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?