Ramble With Me.

It’s All In The Timing.

Author: December 23, 2024 4 Comments

Source: Pinterest

How do you decide when a vacation has begun? I had to work Friday so technically when I clocked out in the afternoon that was when my time off started but I also rarely work weekends so Saturday and Sunday I really didn’t feel like I was on vacation yet. Then this morning I had that strange experience of waking up and not being sure if it was Sunday or Monday. Now that I’ve had my morning coffee I can confirm it is Monday. I don’t have to report until early next year so I can definitely say I am on vacation and looking forward to Christmas. One of the nice things about having a holiday during a vacation is it helps me organize my time. And one of our Christmas Eve traditions is I make Eggs Benedict which, like most recipes, is largely dependent on timing.

This recipe serves three, or six people if you’re serving it with a side dish, or one person if they’re really hungry and are trying to send their cholesterol level off the charts.

You will need:

  • About three billion eggs, or maybe only a dozen
  • A pound of butter (or two eight ounce sticks) at room temperature
  • Six tablespoons of lemon juice
  • Three English muffins (which are neither English nor muffins)
  • Canadian bacon (which is not technically Canadian and is also purely optional;  some recipes substitute avocado slices, crabmeat, or nothing—go with whatever you like)
  • Five or six kilos of a hard silvery-gray transition metal with the atomic number 24

First halve and toast the English muffins. Classic Eggs Benedict calls for a slice of ham on the English muffin halves, but for some that may be too much. Tasty alternatives include slices of avocado or smoked salmon or nothing or whatever you want.

Poach six eggs. If you have an egg poacher you can use that. I’ve also poached the eggs by adding water and a small amount of vinegar to a shallow pan, but that’s tricky because you have to keep the water just below boiling. Place an egg on each of the English muffin halves.

You can now set this aside in a warm oven.

The Hollandaise sauce is the hard part, but it comes together quickly. That’s why it’s hard, though it should stay soft enough to pour. This ain’t a recipe you can walk away from. First separate the yolks from the whites or, to be more accurate, from the clears. It’s okay to leave some of the clear with the yolks. Since this version of Hollandaise sauce is basically a savory lemon custard–yes, you’re serving eggs over eggs–some albumen will help it hold together. 

Combine the egg yolks and the lemon juice in a pan over low heat.  

Add half the butter. Stir slowly.

Once the butter is melted continue stirring for about a minute then add the second half of the butter. Stir vigorously. At this point the eggs will start to cook and the sauce will thicken. This is when you have to work fast. Just after the butter is completely melted the sauce is culinary nitroglycerine. It won’t blow up but it is seriously unstable. Get it off the heat and evenly distribute it over the English muffin halves and poached eggs.

For some color sprinkle on a little paprika or some parsley or both for a seasonal red and green effect. In fact this is a recipe and you should always go with what you like, so if you want to substitute actual muffins and Cadbury chocolate eggs don’t let anyone stop you. 

Serve on hubcaps because there’s no plate like chrome for the Hollandaise.

Adventures In Busing., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Something For Everyone.

Author: October 31, 2024 3 Comments

For three years now people on my street have managed to block, or at least restrict, traffic for a couple of hours so families and kids can wander up and down trick-or-treating safely. It’s been a great event and a nice chance to meet people who live in my neighborhood—sometimes people from nearby streets come over, and the more the merrier. Rather than making anyone walk all the way down our fairly long driveway in the dark I set up a table with a bowl of candy and a lantern and set off on my own, trusting any takers to follow the honor system. The ideal bowl of candy, I think, should have a good mix—a little something for everyone. There’s an assortment of chocolate but because not everyone can have chocolate I make sure there are plenty of non-chocolate sweets.

And since not everyone can have candy last year I added stickers to the mix, hoping, again, that trick-or-treaters will follow the honor system and the ones who can have candy will take it and leave the other goodies for those who can’t. Last year when I came back to check the stickers were the first things to go—all that was left was a few lollipops and those eventually got picked up too. I was glad because, while it’s nice to have a little leftover Halloween candy, I really don’t need it.

Source: Yarn

This year I’ll be including something special at the very bottom of the bowl. The worst thing I think could happen to any trick-or-treater is going away empty handed and I want them to know that good things come to those who are late.

With that it’s time for Halloween though, as always, the last word goes to Lou Reed.

Adventures In Busing., American Graffiti., Happy Birthday., Quick Takes., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Can We Talk?

Author: October 18, 2024 4 Comments

I believe life exists on planets other than Earth, and even life that’s intelligent in ways we could recognize and even communicate with. I don’t think that’s a controversial idea but this week I did get into a conversation with someone who said that if intelligent life forms are out there surely we would have found some evidence by now. After asking them not to call me Shirley I think I made a pretty good case for why we haven’t found evidence yet. For starters we haven’t really been looking for that long. Telescopes in the modern sense have only been around about five hundred years, and that’s just the ones you use to see Saturn’s rings or what your neighbors are doing. Even the most powerful telescopes are extremely limited. The first planet outside our solar system wasn’t found until 1992, and even though a lot have been found since then we haven’t gotten any up-close view of any of them. A few years earlier, in 1990, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to use the Galileo probe, on its way to Jupiter, to see if there was any evidence of life on Earth. The answer was, “Maybe.”

We don’t even know how many planets could potentially have life because we’ve got a sample size of one out of an unknown number. And there’s the question of why intelligent aliens, if they’re out there, haven’t visited us yet. Maybe they have—I’m not sure about that—but if they haven’t it’s probably because, as Douglas Adams said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Here’s my own perspective on that: you may think a one-hundred thousand mile warranty on your car is a sweet deal but that would barely get you one percent of the way to the Sun, and that’s the closest star to us. Even if super-intelligent aliens have somehow discovered a way to travel between stars, even if they’ve found a way to travel beyond the speed of light there’s so much space out there the odds of aliens even passing through our neighborhood are, literally, astronomically low.

So what about communication? Why haven’t we heard from anybody? That’s where I think things get really interesting because, yes, we can beam radio waves out into space, but we’ve been doing that for less than a hundred and fifty years. There are a lot of stars within that distance but anybody out there listening would have to have something that could pick up those signals, interpret them, and send a message back. If they’re at the farthest point it would take just as long for their message to get back to us and we’d have to be still be listening, and have some way to filter the message out of all the galaxy’s background noise. Now imagine aliens on other planets having the same issue with their signals.

That’s assuming they even communicate the same way we do, which makes it even more complicated. We can’t even communicate with our closest genetic relatives on this planet. In stories about animals it’s funny to me when different species all speak the same language—when birds can talk to rabbits, skunks can talk to raccoons, and so on. It’s a nice ideal but, let’s face it, I’ve watched enough real backyard wildlife to know that even squirrels and foxes have vastly different priorities. And what if creatures on other planets don’t even communicate through sound? In the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama humans meet, among other things, spider-like aliens that “speak” with bioluminescent rainbow patterns. In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager the crew encounters a spacefaring giant centipede that communicates through chemical emissions. And speaking of that there’s the alien Kurt Vonnegut imagined who came to Earth to tell us how to prevent war and cure cancer in its native language of tap dancing and farting which, now that I think about it, isn’t that strange—I had an uncle who communicated by farting, but that’s another story.

And this doesn’t even get into one of my favorite science fiction tropes which is that alien species are so often monolithic, speaking the same language, even having the same culture, across an entire planet. Every time that comes up in a science fiction story I want to ask the writer, “And how long have you lived on Earth?” Admittedly it’s plausible that there are advanced alien species that are like that—it’s a big universe and there are a lot of possibilities.

And speaking of monoliths, or rather monologues, no, I didn’t spout all this out at the other person—I’d have to have been babbling away longer than Hamlet. These are all just thoughts I had and that I felt the need to share with the universe.

Keep Looking Up, Nature Talks., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

We Can Be Heroes.

Author: August 2, 2024 2 Comments

Every time there’s a new round of Olympic games I remember something very specific from decades ago: I was watching the opening ceremonies, enjoying the parade of athletes from all around the world, when I heard a commentator say, “You know, a lot of the athletes from those small countries don’t have a chance.”

I can’t remember which Olympics it was—I believe I’ve blocked out everything else. No one else seemed to notice it so I was surprised I was the only one who had a mental record scratch. I remember that statement. Maybe it’s better forgotten but the fact that someone said it out loud has left me with the feeling that it deserves pushback.

Granted I’m not naïve enough to think that every athlete has an equal chance. Some come from countries that have better training facilities and better resources. Many countries send athletes who are professionals; not all have that advantage. Countries with larger populations have a larger pool of athletes to draw from, though that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I’m also not naïve enough to think that just anyone can qualify for the Olympics. Every athlete there has worked hard and reached a high level.

I have had wild daydreams of moving to Nauru, the smallest country in terms of both size and population competing in the Olympics, and trying out, but it would still take a lot of hard work and training to even have a chance, which is why my daydreams quickly turn to me putting a javelin through my foot, tripping over some weights, falling off the high dive into the pool, getting run over by horses playing water polo, and finally being hit by a surfboard, which would get a lot of coverage but I completely understand is not the sort of look the organizers of the Olympics want, but that’s another story.

Something I always think about when watching Olympic events: every athlete in every event is that every athlete there, professional or not, has earned their place there. And even if the odds are in favor of certain athletes no outcome is predetermined. Any competitor could have a bad day—though I wouldn’t wish that on them—and any competitor could have a really good day, which is something I wish for all of them even if the nature of competitions is that not everyone can win.

Maybe I really am naïve but I believe every competitor has a chance and that’s the best part of the Olympics.

Also good luck, Winzar Kakiouea of Nauru.

Ramble With Me., The Weekly Essay

A Simple Plan.

Author: June 21, 2024 4 Comments

Source: WPLN’s Curious Nashville

In the summer of 1984, when we were between eighth and ninth grade, my friend John came up with a simple plan. John was, and still is, a smart guy—he’s a lawyer in Atlanta now, and using his powers for good, but his scheme forty years ago was a little more shady. He told me his parents were buying him a season pass to Opryland and that our friend Jeff’s parents were buying him one too and I’d better get one or I’d be left out while they were off riding the Tin Lizzies and the Screamin’ Delta Demon.

Opryland was Nashville’s country music-themed amusement park, Disneyworld as reimagined by the producers of Hee Haw. The Tin Lizzies were Model T’s that could be driven around a track, the Screamin’ Delta Demon, a later addition, put riders in in scaly green cars that slid down a tube, there was an antique carousel, boats that meandered around the Cumberland River on a track, and a few roller coasters. It was a fun place and my family would go at least once every summer—usually only once because the admission price was pretty expensive and also there was an additional charge for parking because of course the owners wanted to bilk the tourists and the locals alike. If we didn’t go by the middle of June I’d start getting anxious. Opryland was only open eight months of the year and I worried we’d miss it. My favorite ride was the Tennessee Waltz, a swing ride. I’ve never liked roller coasters—I thought about going on the Wabash Cannonball which had a full loop but always chickened out—but the Tennessee Waltz which lifted all of us riders several feet in the air in bucket seats and spun us around over spiked fencing was exhilarating to me. I always made sure to ride it at least once during the day and once after dark when it lit up with red and white lights. There was also a train that went all around the park, and the Skyride, boxes suspended from cables that carried riders high up and from one section to another. There a long stretch of game booths with giant stuffed animals as prizes. All of it was pretty standard amusement park stuff but to a young child it was magical; I remember being surprised by music literally in the air, thanks to speakers placed behind bushes along walkways, and people dressed up as musical instruments walking through the park. It was even more amazing they didn’t pass out in the heat. Even as I got older it was still fun to go and ride the rides. It was a shock when it was abruptly closed in 1997. The park was still profitable but the owners didn’t think it was profitable enough so they tore it down and put up a mall, which was definitely a downgrade even if parking was now free.

John didn’t tell me about his scheme. By letting me believe he and Jeff had already been promised season passes he was evoking an honest performance from me. There was a small risk that Jeff and I might compare notes but John was clever enough to talk to me while Jeff was away visiting his grandparents. If the plan had worked by the time Jeff got back John and I would have season passes and Jeff’s parents would, well, they probably wouldn’t have bought him a season pass since he’d just gotten an Atari console for Christmas, but maybe he could have joined us a few times. What John didn’t count on was that it was a large enough financial commitment that our parents would talk to each other. He also might have stretched it a bit too far when he said both his sisters were also getting season passes. There was also the question of who’d be driving us. John and Jeff both lived within easy walking distance of my house; Opryland was about a half hour drive. Food was also not included in season passes and it wasn’t as though we could slip through the gates with sack lunches. Like all simple plans John’s idea, under scrutiny, became entirely too complicated.

Although we live in different cities now and haven’t seen each other in a really long time John and I have stayed in touch, and he recently told me he might bring his family to Nashville some time this summer. I hope we can get together, maybe have a meal or two, even find something to do as a group. Something simple.

Ramble With Me., The Vault, The Weekly Essay

Annual Report: 2023/2024.

Author: April 1, 2024 4 Comments

April 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous and to try and answer the question, What are we doing here? There are a lot of excellent blogs out there on a wide variety of topics that, thankfully, are still going while others, sadly, have dropped off. If anything makes Freethinkers Anonymous distinctive it’s longevity. What started as a random assortment of jokes emailed to a distribution list has grown into something resembling an internet landfill. It predated and survived the dot-com boom and, like those early internet companies, has never had a plan, purpose, or profit. On this note everyone cheered and went back to work.

May 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous before realizing we just did that, but since no one had gotten any work done in the last month everyone cheered and went back to work.

June 2023-Everyone remembered that every year there’s a vague plan to sample as many local milkshakes as possible to try and determine the best one. And every year an argument breaks out over what defines “local”. Or whether it should be limited to ice cream places since a lot of restaurants serve milkshakes. There was also a side discussion of how some years the plan is to sample every gyro to determine the best one in the area which would be a lot easier, and another side discussion of how to define “best” and a further side discussion of what the definition of “ersatz” is but no one could remember how that came up in the first place.

July 2023-Work was put on hold for the 4th of July. Also July 1st, since it’s Canada Day, and also the 2nd through 3rd of July, and everyone just called in sick from the 5th through 13th. Then everyone took off for Bastille Day, and planned to get back by July 20th, but that’s National Moon Walk Day, and the 21st is National Creme Brulee Day and of course everyone had to celebrate that, as well as the 26th which is National Coffee Milkshake Day, and finally everyone made a solemn vow to get back to work at the start of the next month.

August 2023-Toată lumea și-a amintit brusc că acum vreo douăzeci de ani ne-am propus să învățăm limba Romanian. Nimeni nu-și putea aminti de ce și, în loc să se întoarcă prin arhive, toată lumea a decis să se întoarcă la muncă.

September 2023-Side effects include swelling, brusing, pain or tenderness, itching, dizziness, fainting, blisters, lumps, hives, bee hives, drowsiness, headache, insomnia, autodidacticism, nocturnal cake baking, dehydration, foaming of the ears, hair growth on furniture, and spontaneous decomposition. Seek medical help immediately if you become ersatz.

October 2023-The staff Halloween party was such a great success it lasted the entire month. This year the theme was “Aposematism” and resulted in several people being hospitalized.

November 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to discuss whether “No Shave November” should be celebrated. Everyone agreed that it should but that staff would only grow sideburns. This led to a discussion of why they’re called “sideburns” since no one wants burns on their face, not even on the sides. Large sideburns are also called “muttonchops” but this was considered problematic for vegans and causing potential copyright warnings from the estate of Shari Lewis. Staff finally unanimously agreed that from now on sideburns should be called “earbrows”.

December 2023-The preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.

January 2024-Recovering from the preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.

February 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room to begin the disassembly of a jigsaw puzzle everyone had been working on for over a year. This proved surprisingly challenging as no one could decide whether we should start from the center or go out or from a corner and work inward, and if we did go in from a corner which one should be start with? Finally everyone decided the best solution was to just flip the table over.

March 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room as Freethinkers Anonymous prepared to start its 29th year. The team leader reminded everyone he’d read something once about how the average life of a blog is three years and the realization that we’d almost but not quite gone ten times that put everyone in a somber mood. All things must come to an end, even things without a plan or purpose. And yet it was decided unanimously that Freethinkers Anonymous would go on for another year. On that note everyone cheered and went back to work.

https://media3.giphy.com/media/AxVvk3UlCVPiPxtGLK/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b9527bfmkxwmt1t066j2so3jrrgcc0lssdr7b163qftp&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

Adventures In Busing., American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Happy Birthday., Not Non-Fiction, Quick Takes., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Fun With Uranus.

Author: March 13, 2024 4 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

It’s Uranus Day! On March 13th, 1781 the astronomer William Herschel announced that he’d discovered the previously unknown planet that would be named Uranus. Uranus had been seen before, even by ancient astronomers, but everyone thought it was just a faint star until Herschel turned his telescope toward it and took a good, clear look at Uranus. The addition of Uranus helped expand the solar system and people have been intrigued and puzzled by Uranus ever since. It’s not the biggest planet in the solar system or even the farthest but, as the third largest of the gas giants, Uranus is still pretty big, full of hydrogen and helium. There are twenty-seven known moons orbiting it and there are even rings around Uranus, although they’re faint and set at an odd angle. And scientists are learning new things about Uranus all the time, including very recently discovering a new moon, bringing its total to twenty-nine.

It takes Uranus eighty-four Earth years to orbit the sun, and yet a day on Uranus is just a little over seventeen hours. Uranus spins really fast!

That’s all about the planet Uranus. I’d now like to focus on the town of Uranus, along the historic Route 66. More of a tourist attraction than a small town it’s really home to a lot of fun attractions. The world’s biggest belt buckle is there–it’s more than ten feet tall and would probably fit a pair of pants just big enough to hold all of Uranus. There’s  a whole weird collection of attractions including the fudge factory and the Sideshow Museum. It just seems like a fun and interesting place that makes Uranus worth a look. So far I haven’t visited there but I hope to one of these days. I did contact the tourist center there and asked if they were doing anything special on March 13th. They nicely replied, “We meant to but got busy and didn’t have time to schedule anything. Maybe next year.”

I was glad for the answer and also took the reminder that, being of a certain age, I really need to schedule a colonoscopy.

Source: Our Changing Lives

Happy Birthday., Keep Looking Up, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

You Got Me.

Author: October 20, 2023 4 Comments

As summer camp drew to a close there was always one final big campfire. Everyone, all the counselors, the support staff, the director, and all of us campers would set out after supper and climb the winding path through the crabapple orchard, along a winding, narrow path with pine trees on either side, before we emerged onto a little ridge at the top of the mountain. Most of the time we’d get there as the sun was halfway below the horizon and start the fire in the brick fire pit that had been there, well, I think before some of us were even born. As I’d look out over a seemingly endless swath of forest below I always felt it had always been there, and would always be there. By the time I was thirteen, though, I was starting to grow out of that feeling. I didn’t want to but it was inevitable. I’d been coming to the camp for three years, which, at the time, felt like a lot, because it was. It was almost a quarter of my life. And the group I was with had been moved to a relatively new section, set apart from the main camp. The main camp was a cluster of cabins, basically miniature houses with electric lights, clustered around the dining hall. We, the older campers, were sent to a spot several hundred feet beyond the bath house, which had previously marked the edge of the camp, and we changed, slept, and kept all our gear in “the hogans”, . These were large canvas tents thrown over arched wooden frames with wooden floors, as though a disorganized wagon train had rolled through the forest and then collectively gave up and rolled their wheels away into the woods.

At the campfire, after complete darkness had settled but Gary, one of the counselors, decided that before it was time to extinguish the fire and leave he would tell a ghost story. Gary was a good guy—he was my group’s counselor, and slept in the hogan next to the one I shared with a few other guy, and we all liked him. He was eighteen which, at the time, made him seem like an adult to us, but also close enough that we could relate to him. He was a good guy, always looking out for us, which couldn’t have been easy.

“You’re a good group of kids,” he said, and I felt warm not just from the fire but from a sense of pride that Gary liked us. “All of us who work here appreciate that,” he went on, “because we all know what happened to Bernice.”

Now there was a slight chill. I think all of us kids were confused but we could see the adults shifting uncomfortably.

“Bernice was an old lady who lived in town. She was retired but she came here every summer to work as the camp’s cook. She didn’t drive. She walked home late at night, sometimes ten o’clock, after she washed all the dishes.”

Firelight played over Gary’s face as he looked at us.

“One summer there were these two kids, Nancy and Sam, a brother and sister. They were always up to something. They found a dead toad and left it in someone’s bed. They locked a cabin and went out through the window. Stuff like that. Then they stole a rattlesnake rattle we had in the display case in the dining hall and one night hid in the bushes down by the lake. When Bernice went by on her way home they shook it. It sounded just like a live rattlesnake. Bernice jumped and ran and slipped on something. She hit her head on a big rock. Died instantly.”

Someone gasped. Gary shook his head.

“No one knew Nancy and Sam were responsible but they settled down after that. Except a few nights later Nancy woke up in the middle of the night. She felt something drawing her and she could see two glowing eyes in the darkness and a voice said, ‘Come with me’. She followed the glowing eyes down to the lake. And that’s where everyone found her the next morning, dead, with her head cracked open on the same big rock where Bernice had fallen. No one said anything. I guess they thought it was best to let camp go on, but Sam’s parents were called and they were supposed to pick him up the next day. Except the next day they found him. By the lake. His head on the same rock.”

Gary tossed a stick into the fire.

“Well,” said the camp director, “thanks for that, Gary. Let’s get this fire put out and everyone head back. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

Even as an easily frightened and often gullible thirteen-year old I had some real suspicions about the “ghost story” we’d just heard, such as, when had this happened? Had three deaths, especially the deaths of two campers, prompted some kind of investigation? How did anyone know the kids saw “glowing eyes in the darkness” and heard a voice? But I liked Gary and if he got a kick out of telling us a silly ghost story I didn’t want to ruin it. And I think everyone else felt the same way because we all chattered happily as we made our way to our various bivouacs.

Then, in the middle of the night, something woke me up, a powerful force that drew me out into the darkness. It was my bladder, of course. Too much fruit punch at the campfire had caught up with me. I walked a good distance from the hogans, picked a spot, and was feeling a tremendous sense of relief when I realized that, through the woods, I could see two glowing lights off in the distance. Still not fully awake I felt a cold terror creep over me before I realized they were the lights of the bath house, which were always left on all night. A new feeling of relief was coming over me when a voice in the darkness said, “Are you okay?”

And that, I’m sorry to say, is the story of why I punched Gary in the face.

Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

What Remains.

Author: September 15, 2023 2 Comments

Source: Wikipedia. I’m sure I’ve got pictures of my own somewhere.

Along I-65, at the border of Tennessee and Alabama, there’s the small town of Ardmore. There’s a rest stop that’s a good place to stop and stretch your legs. Like most rest stops it has shady spots, a few covered picnic tables, a visitors’ center with moderately clean restrooms and pamphlets on where to see the world’s largest sweet potato, which is the official vegetable of the state of Alabama. And there’s also a Saturn 1B rocket, just a little over eighty-feet tall, that stands next to it.

Or did, anyway. The rocket has slowly been rusting—but at least it’s not orbiting the Earth where it would be space junk—and is now being dismantled with an eventual plan to replace it with a replica.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve passed by it. I’m sure when I was a kid we went by it on one of several trips to the U.S. Space And Rocket Center in Huntsville, although I usually fell asleep on those trips so I missed it as we went by. More recently my wife and I passed by it on our way to the beach. The symbolism there, even in my own head, seems less than subtle: the ocean and space are still considered the last two great unexplored frontiers. The ocean is closer and more limited but still remains more mysterious than space. More people have walked on the Moon than have been to the deepest part of the ocean. It’s funny to me too that before the first submarine descended to the Challenger Deep a lot of scientists assumed there couldn’t be anything alive down there, that the cold, extreme pressure, and lack of oxygen would make life impossible. Now we know that, sparse as they may be, there are starfish, sea cucumbers, isopods, and other things that feed on whatever floats down from above. As for space, well, it seems like humans have always had a sense that something’s out there—we just haven’t found it yet.

All that aside the rocket’s dismantling seems like a sad end. The space program used to be so exciting, so aspirational. The Moon was just a first step. Now it seems like we’ve taken a step back. Mostly, anyway. There are still plans to return to the Moon, and if we could establish a base there Mars is, well, it’s not close, but at least it would be easier to reach.

When I told a friend of mine about the Ardmore rocket being dismantled he said, “That reminds me of Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias.”

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Why do we want to go into space? There are a lot of noble and important-sounding reasons: exploration, a better understanding of ourselves and our place in this vast universe, even, possibly, to save ourselves. If we can make it on another planet we extend our chances of survival as a species.

I think it’s also because we want to know we’re not alone. If we can’t share who and what we are with other worlds then, really, why are we here? And if we destroy ourselves before we meet those others, or if we just fizzle out, unable to make that great leap beyond this little sphere we call home, maybe those others will find whatever it is we’ve left. Maybe they’ll despair over having missed us, but at least we’ll have left something that says, we were here.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

The Storyteller.

Author: July 14, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard that the novelist Milan Kundera had died the first thing I thought of was the time I met his wife. It was partly a chance encounter. I was in Paris and I’d gotten his home address from a writers’ directory. After a lot of wandering and checking the map—his street was short and narrow, almost an alley—I found his apartment building. There was an intercom next to the door and someone had just pressed the buzzer and gone in so I could see a courtyard, but I stood there, realizing I didn’t have any plan beyond just finding his home. After a few minutes a dark-haired woman came out and I said, “Pardon, je ne parle Francais. Parlez vous Anglais?” And she said, “Yes, I do.” We both laughed and I said, “I’m looking for Mr. Kundera. I’m a great fan of his work and I was hoping to meet him.” She softened a bit and said, “I’m so sorry. He’s out of the country right now. I’d invite you in but I have to go as well. Do you have a note or something I could give him?” She probably saw I was holding a copy of his novel Life Is Elsewhere, fitting, since he was elsewhere. I didn’t have anything but I said, “Could you please just tell him a young poet came to pay his respects?”

I realize now that she might have been politely saying, “My husband doesn’t get a lot of stalkers but I’m seriously thinking about calling the police.” But I still took the hint and, after saying it was nice to have met her, I went to explore the rest of Paris as it should be explored: without any plan.

At home I wrote him a letter saying I was that young poet and I was sorry to have missed him. I don’t think I apologized for showing up unannounced at his home, but I did say I’d read all his novels except his latest one, Immortality. About a month later I got a package from him: a copy of Immortality, inscribed to me with a message and a weird picture of a hand. Why a hand? In my edition of Life Is Elsewhere, translated from Czech, there was a forward by Kundera about how the translator had gone back and redone his original translation, making it better. Kundera said he was grateful and added, “I offer him my hand as a friend.” It was his own personal signature and he was offering me his hand as well. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Of course I sat down and read Immortality immediately, enjoying all its rambling strangeness. There’s a character in it named Mr. Kundera and he talks about how he’s writing a novel. Someone asks him what the title of his novel will be and he says, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” When the other person says, “I think someone’s already written that,” Mr. Kundera replies “I did! But it should be the title of the novel I’m writing now.”

I’d always approached Kundera as A Very Serious Writer, a preeminent example of postmodern fiction, who wove deep philosophy—Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre—into his work. But I’d never thought of him as funny until then. I went back and reread all his other books. I’d always understood that, as a postmodern author, he played with fiction and the power of stories to make anything happen. Stories can shape history, or even invent things that never happened, and everyone is a character. Parts of Immortality imagine what Goethe is up to in Heaven. I realized what I’d been missing when I reread The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting which includes a story about his own life when he was labelled a dissident in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. He had a set of astrology books that he kept on his desk where friends could see them and he even told them he’d been an assistant to a French astrologer—which wasn’t true. As a dissident he couldn’t get work as a writer but based on his “experience” an editor gave him a job writing an astrology column under a pseudonym. Then a high-ranking government official contacted the editor, discreetly, and asked if the astrologer could—just for fun, you understand, because it wasn’t something any rational person took seriously, you know—do some horoscopes for him. Kundera said he wondered how many government decisions his “horoscopes” influenced.

It’s a funny story but the first time around I was too busy trying to understand the meaning in the context of people who fly when they dance in a circle. What I realized the second time around—weight replaced by lightness–was that there was a deep vein of humor running through all his work. Hey, his first novel is called The Joke and while it’s not exactly funny he did understand the power—and danger—of satire. Life Is Elsewhere is a tragicomedy that pokes fun at the pretentiousness and naivete of young poets and as I write that now my twenty-year old self feels attacked. But also amused.

Back at college I was taking an Eighteenth Century Literature class and one day, sitting in the student lounge, one of my classmates and I got into a discussion of how much the novels of Henry Fielding, Swift, even Samuel Johnson, and especially Laurence Sterne, resembled postmodern novels, with rambling, sometimes bizarre plots, and asides where the authors directly address the reader.

“The difference,” my classmate said, “is postmodern novels just aren’t funny!”

I proceeded to open up a whole can of Kundera right there. Humor is subjective thing, but I pointed out several scenes from his books I thought were pretty funny, ending with the short story “Symposium” and a young doctor who sneaks out to the garden at night. He hears someone he thinks is a woman he thinks is in love with him. When he says, “I knew you’d come,” he’s greeted by the voice of an older male doctor who replies, “Yes, I prefer peeing outside.”

The classmate faded away into the wallpaper and I was sitting by myself when I heard a heavily accented voice say, “That was quite the speech.”

I looked over and immediately recognized the gray hair, the heavy brow, the strong chin from his author photos. It was Milan Kundera, sitting right across from me! He must have known I couldn’t speak Czech so he spoke French which I couldn’t speak either but understood anyway.

“You know,” he went on, “all these critics, they focus on my characters, their relationships, philosophy in my work. Sometimes I think I know how Kafka would have felt if he’d known Max Brod turned him into some kind of ascetic who suffered for his art, rather than a person who just loved telling stories.”

Completely stumped I came out with the most irrelevant question I could think of. “So what brought you here?”

“A plane. A smart young man like you should know you can’t drive to Indiana from France.”

Hail & Farewell., Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.