Traffic Lights Love Me

Some of my friends and I have this little ritual we do every time we make it through a yellow light: we kiss our hand and then either tap or rub it against the car's ceiling. I understand that in parts of Concretestan, doing this would require other people in the car to remove an article of clothing. But when we do it, we are thanking the stopligth for allowing us to make it through. In doing so, the traffic light likes you a little more, and will put in a good word for you to all its traffic light friends. (And they are all friends.)

And it works. Since I've started performing this little ritual, the percentage of traffic lights that I make it through on yellow has increased noticeably.

So now that I'm in with the traffic lights, now that I've won their favor, do I just take it for granted every time I make it into the intersection just before it turns red? No. Every time, I thank the traffic light.

And that's why traffic lights love me.

Escape Velocity

"I wanted to be a spaceman

That's what I wanted to be

But now that I am a spaceman

Nobody cares about me"

-Harry Nilsson, "Spaceman"

"So you're a literature major... What do you want to do with that?"

"I want to be a writer."

"So like, what kind of stuff do you want to write?"

"Fiction."

"What kind of fiction?"

"Well um... actually, I want to write... science fiction, among other things."

This is a conversation that I have been having a lot lately. I feel like the epitome of lame when I tell people that I want to write science fiction. I might as well take to playing Warhammer, wear coke-bottle glasses, and frequently describe things as "purely plasmodial!"

Growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. That was until I first got on a roller coaster and spent the next hour praying to the porcelain gods. I also found out that my eyes are not up to snuff. I am not physically perfect enough to be an astronaut, and I probably don't have the grades either. I am not good enough to be an astronaut. I will never go to space.

Nor will you, most likely. No matter where on earth you are, you are less than 65 miles from outer space. I am closer to outer space right now than I am to Concretestan. It takes maybe ten bucks of gas to get to Concretestan with current gas prices. To outfit, launch, and maintain a space shuttle flight costs somewhere on the order of $1.5 billion. And that won't even get me escape velocity. Funding an Apollo mission in today's dollars would cost somewhere around $145 billion. Building and launching spaceships is incredibly costly and requires more numbers than could ever be held in my brain. I am not intelligent enough to build spaceships. I am not intelligent enough to send people to space.

I know why I write, and that is because through writing, I can make anything happen. I may not be perfect enough to man spaceships (with the exception of my beloved Spaceship Earth), I may not be intelligent enough to build spaceships, but I can write about spaceships. And by writing about spaceships, if I do it well enough, I can take anyone to space.

In all reality, there will likely not be another man (or woman) on the moon for the next thirty years. NASA will continue to receive less and less funding, along with the European Space Agency. China, or maybe India, could potentially send more people up, but as of right now their space programs are still nascent.

We blew our wad by winning the space race. We rushed into space exploration without taking time to do things right, and in doing so we missed out on a lot of opportunities. Getting to the moon turned into a pissing contest for national pride, rather than an opportunity to create a sustainable space program that would maintain continued progress. Space exploration is not as advanced as we think it is. Despite the optimism of some scientists, my generation will all be dead before someone walks on Mars, and our children and their children will be dead before we get to the other side of the asteroid belt.

I will be providing the next best thing to going to space. I want to go to space, and I'm sure many others do as well. That is what I want to write science fiction. That is what I want to tell people when I have the aforementioned conversation. But I just watch the wheels turn in their brain as they realize how unbelievably lame I am.

Kinetic Village/Revelation Lake

"But I don't need to bother you, no, I won't play that part

I just want access to the inside of you heart Access to your thoughts on the way that I should be So I could start to change and maybe you could access me"

-Phish, "Access Me"

I realize that this post is a little late in coming. You get what you pay for. If you want me to post when I say I will, cut me a check and I can guarantee any number of subsequent posts (based on how much you pay me) will be up with all due expediency. But until one of you steps up, you will have to deal with this after-the-fact bullshit. Enjoy

Sometimes you have to cut your way through every layer of bullshit to stab at what you are looking for. This was relatively easy in Spaceship Earth. The dimensions were right, the shape was right, the thoughts just bounced around and the AI would get inside your head, break down the barriers and the inhibitions and, as they say, you could talk some real shit. You can call it a heart to heart or opening up or a sencere discourse or even a mutual expounding of truths of the mind and soul between two or more consenting parties. But it all reduces to "talking some real shit."

You could do that inside Spaceship Earth. It worked to a degree even after the ship itself died and only its brain in a jar was present. But the brain is still alive and sitting in someone's room. He is someone who needs it. New Gibraltar needs Spaceship Earth. But dammit, so does St. Collegeberg. Everywhere needs a brain of Spaceship Earth, but there is only one brain of Spaceship Earth and it is sitting in someone's room in the town of New Gibraltar, which is located in Greater Balboastan. (If you do not know what these places names actually are, try to figure it out. If you do I will give you five ozonebucks, which are good for, well, absolutely nothing.) I am currently away from the brain of Spaceship Earth, in a town called St. Collegeberg, which is located in the northern regions of concretestan. The area is known as Ferdinand's Folley. Ferdinand's Folley is about a five and a half hour drive from New Gibraltar. Can you figure out what these places are actually called?

Anyway, that is not my point. The point is, the world needs people to be sencere both with each other and with themselves. You could do that in Spaceship Earth.

And now that we have no intact Spaceship Earth, how do I do this?

Well it just so happened that I went on a vision quest.

The vision quest was a rite of passage used by the Sioux Indians. Men would sit in a hole for three days with no food or water and would have dehydration and hunger-enduced visions. I did a vision quest-lite. Less fulfilling, but better for you. I went out in the woods for a few hours. The whole team did this during our stay at Kinetic Village.

The place I am referring to as Kinetic Village is a town whose population is less than its elevation in feet above sea level. It is a beautiful place with lots of trees, endless trails, spectacular mountains, and very little oxygen.

Even though I went up there to train with my team in the weeks before class starts, I won't talk much about the running. Most people will not be interested in hearing about my running, and this is not a Flotrack blog, where I could talk about my running and the life lessons I learn from it and how it's so damn important and trancendental with some sort of metaphysical construct placed precariously on top, or if it is Ryan Hall's blog, an awkward paragraph about how his tempo run related to Hebrews 11. Running is not something that is complex and philosophical. It is the opposite. It is life stripped of everything complex and philosophical.

I will talk about the radio stations in Kinetic Village. Kinetic Village and its greater surrounding area are very sparesly populated. Therefore, these radio stations really dont' have very many listeners, and therefore generate very little advertising revenue. These radio stations therefore get to play whatever the hell they want. I don't mean that they can play the slightly less popular Nickelback songs or the uncensored versions of songs that are labeled as explicit. I mean that they play whatever the hell they want. A set could go from a country western ballad to a smooth jazz porn groove to early Jefferson Airplane to a Texas blues. And this was common. One station had the classical hour every morning at eight, followed at nine by the speed metal hour. One show was operated at the hands of an old man who played mostly Old-Timey music and sounded like he was having a stroke when he was talking. He also seemed to have seen most of the artists he played live and in their heyday.

In mainstream America circa 2009, you don't play a song because you like it, or even because you think it should be played. You play it because it's what people want to hear it. People want to hear it because other people want to hear it. This may be a bold statement, but I doubt that more than 10% of the people who consciously listen to the song "Birthday Sex" actually enjoy listening to it. It's popular and it has novelty. And what about when people want to sing along? You put on "Don't Stop Believin'," because we all know the words and it's catchy and singable. I'm sure that a lot of people, in the rare moments when they are honest with themselves, don't really like "Don't Stop Believin'." They like it because it is a cultural common ground, something that everyone can agree upon. But when you go up to Kinetic Village, where the air and population are spread thinner, you get DJ's who really don't need to rely on what people want. It's a beautiful thing, if you don't mind having your relaxed mood, created by listening to the Bach Cantatas, suddenly interrupted by "Enter Sandman."

My vision quest involved a lot of climbing rocks, for some reason. It was something I wanted to do. I saw a cleft on a rock face, and wanted to get there. By the time I got there, I had decided that it wasn't cool enough, and wanted to go to a cleft that was higher up, and would therefore require more climbing. I had a notebook with me to write down my thoughts. I kept climbing up these rocks until it got really steep and I had to carry my notebook in my teeth so as to have two free hands. I ended up yelling at myself a lot, and singing Phish's "Access Me" for some reason. I realized that Phish could have been recognized as a really good band, and not just a really good jam band, had they taken their studio efforts more seriously. As I knocked loose rocks hundreds of feet down, I was reminded of the Chinese proverb about moving a mountain by moving small stones, and how I could theoretically move this 9,000 foot peak if I just had enough time on my hands. I saw the entire valley as this sphere and I was swirling around in it. I climbed up to a cleft and looked out at the mountains in the distance and knew that on the other side there was nothing but desert and casinos and concealed UFO crashes. I knew that behind me lay a subcontinent that I call my home, but that I will never truly understand. I didn't see the ghost of FDR, I didn't speak in tongues, I didn't see the face of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. I just knew that being afraid was pointless, even though the slightest clumsy motion could send me falling hundreds of feet, and that I would die wearing those stupid sweatpants with snaps on the side so that you can rip them off. I yelled at myself because of all the things about myself that I hate, and how I am inheriting all of my family's problems and shortcomings.

I could resurrect Spaceship Earth, the whole thing, enough mind power and willpower and it could be whole and functioning and one foggy day we could get in and then go, some place. Even if you go in circles in Spaceship Earth, you are going somewhere. You figure things out. We can talk about what happened on the day when the windshield of the world was smashed and a whole new reality rushed in. You don't know what I'm talking about and it's better that way. I just want to figure it out. But I can't. Everyone has a demon, some event that haunts them. And my problem is that my demon is someone else's demon.

Some runs will make you faster. Some will challenge you. Some will make your quads stronger. Some will reveal secrets. Some will show you things about others. Some will tell you what you lack. Some elevate your mood or crush your spirits. But there is one run that reveals who you are.

There is a lake near New Gibraltar. The trail around it is a fourteen mile loop which gains a net total of at least 1,000 feet of elevation, possibly closer to 1,500 feet. I ran this loop four consecutive Sundays this summer, and I saw who I am. I do not like who I am.

But in Kinetic Village, I saw what I can become. And I like what I can become.

Then one day I'll come back to New Gibraltar and chase the demons out of all of you.