My wife and I sat down and looked at our finances this afternoon. I have done what I’ve always wanted to do — I put the desire for dancing above my need for hearing aids — I’d rather be deaf and move my body to the sound of music than be a cyborg with enhanced auditory functionality.
Again, the happiness of overcoming physical fears is almost impossible to describe, like I changed bodies last week and am a new man.
Time for this new old man to get off of his cloud and sleep!
…is sometimes expressed most quietly.
To Jenn, from whom I have accepted the renewed gift of storytelling, I thank you for allowing me to draw a character loosely based on your biographical details.
The real person’s qualities outshine the fictional one and is so much more fun to share a dance without purpose, design or pretext.
May your friends and family forgive me if I draw them in poor lighting or exaggerated grotesquely.
In other words, would you say that your email and texts are as unable to interpret and respond to emotional social context as a person on the autism spectrum? In what situation are they identical and thus the avatar of one is the same as the other?
What are the chances that two nights ago I tripped over my copy of “The Saga of the Sour Toe” by Capt. Dick Stevenson, edited by Dieter Reinmuth, and then today this story pops up in the news?
All I can say is thank goodness the universe was exists purely to create me and entertain me.
Otherwise, I’d go mad (no, don’t tell me I’m mad — let it be your secret you can keep from me!).
The colonists looked everywhere but in each other’s eyes.
Despite their knowledge, their scientific curiosity and their access to the ISSA Net database, none of them was quite willing to talk about the elephant in the room:
When the only source of protein, the flesh of a recently-deceased colonist, was known to contain stage-4 cancer, was it edible?
On so many levels — emotional, ethical, practical, moral.
Back on Earth, body parts recycled for food had entered the fictional mainstream eons ago, the food made flesh (or was that the other way around?) long before Martian colonisation became a buzzword, let alone a reality.
On Mars, though, there was not the sophisticated equipment to separate healthy flesh from diseased flesh.
Malnutrition and scurvy had swept through some of the outer settlements.
Colony No. 1 was not supposed to suffer the fate of poor planning and execution.
Burying the dead was no longer an option, had been argued and regulated out of existence several generations back.
The colonists put the decision off a day.
Sure, they were rational beings but mourning the dead was still an active part of their subculture. Give themselves a day to grieve before making this important decision, they told each other without saying a word by leaving the lab where a dear friend, colleague and family member lay motionless, eternally unresponsive.
Bai jumped across the colony’s esplanade with Shadowgrass.
“Mom told me that you’re one of the main reasons I’m here.”
“She did?”
“Something about your grandfather and a war?”
“She remembered! That’s great. Yes, my grandfather was a soldier a long time, during the period many on Earth call World War II. He was a radio operator.”
“Dad told me about those. Specialists who were responsible for sending signals between groups of people because they didn’t have a love/hate relationship with the ISSA Net yet.”
“Hmm…hahaha. True. But my grandfather is famous back home in the Philippines. He was the man who first contacted General MacArthur, an American soldier in charge of many troops.”
Shadowgrass nodded, mentally scanning the information about World War II as they skipped and hopped. “So how does that account for me?”
“Oh, yeah, it doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, you see, my grandfather was a strict soldier which led to my father’s interest in discipline but for a totally different reason. You’ve probably never heard of ‘Star Trek,’ have you?” She watched his eyes flicker slightly. “Well, I guess you know about it now?”
“Yes, Bai.”
“My father fell in love with the TV show. It was like having his grandfather and all of his grandfather’s friends and uncles live the life of space soldiers. When I was old enough, he made me watch every episode of the original TV series, all the spinoffs such as ‘Next Generation,’ up to ‘Enterprise,’ and, of course, the films as they were released. Inside of you is a little bit of Data with a little bit of Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko.”
“Mom said you were able to infuse my genetic material with the propensity for personality traits of fictional characters. How did you do it?”
Bai ran her gloved hand across her faceplate, intending to but unable to rub her eyes. “Did Guin tell you I used to date Brannon Braga?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Yes. He was the one who inspired me. I hope I inspired him some, too. His place in Melrose, not far from the film studios, was amazing. I remember one party he had, it was a food bar from front to back. You walked from his kitchen to the backyard, which opened onto an English garden, and then the pool…the pool…” She stopped and looked up at the Martian sky.
“What is it, Bai?”
“He said he put me in one of his scripts. I never asked him which one.”
Shadowgrass flipped a few times in the air, bounced up and down like a kangaroo and landed in a three-legged stance. “Did he write about me?”
“No. You are my creation. I mean, it was me who gave your parents the idea to call you their son.”
Shadowgrass flipped up in the air and landed in a standard bipedal configuration. “That’s what Mom said. But I thought you might know something else.”
Bai heard a note of disappointment in Shadowgrass’ intonation of curiosity.
“Shadowgrass, you are a part of everyone’s life, don’t you know? You are the culmination of our species’ achievements. Do you know how many kids on Earth dream of being you, able to change out body parts on a whim, with superstrength and superspeed?”
“Yeah, but…”
Bai nodded. She knew where Shadowgrass was taking his thoughts. His mother, Guin, had been a competitive boxer from an early age, trained by her father, a former member of the U.S. Marines, with assistance from his military and boxing buddies. Growing up on a farm, she had been kicked and stomped on by calves and cows, raising her pain tolerance above normal levels. She had later become a ballerina before switching to a career in rocket science.
Shadowgrass wished he had his mother’s natural abilities, and didn’t have his enhanced abilities that made him so much more capable than his parents.
At age two, he had completed his space exploration vehicle. When his parents were two, they were barely walking and talking.
That’s why Bai had asked to spend the afternoon with him. He needed encouragement to take Martian society to places he couldn’t believe possible when he’ll look back in a few marsyears.
She couldn’t believe she was with him herself, remembering the nights decades earlier, alone with her thoughts when she was at her lowest, torn between her French lover and being near her children on the North American continent.
She wanted to teach Shadowgrass to embrace his emotional side and use the energy he generated to plant seeds in his thoughts that would sprout into giant oaks in no time.
She had done that for so many other people. She knew she could get Shadowgrass to, too.
To address the concept of freedom, one asks oneself what is the attitude one adopts to question “the concept of freedom.”
Tonight, the one who addresses the question is the one who writes the words, thinking in broader scopes outside of one’s inner circle yet operating within one’s circle of influence.
One is.
Yet, one is not.
There is no “one” that exists outside of space and time, separate from the universe.
One chooses, therefore, to write upon subjects of personal interest to answer the question, “Who am I in this moment that constitutes who I was and who I was not a moment before?”
What are decisions I make or made that move me out of one swimming lane and into another?
What are the masks, the walls, the false identities that divide the bigger concept of me seen by myself in a mirror and seen by those sets of states of energy that clearly are not me within the timeframe of seconds/months/decades?
To be sure, a breath from another person can be inhaled by me — to whom do the molecules “belong”?
Why would someone be nice to me for no other reason than to share a moment when two male whitetail deer should be walking closeby, eating apples under a line of apple trees near the creek the same as any other dusk in the past few weeks?
I am not a complex person. I do not compose symphonies or design planetary socioeconomic systems from scratch.
I am a person who loves the person who has been a constant part of his life for 40 years but who loves a lot of other people, too.
I test social situations, then report what I observe.
I am what some people call devious.
I am helpful, courteous, kind, cheerful, thrifty and friendly but not always obedient, trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent.
I listen in order to learn.
If people don’t mind me being devious, then I don’t mind using our connections and our friendships for good stories.
There are many new characters to introduce to our main story and I have the better part of this week to get them written down, their lives painted on this canvas for posterity, giving them a place in our Martian colony, our Moon base and our Earth support network.
Some of them coincide with the lives of people I’ve met, some people more like acquaintances I’ve bumped into and other people I’ve gotten to know better than I know myself.
I remind myself in this blog entry that writing about people I know, putting their words and actions into my thoughts so I can imagine what they’ll do in imaginary situations is not the same as my living their lives, although it might be.
I have to see how much I can stretch my imagination and how much I choose to look at the limits I’ve placed on my thoughts and actions, deciding which limits were set arbitrarily at one point in my life and no longer apply.
Is it “art” above all else, including my subcultural expectations?
What am I doing here in this blog?
As a person fully aware of his surroundings, what am I willing to say is background noise and ignore? What of the background noise is worth my attention? What is in my face that is masking something more important? What needs to be in my face that isn’t?
These questions set my thought patterns in motion for this week’s stories.
The answers may or may not involve me, but they will certainly involve the characters who appear in future blog entries.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we blast off toward new horizons!
Today is an important day here at Project Xceed Xpectations. We’ve decided, while finishing the details on our business plan, to introduce you to the project itself.
First of all, let’s give it a name, shall we? Here ya go!:
All Sols Day is an Internet-based serial story, in the format of sitcom-meets-reality TV, about life on Mars, mixing cartoon-style graphics with live footage of the first landing, exploration and settlement of Mars.
The Kickstarter campaign will offer you different levels of participation:
Those are all some of the preliminary “thanks” levels we have proposed to our Creative Arts department for completion within a reasonable waiting time by you, our patient contributors and supporters.
We’ve asked the producers and crew if any of them would be willing to travel to your home, office or event for a public speaking engagement as part of a high-donation “thanks” participation level. We’re working on the legal details at this time.
We’re also in negotiations with a replica construction company to make a vehicle that could “launch” your child and land your child on a simulated Martian surface where your child could explore and set up a habitation module during a two-week period, but the cost — hundreds of thousands of dollars — would be hard to justify without knowing there’s full interest by at least a few parents willing to fund a Mars Exploration Camp for kids.
Our friends in the space business have asked us to make this project a success, putting into the minds of the people that Mars settlement is a given fact because we know there will be setbacks along the way and want them fully onboard with the good, the bad and the ugly future.
treetrunkdings 