of the building, to soak in the place and get a feel for it. It was very late at night, and the birds and cicadas were causing a lot of noise in the bushes and trees that surrounded the area. I stayed outside for a while to admire the pleasant weather and to reflect on the trip so far. After a bit, I stepped back inside, removed my shoes and collapsed into the bed in a heap of tired eyes and exhausted limbs.

Full Speed Ahead, Maniac Twins! (Pt.2)

I suppose I should note, at this time, that I am not what you would call “traditionally handsome”. I wasn’t clean-cut, and fit like the officers who had escorted me from the public airport to the military airport (and who ultimately ended up being pilot and co-pilot on the plane I had just boarded), nor was I worn-out and weathered like Jack. I was thin and lean, and had always been a little too tall for practical purposes. My knees had a tendency to knock into desks and drawers and my shirts never seemed to fit very well. In addition, I had never acquired the skill for taming my hair. It stuck out in all directions, and on a windy day like this, tended to aggregate toward the back and slightly off to the side of my head.

So you can see why I was a bit nervous when I cleared my throat and said, “Hello! This is some strange trip, eh?” I firmly believe that it would been a smooth line, had it not been for the fact that right in the middle the pilot cut in with the two engines, and my words were lost in a whirlwind of howling intakes and screaming blades. This was not to be the last time I wasn’t able to successfully engage this beautiful woman in conversation, but I will touch on some of those other times where they are more relevant to the story.

The plane was crowded. There were only the three of us, plus the two officers in the cabin, and there was also a dog who had curled up on the floor and fallen asleep as soon as the plane had taken off. However, the majority of the space was taken up by a big pile of tarped and pinioned packaged machinery. My trained eye could see the outlines of manifolds, metal heat sinks, and tubes that indicated it was some sort of engine, perhaps a generator of some type, beneath the miles of gray military tarping stretched across the bulky surface. I had just spent the better part of six years and more money that I wanted to think about focusing on machines exactly like the one that sat in front of me, and so you’ll understand if I went out of my way to avoid thinking about it too much. Instead, I decided to stare out the window and watch the planet drop away as we took to the skies.

It was all very mysterious and brand new, and I had been caught up in the heat of the moment and not stopped to think very much about all that was happening around me. It was getting late at that point, and as we flew towards the east, the sun sank into the horizon behind us and the sky and clouds towering over the Gulf turned beautiful shades of gold and red. I thought about my apartment, and I thought about the lab in which I was working and also about the classes I was helping with, some lower level stuff. As the sky outside turned from honey to a bloody purple I couldn’t help but let my attention creep slowly away from the window, across the seats and the aisle and over to that blonde sitting across the way.

She was wearing a light gray leather jacket over a dark blue turtleneck, and her hair fell in curls around the neck. She had a book open on her lap, but was looking out the window, admiring the tremendous display of colors as the planet slunk away from the sun. The air conditioning cycled softly and the plane bumped and swayed with the light turbulence. I was very happy at that point because I was doing something new and exciting. I leaned over slightly in my chair and said, “Hello. Beautiful night, isn’t it?” She replied without turning around, “Very much so! We never had nights like this in Michigan.” Her voice was not lyrical or beautiful in any way. I’m not trying to say that she had an unpleasant voice – quite the opposite in fact – but it seemed to me that she talked as if she didn’t think before hand. Her words didn’t seem pre-planned, but spilled out of her with unapologetic honesty. After being surrounded for six years by people who spoke in sentences as carefully calibrated as the machines they worked on, it was very refreshing to speak to someone who spoke at the same rate that they thought.

In an attempt to continue this trend, I immediately said the first things that came into my head. “I hear Michigan is an incredibly awful place. Very cold, I mean.” She turned in her chair and looked at me for the first time. She had green eyes. She laughed. “In the winter it can get pretty nasty. However, I recommend you visit us in the early summer before forming any permanent conclusions.” I smiled and mumbled my agreeance, greatly relieved that she had not been turned off by my hasty response. She spoke again. “Where are you from anyway? You’re not from Texas are you? I can’t stand Texan men. They all think that they are cowboys. Unless of course you are simply living in Texas. Do you study? You seem like an academic type, very rangy. Or are you a career man? I hear Mark is picking up people from both sides of the fence so-to-speak. That’s the way it is with the government. They hire people who can think, and then they hire people who can run things and keep those thinker-people in line and on-topic. I’ve always had the distinct impression that university-types don’t need much guidance when they’re set loose on a project. They’re a little mindless to begin with, so as long as you tell them what you need and keep them well fed, they’ll keep working until they get the job done. What do you think about that? Do you think I’m too harsh on them?” Realizing that this woman enjoyed talking, and that I would be run-over by her in straight conversation, I tried to halt the flow of questions, by asking one of my own. “So are you a career woman or a scientist?” She did not seem bothered by my attempt to evade her questions, but smiled slightly, and turned back around in her chair to study the sky through her frost-encompassed window before replying. “I don’t believe that we should be limited by careers, and I feel very strongly that science is dead.” That was all she said, and I couldn’t think of a good way to respond, so I rested my head against the seat and faced the window, my head full of questions and thoughts.

Long Live the King

The high dressed high bred highlights
run high rises from the drawing rooms of estates
the puppet strings strain under the tension of a thousand fingers
reaching forward, they stand like tombstones, impassable.

Here comes the revolution, a revolution of minds
Lets tear down these walls
Lets inspire the lonely loves, and lust for lost languages
Be prepared, we guarantee perfect anguish

The lowlands run red with the sanguine silence of the white collars and city brokers
Up above, the castle is without a door, without a throne
We thrust upon the mantle of holiness, the mantle of empires and civilizations
Laughing and shaking, the rafters rain down, Long Live the King!

Full Speed Ahead, Maniac Twins! (Pt. 1)

CHAPTER 1: A Meeting

The first time I saw Jack Faust I knew for sure he was a pilot. He stepped out of his truck right in front of the main entrance of one of the test sites on the tip of Florida, the farthest eastern tip; right on the Keys. It was a bright day, and a swift breeze from the south blew dust past the strips of lights scattered for miles on the ground. This was back when I still carried a leather brief case around, and at that point I was still very fond of it, so as I walked to meet him I turned slightly and hobbled against the wind, trying to protect my leather brief case from the whipping wind and sand. “Hello!” He cried out, very cheerful. That is the way it is with pilots; they don’t say very much, but when they do talk it is very cheerful and short and to the point. His manner of speaking was very crisp, and I felt a little like an idiot when I responded, “How are you?” It seemed as if my words got lost in the miniature dust storm that had whipped up around us.

I could tell a lot about Jack from the truck he drove. It was very old, but not in a nice antique way. It was just old, like the men you meet outside of barbershops waiting to get their weekly haircut, despite the fact that their hair is very white and thin around the edges. Some cars and trucks are old in the way that old people on television are. Polished old. Jack’s truck was ancient, and it seemed to be falling apart slightly. When he exited the driver’s door, the suspension creaked and groaned and small avalanches of rust cascades off the bottom and the sides by the wheels.

He was wearing a black leather jacket over a worn gray t-shirt. You could tell it was a shirt that he worked with; it was thin in places where vigorous washing and bleach had been utilized in a constant war waged against drops of machine oil, grease, and dirt. That was the way it was in general with Jack. He was very clean, very neat, but thin in certain places. He was worn, well used, and his personality reflected that. He acted like a man that had seen a lot of the world, and met a lot of people, and made his conclusions and was confident that nothing he would experience stood a chance of changing those opinions that he had worked so hard to make. I don’t mean to say that he was stubborn in his ways, or negative in his intolerance. He was just well worn, like a belt that bends at the notch where you have tied it every day for 20 years.

I was a bit more of a mess than Jack. I had just gotten out of college at that point and was still reeling from the tremendous influx of knowledge that had poured through my brain. That is the way it is with college; they pour knowledge over your brain and you try to suck up as much as you can like a thirsty plant. At the end of it all, they wring you out and see how much you have absorbed. If you’re lucky, they slap you on the back and hand you a diploma and leave you lying on the side of the road trying to reabsorb as much learning as you can from the dirt before the sun evaporates it up. My friends say that my narcissistic attitude about college was in fact just one small part of my larger cynical nature, but I can assure you that I am overall quite an optimistic guy, and that the events of this story will prove that to be the case. I just don’t much like college, that’s all.

So, like I said, I had just gotten out of college when I first met Jack. I had studied aeronautics and engineering, and I could recite equations in my sleep. During my final year in school, I had in fact become a bit of a robot, and like a machine I would process variables and situations like a lightning bolt, quick and fast. Of course, in the process of all of this education, my social skills became slightly degraded, and so I will be the first one to admit that I wasn’t the coolest cat for the first couple years after I had gotten out. I had, only a few months earlier, published my first paper. I had been working with an old professor, Dr. Michael Iota, in developing a brand new way of cooling engines. It involved a lot of magnets, and rotating ion channels, and a lot of subatomic particles that whizzed by a series of conical convections tunnels made out of some really great brand new carbon material. It was fantastic and brand new, and the entire experience of developing it and testing it was very fun and exciting for me, considering at the time I figured I could get my name out there and secure myself in the scientific community.

A few weeks after we published, I got a call from someone named Mr. Shepard who said he represented a Mr. Bento who worked in the military, but firmly insisted I call him Mr. Bento, and not Major Bento or Colonel Bento or whatever rank he was. I can’t remember for the life of me. He may have even been a General for all I know, but I finally got the chance to meet with Mr. Bento approximately ten minutes before I met Jack Faust. Apparently, by some fluke of chance, my paper had landed on the desk of some bigwig, and they wanted to see me in person to discuss an issue of material science that was relevant to some new program or project. They flew me down to San Antonio from Dallas, where I was met at the airport by a couple of Air Force officers who carried my bags for me and addressed me as Doctor. This was an extremely exciting experience for me, as I had only two months before earned my doctorate and still was having trouble adjusting to the new title. Anyway, they drove me down to another smaller airport. I could tell that this was a military airport because there were no children anywhere, and the only people in civilian clothes either looked very angry or very sad. My two officer-chauffeurs brought me to a dusty tarmac where a small two-engined plane was waiting. Inside there was a small man dressed in a very neat suit who kept talking to me and asking me how I was. I eventually learned that this man was a Mr. Karl Dagen and that he was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of all time. At the time though, all I could pay attention to was the brilliant blonde sitting across the copious aisle from me.

To be continued

Thoughts on Cold Weather

If there is one thing that should be known about life, it is this: one can never appreciate the tremendous discomfort caused by the cold. As humans, we have an inherent tendency to forget that which has caused us pain in the past. This fact, along with many other things (some of which I hope to discuss later) has led me to my current belief that we, as humans, are tremendously versatile and persistent creatures. Surely, the many monuments of our civilization, the books and poetry and artwork that marks the progression of our culture, like waterlines on a porcelain tub, are indicators of our ability to succeed and flourish in places and in manners that would be otherwise considered impractical or impossible. This progression, these advancements, are all due to the fact that we cannot remember that which has before caused us great pain. Instead, we store our knowledge of past failings, of past goals unmet, in some dark dusty, back closet in our mind. These memories sit there, quietly and perpetually contributing to our conscious process. The ragged edge of pain is dulled by this seclusion; we force unpleasantness to the back of our mind where it must push through countless layers of neural mush in order to reach the front of our mind, and in the process the sharp edge, the painful qualities are lost. So it is with the cold. We remember that cold has the potential to be and indeed often is unpleasant. We know all of this to be true; the intricacies and details that surround and define the interaction of cold temperature and our biological functions; the specific ways in which a dramatic decrease in heat and light can severely inhibit our body's natural ability to perform mundane functions like walking, tying your shoes, or breathing. We even remember how the cold air can invade our minds, freeze everything but the inner parts, the parts that tell us frantically to find shelter, to find warmth. And yet, despite these recollections, despite the fact that we, as humans, seem to be imbued not only with a sense of memory, an sentient awareness of the continuity of time and our place in it, but also with a recognition of the powers and weaknesses of our own recollection machinery; we still manage to find ourselves completely surprised by the cold.

It's cold now, and we had our first significant snowfall last night. I use the word significant to indicate a level of snow that is quantifiable, and which does not turn immediately to an awful slush upon hitting the wet ground. Soon, the ground we'll freeze, and stay frozen for several months, and any snow that falls will stay here, glued to the ground, slowly subliming into the atmosphere on sunny days.