Should the interiour of spaceships invoke aesthetic design criteria or functional?

Yesterday, I wanted to take my wife to a nice, quiet, flat lawn to sit and watch a fireworks show to honour the anniversary of the traditional start of the United States of America.

How many of us have sat in meditative silence in “Rocket Park,” a display of rockets, missiles and other gear located in the back lot of the US Space & Rocket Museum in Huntsville, Alabama?

Why not, I thought, grab a couple of cheap lawn chairs, a good book to read and some cash, buy food and drink from street venders and wait for the sizzle-n-boom of pyrotechnic fantasies light up the sky while surrounded by aerodynamic monuments to science?

Me, my wife, and a few hundred people, it turned out.

Rocking to the music of the AMC band (courtesy of the U.S. Army Materiel Command).

I made it about halfway through Craig Ferguson’s “American On Purpose” when threatening thunderstorms dampened the mood (and the book), pushing us indoors until minutes before the Main Event.

All of us have our stories to tell, don’t we?

Earlier in the day, we’d shopped at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, where I dared myself to get back into reading books again, picking up copies of “You Laugh, I’ll Drive” by Jenny Herrick, “Everything Bad Is Good For You” by Steven Johnson, and “A Short History Of Progress” by Ronald Wright.

So, I started my foray back into the writing styles of ghostwriters by reading Jenny’s autobiography and ended with Craig’s.  But, strangely enough, not Jenny Craig’s.  Hmm…

We can weld and program computing devices that explore the outer reaches of the solar system, can’t we?

We can enjoy the explosive nature of gunpowder without anyone getting hurt.

Is there anything we can’t do?

Yesterday, I was sad, the first 4th of July without my father and my mother in-law.

But it’s who/what I have and what I can do that matter most.

Like having chronic back pain for so long you’re consciously unaware of the fact you lean against the pain for support.