The Single Biggest Thing to Ever Happen on December 25

Well, friends and family, tomorrow is The Day! The main event, the big cheese, the spicy enchilada, if you will.

I'm referring—as I'm sure you've guessed—to the worldwide celebration of the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton (if one refers to the Julian calendar, naturally).

Oh, but the excitement doesn't stop there! Scientific history is about to be made yet again with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope; a scientific instrument literally decades in the making. I find it kind of awesome that it is launching on such a cardinal date in human history (and incidentally, a year to the month after Arecibo's collapse).

Looks like Santa isn't the only thing to be excited about in the skies this holiday! The gift in your stocking may be a better understanding of the Cosmos itself...

The mission will stream live on NASA TV at around the time parents everywhere will start to need earplugs and a stiff drink.

The True Meaning of Spooky Season

Samhain. All Souls' Day. Día de los Muertos. All Hallows Eve. Halloween. Whichever label you prefer, this is the time of year when the veil between the living and the dead is believed to be at its thinnest. 

Remember to take a few moments to send remembrance and love to those who have passed on. It is, after all, a journey we all will eventually undertake.

The knowledge of our own mortality is what gives our lives their greatest purpose: to Love. A force so powerful that even the veil has no hope of dimming it.

Also—if you can—take a moment to observe the trees. Every Autumn, they teach us a lesson: the importance of letting go. It's okay; nothing (or no one) is ever truly gone. 

Spring will come. Life will renew. The forest will become whole once again.

So. Can. We. Every leaf that sails on the wind is a promise that things are going to be okay.

Whatever day you celebrate, my wish for you is that your heart be as full as a bottomless cauldron filled with big-sized Snickers.

The Terror Felt Around the World

Twenty years ago, as I was getting ready for work, I saw a news report showing an airplane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers. At the time, it seemed like a terrible accident. I thought no more about it as I began my day, consumed as I was then about trivial things. 

Things that would soon be rendered permanently meaningless.

By the time I started my shift, the second plane had hit, and it was then understood as a deliberate attack. I was stuck behind a cash register for most of the day, getting sporadic reports (some true, many exaggerated) from the handful of customers who trickled in. Smartphones weren't a thing. The Internet was something you sat down at a desk and dialed into. The closest television was back in the break room. There I was, wondering why our normally busy store was practically a ghost town—completely oblivious that the world beyond those glass doors was changing forever.

It took me a few hours to believe the towers had actually collapsed. After all, I had pictures of them taped to my wall that I had taken on a band trip only a few years before. They couldn't possibly be gone! When I finally saw the replay during my lunch break, it was like watching a movie. It didn't seem real.

I remember how gas stations and credit card readers kind of just...shut down. The networks were overwhelmed. 

The following week, I happened to be in Florida for my niece's christening. I decided it would be fun, since I was already in Orlando, to visit Universal Studios. I arrived to find a nearly abandoned park. There were no lines for any of the rides. People were terrified, assuming that theme parks might be the next target. In retrospect, I was an idiot for wanting to go, but I was 23. I felt invincible. (Although it was a stupid idea, it was one of the last road trips I ever took with my sister. I'm still glad I went.)

I remember Steph telling me I needed to marry my then-girlfriend so I wouldn't get drafted into the next world war. At the time, the fear didn't seem far-fetched.

My then-girlfriend, who was a native of Uganda, hugged me tight as she whispered, "now it's in your country," with a fear in her eyes I couldn't comprehend. She and her mother had moved to the United States to escape a civil war, only to find terrorism hitting our shores as well.

Until then, I had known nothing but a feeling of complacent safety during my privileged upbringing.

There are no words to describe how it affected...everything. All of the cable channels, including ones like MTV and Cartoon Network, carried 24/7 news coverage. Rumors spread like wildfire. I can still hear late-night panicked calls from close friends saying they heard Nashville was going to be next.

It doesn't feel like 20 years have passed. There are grown adults now who weren't alive then. They have no idea how the world was changed; how we were changed. Watching dozens of people jumping to their deaths live on television to escape being incinerated by flames...well, that sort of horror stays with you.

Some people say it brought everyone together, but that kind of depends on whom you ask. I vividly remember hearing accounts of hate crimes against innocent families who even looked like they might be from the Middle East. There was a lot of anger during that time. While understandable, it was unforgivable. You can't say it brought us together if you exclude some people from us.

That was what scared me then: how grief quickly grew to overwhelming anger. In many ways, it felt like the flames of fear and hatred were purposely fanned. Human beings, as I've recently written, are genetically conditioned for war.

There was a tidal wave of bleakness that drowned everything in a way I had never experienced before. Television shows stopped taping new episodes. Late-night talk shows didn't tell any jokes... if they aired at all.

For a time, it felt like we would never be able to laugh again.

Our innocence—our naivety —was lost.  

Those of you who regularly follow my musings know I generally try to keep things light-hearted, but there are no ways to make light of 9/11. We can hope some positives came out of the whole thing, but at such a tremendous cost of innocent lives—not to mention the pain for those left behind—was it worth the payment?

No. Not even close.

Please take care of yourselves and each other. The need for Love in the world cannot be understated or undervalued.

Lamp Posts

I wish each of us—every day—would take a moment to realize that we see the world around us not for what it is objectively, but rather skewed through a myriad of prisms; each based on our own cultural biases, religious programming, and social upbringing.

Our typical knee-jerk emotional responses to many of the things we see around us are so deeply embedded into our subconscious, we often confuse them as truths without question.

But, why are we who we are? Why do we believe what we believe? Why does someone with a differing point of view get immediately labeled as them or enemy? It is a pretty binary way of thinking for analog organisms, isn't it?

Us vs. Them. We see it every day on the news and on social media. The political arena, in particular, is a culprit as nasty as any comic book villain. Humans are, simply, conditioned for war.

It dates back to our tribal roots. Territorial conflict helped us survive our early days as a species. My tribe created a certain dogma that, in turn, became diametrically opposed to my neighboring tribe's dogma. Over time, our bodies evolved and our brains grew, and this behavior became embedded into our DNA. It was shoved to a back shelf in our shiny-new subconscious, yet it was as loud as ever.

Today, we have something amazing we've never had before: access to information. With the touch of a button, we can explore the cumulative database of all that humanity has learned and achieved. The best part? We are now exposed to points of view and ideologies that differ from the ones with which we were raised, on a level of magnitude unprecedented just a few decades ago. (These differing ideas often get categorized as them out of hand. Watch how our knees jerk! Pavlov would be proud.)

It may not seem like it when perusing literally any social media comments section, but the Internet is one of humanity's greatest inventions. It's not just for porn, cat videos, and dissenting opinions about Star Wars!

Oh, we're not mature enough to use it properly...not yet. See, we still have those prisms in front of our eyes. Those pesky tribal instincts. On the cosmological scale, humans are relatively recent arrivals. We are still in our collective adolescence, prone to outbursts and moodiness when things don't go our way.

You may be thinking I'm anti-religion. I'm not against religion, per se; I think a curious, healthy spirituality is a wonderful thing. Loving others, kindness, and treating your neighbor with respect are the greatest tenets of all of the world's leading faiths—perhaps even those you believe to be them.

The thing is, we're all on the same journey; we're simply on different parts of the road.  Some of us are traveling over mountains, others are trudging through the desert. Our personal viewpoints may differ, yet we all seek truth and understanding of the Universe.

Just as we seek to be understood ourselves.

I've been incredibly fortunate over the years to encounter many teachers who challenged me to think beyond my own prisms. Most of them had no idea they were teaching me anything; I simply listened to their stories. Along the way, I learned to start thinking outside of myself. I call these folks Lamp Posts, because they illuminated a part of my journey for a while. They showed me a part of the road I had never seen before.

I'm not the same person I was a few years ago. Universe willing, I'll be a different person yet by the time this 'ole biological machine stops functioning. (If I'm really fortunate, there will be even more to explore in whatever exists beyond.)

I hope we never stop learning, growing, and revising the idea of Who We Are. We have so much amazing potential.

We have to start by seeing the world—and each other—clearly.

If it's the Journey that Matters, I Want to Ride the Rails

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of train videos on YouTube.

Model trains. Mountain-climbing cogwheel trains. Disneyland’s steam train. Japanese suspended monorails. The Hogwarts Express. Lego sets affixed with GoPros zooming throughout living rooms and terrorizing housecats.

I’ve been fascinated by trains ever since I was little. One entire bedroom of my childhood home was dominated by a miniature town whose primary mode of transportation was an illuminated four-car passenger train. Not that the citizens could actually go anywhere—there was only one station.

Naturally, everything lit up. I remember turning off the lights and staring at the thing for hours on end. (If I still had it, I’d stare at it as an adult, too. In fact, I’d probably already be decorating it for Halloween.)

I’d love to travel across the country via train. One with a sleeper cabin, and preferably a shower. It would be a long trip.

Until that dream becomes manifest, YouTube is free, so my mind and spirit can travel any time I wish. Being something of a nomad by nature, my sense of wanderlust is ignited by views of sweeping vistas rolling leisurely past the cabin windows. I breathe deeply, existing in a space where time is marked only by meals and sunsets, and conversations are timeless.

I imagine simply being, my mind unencumbered by the distracting rhythms and patterns that permeate (and often irritate) my normal, rail-less existence.

The destination isn’t important. Arrival schedules are irrelevant. The outside world becomes part of another life, another place; mere trivialities circumvented by a magical length of transcendent track.

It isn’t a highway that leads to Heaven...it’s a railroad.

Back to BASICs

I can still remember the first computer program I ever learned to code. It was two glorious lines of BASIC; as simple as it was eloquent:

10 PRINT "FARTS!"

20 GOTO 10

RUN

The resulting output was a repeating stream of FARTS! scrolling down the screen, which would continue to propagate until someone interrupted the loop, or the Universe ended — whichever came first.

Anyone who owned a computer running BASIC during the ‘80s and ’90s might have had a thick companion manual filled with programs, screensavers, and games; all of which had to be manually entered line by line. Sure, you could pop in a cartridge or load the program via an attached cassette drive, but what would be the fun in that?

A few months ago, I acquired a Raspberry Pi computer. For the uninitiated, a RaspPi is a tiny, low-cost computer the size of a credit card, which can be used in a multitude of projects: from home media servers to robotics, portable weather monitoring stations, retro gaming platforms, or running endless varieties of full desktop environments. You can even run some Windows applications on the newer models. 

It is the perfect project computer for anyone (kids and adults alike) who wants to learn to code. You can’t mess it up as everything is loaded from an SD card or USB thumb drive — any major mistake can be fixed by a simple reformat.

As I have access to an entire library of educational Udemy content via work, I’ve decided to take an introductory class on Python programming. I haven’t progressed much further than “Hello World” (or FARTS! as my BASIC counterpart is wont to do), but I always get kind of giddy to learn something new about computers and how they work.

So, quick question: any tech firms out there willing to pay top dollar to a middle-aged geek who knows how to output a lot of FARTS!? (Actually… don’t answer that.)

Vincent and the Doctor: a study on Mental Illness

My favorite episode of Doctor Who is “Vincent and the Doctor.”

The titular Doctor, along with companion Amy Pond, finds himself in the past... sharing the company of artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Vincent suffers what today we would recognize as mental illness, displaying symptoms such as severe depression and hallucinations. He is ostracized from society. He and his contemporaries believe his paintings to be worthless, even after the Doctor and Amy show complete admiration for his work.

Nothing either of them says can convince him otherwise.

Eventually forming a friendship with the troubled artist, the Doctor and Amy decide to bring Vincent to the present, to show him the impact his art has had on a more appreciative society.

In a heart-wrenching scene, Vincent stands in the midst of a gallery filled with his paintings, each piece crowded with admirers. The Doctor pulls a nearby docent aside to explain the importance of Vincent Van Gogh.

“To my mind,” the docent enthuses, “that strange wild man who roamed the fields of Provence, was not only the world’s greatest artist but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.” Standing within earshot, Vincent—and the audience—begins to weep.

Vincent is soon restored to his own time. Amy can’t wait to return to the art gallery, believing they must have changed the outcome of Vincent’s life. She expects to find hundreds of new paintings, but instead discovers that history remains unaltered: Vincent Van Gogh took his life mere days after their shared adventure.

Doctor Who is, of course, a work of fiction. As far as we know, Van Gogh never knew the impact his art would have on future generations.

Would that knowledge have made a difference? We will never know, but that wasn’t the point of the episode. If you have never watched it, I encourage you to seek it out.

Depression wasn’t only an issue in Van Gogh’s time. According to the CDC, suicide is currently the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. 

As it so happens, May is Mental Health Month. Like the subjects of other awareness months, Mental Health is a vital discussion we should have more often than a handful of weeks out of the year.

To give you a little of my own backstory, my mom was diagnosed Bipolar with Schizoaffective Disorder when she was a young adult. That means in addition to unpredictable mood swings, she occasionally has psychotic episodes where she has to be hospitalized. That used to terrify me when I was a kid, but then I learned about neurochemical imbalances in the brain. They are more common than I realized!

I personally have had issues with depression and anxiety throughout my life. It is a part of the psychological landscape I navigate every day. Writing about it has been an important part of my own therapy.

Fortunately, unlike poor Vincent, we exist in a world that encourages open discussion of mental health. There are treatments, such as therapy and medications. While modern mental health care is far from perfect, it has come a long way from its troubled beginnings, when it was considered a taboo subject never to be discussed in polite company.

While there are resources available, it comes with a catch: you have to be aware. Not only of yourself but also those around you. Are you no longer enjoying things you once did? Does your anxiety sometimes get so bad it keeps you awake at night? Has a friend suddenly become withdrawn?

Depression isn’t a weakness; anxiety isn’t a flaw. Even more severe mental conditions, like Schizophrenia, don’t mean you are broken. Sometimes, they’re simply a result of chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be regulated with medication and doctor supervision. (A real one, not the fictional hero.)

Other times, treatment can be as simple as talking with someone.

No matter the case, it begins with communication. We are all in this together.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

(800) 273-8255

BetterHelp Professional Counseling Services

https://www.betterhelp.com/

Centers for Disease Control Mental Health Information

https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/index.htm

National Institute of Mental Health

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/find-help/

Lights Out

At 1:30 a.m., a rare thing happened here in downtown: the power went out.

I only know this because the sudden departure of sound woke me up. (I can snooze through a tornado, but a quiet room will keep me up all night.)

Never one to miss such an opportunity, I stepped outside. There's an almost complete absence of light and sound—interrupted only by the pattering of falling rain—in an area usually humming with a subliminal orchestra of electrical equipment and glowing streetlights.

You don't usually notice all of it... until the orchestra stops playing. Now the world feels somehow wrong, even as it regresses to its default, more primal setting. I can't say whether there's a statement here on modern civilization and its impact on our senses, partly because I'm not really qualified to make such a pontification, but mostly because my sleep-deprived brain is trying to think at 2-freakin'-a.m.

Also, I'm realizing how loudly my cats snore, and it's terribly distracting.

In any case, now that I've dutifully chronicled the experience, I hope for electricity's swift return, because I can't sleep.

What's in a life?

 A part of my day job includes preparing obits to run in the following week's paper.

I always try to take a moment to reflect on the names sitting on my screen. These were real people with hopes and dreams and families and worries and fears and successes and loves and full, complete stories of their own―each one far more compelling than any piece of fiction ever scribbled.

However, tonight marks the first time I'm editing one for someone I actually knew. Suddenly, every bit of punctuation, each letter, even the spacing of lines are treated with meticulous, loving precision.

To be fair, that's what I'm supposed to do. It's literally a recurring item on my weekly "to do" list. But the task lands differently when it's someone I know.

An entire life, someone's entire existence... relegated to a few lines in ink.

It never seems enough, does it? Not when we are libraries all our own, with countless stories to tell.

When Superheroes Grieve

 “But what is grief, if not love persevering?” -The Vision, uttering the best line of the entire MCU.

Let's take a moment to appreciate how great Marvel is at having its heroes deal with emotional trauma. WandaVision may have started as a decades-spanning sitcom starring two Avengers, but at its core, it has always been a show about grief. How we move on—or in some cases, don't—from the loss of a loved one. How we would do anything to see that person again, and what happens if we actually are in the position to do something (You know, like magically reincarnating the deceased, then enslaving an entire town to turn into our very own sitcom universe. That 'ole chestnut.)

Perhaps that's why Marvel Studios produces better stories on the whole than its Distinguished Competition; the characters are written as people before they're written as superheroes. The whiz-bang is secondary to their humanity. Tony Stark spent multiple films dealing with crippling anxiety. Steve Rogers became an international fugitive because of his love for a friend. Vision, even as his body was being torn apart, pleaded with Hayward to save the citizens of Westview. (Mjölnir chose his worthiness well.)

When Natasha Romanoff sacrificed her life for the Soul Stone, we felt Clint's grief as he beheld his shining prize. We can almost hear the distant echo of Gamora's “what did it cost?” as it weighs on this moment. We know. We know the cost.

Wanda has lost everything. Her parents, her brother, and then the one person who was able to connect to her through her grief. If that wasn’t enough, she's also haunted by a mistake that cost innocent lives. Unlike Tony Stark, who received a hero’s sendoff, there was no memorial for Vision. The last she saw, his body was lying broken on the ground. Wanda wants to bury him; he deserves that much. Instead of closure, she is shown his ruined parts strewn about on cold tables, being poked and prodded by technicians. She is denied the right to even lay him to rest.

“Do you think maybe this is what you deserve?” Agatha asks from off-camera, seemingly feeding off Wanda’s torment. “You’re not supposed to talk,” Wanda replies, as though trying desperately to keep the pain hidden away. (Speaking from personal experience, I can vouch that this never works.)

Steph wasn’t shot by a murderous killbot; cancer worked its horror over the course of years. When Wanda ripped one of Ultron’s mechanical hearts straight out of its chest to demonstrate the pain of her brother’s loss, anyone who has ever lost someone felt it immediately.

If I possessed chaos magic, there’s a nonzero chance I might have tried to have at least one more conversation; one last chance to say the things I never did. Wanda emphatically states “this is our home” when the recreated Vision asked what is outside of Westview. She doesn't want to leave the bubble of fantasy. (Any credible artist will confess the best art comes from pain.)

Yes, these characters are fictional, springing to life through a writer’s mind, a director’s instruction, and incredible acting talent...plus several minutes’ worth of credits. Yet they are relatable despite the fantastic circumstances that surround them.

When superheroes grieve...so do we.

How awesome is that?

On the morning of July 30th, 2020, a 191-foot tall Atlas V-541 rocket raced the sun into the sky from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its destination: our rusty-hued celestial neighbor, Mars.

While already a breathtaking feat of engineering, the rocket’s payload included a curious, almost trivial thing; something never before encountered in the Cosmos.

It carried my name. Yours too, perhaps, if you signed up for it.

For seven months, that vehicle has traversed the roughly 293 million miles that currently stretch between our two worlds without a single bathroom break. On the plus side, traffic was light. There were only two other vehicles on the road during the entire trip.

Soon that wondrous assemblage of scientific instruments will descend through the thin Martian atmosphere, perform a precisely calculated set of maneuvers, and touch down on an alien world (fingers crossed). Millions will watch the event from all across this amazing blue marble.

Our names are landing on another world! Long after the rover’s mission parameters have been fulfilled and its energies depleted, it will remain on Mars as a monument to human achievement. How awesome is that?

As someone who has been interested in space exploration since I was a kid watching Star Trek reruns, events like this are cause for great excitement. Mars has been our constant next-door neighbor since before humans took their first glimpses skyward, yet we’ve barely begun to unlock its mysteries. Even less so the myriad worlds that lie beyond our local galactic cul-de-sac.

We have been poetically described as a way for the Universe to observe itself—matter spewed forth from the crucible of exploding stars assembled into a conveniently sentient humanoid form, capable of pondering its place in the Cosmos. Endless debates echo throughout halls of learning, houses of religion, and the lawn chairs of late-night stargazers. We all strive to understand not just the meaning of ourselves, but our place amongst the greater scheme of things. Why are we here? Are we alone in the Universe? If a rock tumbles on Mars, and no rover is there to record the anomaly with its onboard sensors, does it make a sound?

Exploration is the first step towards answering some of those questions.

My own, one for which I can already guess the answer, is: How awesome is that?