Dr. Langstrom/Other

I’m moving the Dr. Langstrom stuff over to the Pages section.  New one is here.

***

New Business:

I hate seeing how hard our culture is on women.  I mean, sure, we men face similar challenges.  It does inspire a certain sort of uneasiness when a woman who claims attraction to you gushes over someone who’s facial features and physique you will never in a million years emulate.  I think though, that that uneasiness, and it is straight up pain for some men I know, is fractional in relation to the way a lot of women feel about themselves on a daily basis.

Maybe it’s just a general epidemic of low self esteem, one that is slightly gender specific, but I see more women hurt by societal judgements of body than men.  That isn’t to say I don’t know some roided out, eating disorder having men.  But I know more women outwardly emotionally suffering due to their appearance.  It isn’t right.

Sure, I like to look at some lean college student ass, but I hardly make that an exclusive taste.  I find most women’s asses appealing.  And boobs? they’re great.  Big boobs, small boobs, the frighteningly perky ones, they’re all fun to play with and look at.  Really. Show me your boobs! I love them.

Though I am most obviously a visual aesthete of the female form, I am blessed with wildly arrayed attractors in various form.  I like smart women better than perfect-bodied women.  I like funny women more than stripper school graduate students.

Realistically, most people don’t have the time or money to look like men or women in magazines, on TV, etc.  Trust me, I dropped a mandated 25 pounds of Ale House muscle over the last two months and it cost an assload of money. Well, honestly, I lost a lot of striate lean muscle in that purge, as evidenced by my weak showing in the benchpress department as of late. I have went from a Caterpillar D9 to a Caterpillar D7 in body type.

And you know what I noticed? The leaner I get, the less women chatting me up are my type.  That sentence was convoluted, but it makes sense after a second reading. The more angular and martial I look, the fewer smart-alecky, natural, funny, and intelligent girls talk to me.

There is always an intimidation factor working against me, it just seems to have gotten worse.

All that to say: chicks, I understand because I am a sensitive, caring (horny) motherfucker.

Now you, the one with the ass, take them clothes off.

Dr. Langstrom 2

*Dr.?

“Yes?”

*Nearing initial point

“Very well. I’ll be up shortly.”

*Very well.

“Mersis?”

*Yes.

“Run: Diagnostic: Payload; Navigation; Tomb; Tomb sustainment, propulsion, and avoidance systems; Full ship and Pod auxiliaries.”

* Run: Diagnostic: Payload; Navigation; Tomb; Tomb sustainment, propulsion, and avoidance systems; Full ship and Pod auxiliaries. Aye.

Gold eyes stared down on a prone figure laying on a thin white shelf.  One hand reached out from the thin blanket and checked the system time. The body had the frailty that comes from too many years in fractional gravity. The thin bluish body of the doctor rolled out of bed and contacted the floor.  The surface warmed before his feet hit.  Through a short corridor, he bounced from one wall to the other.  The tomb laid as a gleaming gold and silver polished fuselage, gaping mouth hanging open at one end and mirrored black motors wrapped around the tail.

*Dr.?

“Yes.”

*Dignostics complete. Systems all returned positive. Would you like to know our distance to initial point?”

“Just elapsed time to arrival.”

*Approximately 5.7 minutes.

“Very well. Mersis?”

*Dr.

“Leave us until we reach the IP.”

*Very well.

Golden eyes faded slowly along the ceiling and wall and the lights lowered.  The gleam of the tomb reflected the brightly lit goings on of the computers on either end of the lab, down blacked out corridors.  His hand went to the tomb and ran along the bullet hull, tracing his creation.  That creation had come at great expense to his financial resources and a few very serious laws. He sat in silence. The words had all been said and systems had all began their final run-up to launch.  The tomb glowed warm, but was not radiating.  It would only radiate when it had achieved relative-to-light speed and its voyage fell almost out of time.

*IP approaches.

“Very well.”

The doctor grabbed onto the handles along the walls as the gravity ceased.  He pulled himself into a seat forward of the lab and strapped into the only seat in the ship.  His mind ran a diagnostic of his being and his decisions. The ship rumbled slightly as the ship’s vectoring motors fired. It lined up along the equator of the distant Earth and began a sharp descent into a failed orbit. The golden eye on the forward superstructure of the small ship held constellations and earthly points in its mind as the ship fell in a death spiral toward the Earth.

*Release imminent.

“Very well.”

A gentle shudder went through the ship and the pilot and its lone passenger.  The tomb was released toward the Earth below.  It fell sharply and nosed down into the pale atmosphere.  The doctor watched a visualization of the craft fall away.  As the nose began to glow in the reentry, a fire began in the spiraling tendril of compressed and stirred air behind the tomb.  The fire crept in a thin silver line down the contrail and grew thick.  The tomb had almost disappeared into the blue when the contrail exploded in flame.

The view of the earth below was split in two by the rapid tearing of its sky beneath the ship.  The streaking tomb, occulted in flame, shot up out of its freefall and rolled over the far horizon, circling the Earth below.  The doctor held the small breath he had and the biometric system immediately filled the room with more oxygen rich atmosphere.  The visualization panned behind and caught the silver dawn and the professor breathed again.  The tomb rushed up around the blue globe and shot by to dive again, following its curve one last time.  With no delay, the false dawn and streak of silver flame erupted behind the ship and leapt free.

The doctor looked out the porthole to his side at the silver streak blasting away into the darkness and he grew cold.  He touched the window as the red haze of his ship burning up on its own non-sustainable reentry swallowed his view.  The golden eye on the superstructure exploded in the heat and the rushing fiery atmosphere eroded at its borders until the mast sheared off and fell behind to burn up alone.  The ship, its pilot, and its passenger rode the comet down into the heavier air as their entombing fire began to eat the least aerodynamic features away for the hull.

The doctor called up from the lagging pilot one last visual, hazy and reddened, of the tomb, or rather its exhaust plume as the main engines fed on the acceleration away from him.  He held her face in his mind and called to her, hoping that the mythologies of the last generations were true as the hull split into two and then four pieces. And then into oblivion raining down.

Dr. Langstrom

<One day, when we’re all machines, I want to see you again.  I want to see and feel you through conduits of perfectly compressed data./

<I want to lose you to flesh and blood, where we always fought each other’s humanity.  I want to see you drop away from me one last time in the aerobic shuffle.  Let’s meet up again when we’re servos and actuators./

<The way the stars light your face and you stare away into a galaxy you can only perceive in numbers you’ll never see, the way you can only move at the whims of glucose and fructose and phosphorous, the way you want more than your mind can handle, these are the things that make pumping blood so tragic./

<But in our next life, in some grand cave of steel, let’s move out into the sun and feel the photovoltaic answer to some question our creators never asked pulse through our copper veins.  When we ride on, from world to world as our information, let’s hold binary hands and never lose each other again./

<But for now, let me watch you die. It hurts us both, you know.  You laying there, covered in tubes and bile and poplin.  I want to see you drift away from this world where our imperfect approximations of machines fail us in spectacular and disgusting ways.  Roll on, you’ve seen what you need here.  But I will carry you with me, as all the data of our years together until I can move you into a new home of easily repaired motors and shining titanium bones.  Please stay alive, in whatever storage medium can possibly hold all that you are, stay alive until another vehicle for you is found.  Until I build it.  Until I commission it./

<When it all goes gray and your eyes roll back away, failed and useless, and your hands go slack in mine, broken and faltering, hang on.  Deploy your slats and spoilers and brake and slow your vector until I can catch you again.  Please./

<I don’t want it to end like this.  The failure of your machine killing you./>

<@_Transmit)

The fingers slid apart and the metronomic tones slowed and grew irregular.  And then the tone disappeared altogether.  The lights of the room were lowered automatically when the biometric sensors interpreted the story told by the only living body left in the room.

The hiss of skin on skin sounded in the silence as the hands slid away and the cooling arm fell and impacted the rail of the bed with a wooden, wet sound.

A round porthole in the room let in the thin silver light radiated from all the distant stars and the blue reflected radiation of the white clouded globe outside.  Africa was slipping by, and soon India would follow and then the open, untouched azure Pacific as the life and machines in the room slowly circled the Earth.  Only one life, now.  One life, a few golden electronic eyes, and one forever broken primitive machine.

There’s an interesting article in the New Scientist.

The general idea of the article is that eventually, people may be able to tell life bearing planets by their surficial features.  Valley/ridge type of things.

Obviously, this requires water erosion to be effective.  The end idea is that the life of a planet will cause completely different erosion patterns than what you would find on a lifeless surface.

Reading it got me thinking about how often you see trees clinging to hillsides or huddled along ridges and you admire the tree for living where one is so challenged by the local geology.  In most of the Desert Southwest, you’ll see the familiar cedars hanging on for dear life along cliffs, while the cottonwoods, willows, and some grasses hang out in river bottoms or various other water rich flood areas.

Those cliffs are being constantly eaten through a process called floraturbation.  Basically, the roots eat away at the rock and split it with forces unimaginable in our short lives.  The creation of those cliffs is probably largely driven by this process.  The strain rate is low, though.  The roots grow too slowly for anything spectacular to happen.

It also stands to reason that the river bottoms are probably created by some action of the willows, cottonwoods, etc. that spread out in the channels and along the banks.

I don’t know why I never thought about that.

I’m sure all the difference made by the flora is eventually evened out in cool defeat at the hands prodding time, but for a while, it fights and shapes and wins.  And maybe the graveyard planets left long after the life is dead and the water gone are better monuments to the forces of life than a blue planet rich with tectonic erasures and a vibrant eating community of lifeforms.

I’ve seen gravestones hundreds of years old, and abandoned dwellings much older, but have yet to meet anyone much older than a century.

Just one more way for your life to feel inconsequential.

August Approaches

While I am fairly decent at describing hypothetical emotions in diverse circumstances, I cannot for the life of me ever talk about them in a coherent way.  It’s a failure that will probably never be rectified.  There’s a world of swirling murky feeling shaped objects in my head sometimes, but it’s just a centrifuge of ridiculous asymmetry.

So I won’t say those feeling shaped words to you.  I quit trying.

Some situations would only be muddled by clarity, anyway.  Somehow, I find all the useless extravagance and chrome-plated accoutrement of romance more of a tombstone than an affirmation. In that, I think I may not be alone.  But I would rather assume so and not further complicate my world view with questions or proof.

Don’t you believe in love? She said.

Obviously not like you do, imparted I.

That’s a really sad way to go through life, she told me most judgmentally for a complete stranger.

I’m sure, I drolled, that there were tears shed over the death of epicycles.

If I ever meet the creator of Calibri font, I will destroy him with all the fires of rage constructed of my faultless aesthetic sense.  That is as unrelated to love a statement as I could muster.  I was unpleased with the direction this suddenly took.

The Broncos will probably go 6-10 this season.  I can feel a losing season in my bones.

Exhaustion and Alcohol, I Blame Them

Do you think that your soul could be math?

When I think of all the cascading interrelated events and conditions that make a person whatever they may be, I wonder if the measure of your existence is like a contrail following you into the dark.  To believe that some version of yourself exists inverted or stretched through some multiversal history strikes me as hokum, but maybe right here, right in this reality, our souls are right in front of us.

Could you sit and compute yourself? I think you could, given time and help.  It is possible, though unlikely to happen, that a person could have the events of their life so well cataloged that they would be replicable.  If you were to do that in some analog to where we are now, would you have created a person? A stunted Hebrew Gollum?

What made the Abomination of Desolation so incredibly bad? Was it that a man assumed he was God enough to make a copy of himself or that he had cruelly left a life beating without soul?

So, when you take your magic words and your human finger and write your name across the forehead of the reality you know, are you lending your soul?

I think so.

This goes back to the event horizon of consciousness hypothesis from some months back. As the person’s brain loses all track of time and the last anoxic moments stretch forever, is that where reality fails as a medium? Here in Consensusland, we can all agree on both the existence of time and its measure,  but I have a feeling your brain believes in time like I believe in capital.  Sure it’s there in my pocket and (hypothetically) in my bank account, but I find it doubtful that it is the end-all infallible meter it is assumed to be.  Yesterday a bike inner tube was worth a lot more to me than a bottle of whiskey, but it would take approximately six inner tubes to add up to 750 ml of Knob Creek.

But if your brain senses itself running out of time, or its cousin oxygen, would its creation of a slow moving, never ending reality be a rough analog to sitting next to your flat tire and getting shit-hammered on bourbon?

Jaguar, Rectified

“This is getting out of hand.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I offer no solutions.”

“Maybe you should stop trying.”

“Maybe.”

And she rolls the linguine in a substandard tomato creme. She’s forming questions greater and of more import than she lets on. She always is.

“Would it be so bad?”

“It is so bad.”

The sound of china and silver colliding like gravitationally collapsing helium in some time-engine powered nebula closes in on her looking away and our breathing slows and falls away.  It falls away forever while some greater creation of some mental Andromeda forms behind those eyes. She looks away from herself toward me.

“I’ve never known anyone who has a harder time when they’re happy.”

“I’m never happy, you know that.”

“Do you think,” she says crushing the dust of the gods into plasma, “that happiness may be something you wouldn’t recognize if you had it?”

And while I struggle again to answer in some way that makes her at least sound wrong, she moves her fork toward a zucchini doomed forever to mediocrity and a bland tomato creme, but soon to be destroyed in the furnace of life and recycled again into untold synaptic insight.

” I like this song,” I say as I turn to my beer.

“Me too. I never figured out what it’s about.”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s glycerine used for, anyway?”

“Lots of things.  Actors put it in their eyes to make themselves cry when the script calls for it.”

“Huh.”

Beep, boop, etc.

It is possible that minor epiphanies are all reality can be.

I was backing my brother’s decrepit Honda out of my driveway when the librarian stylized ramble of NPR intruded in on my concentration. The story was about the impending confirmation of the latest Supreme Court nominee. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that I see the creep of inevitability in the whole process. The purpose of confirmation hearings is not to judge the capabilities or intelligence of the nominee, but to air out the tired clichés politicians know their constituencies ache for. It’s all such a damn circus.

And as I heard a conservative Senator with a put on Southern accent ramble about how she may not believe in the impartial rule of law, I did consider his words. His basic theory was that if you take into account your own personal experiences in large decisions, you are not being impartial and, for a judge, that means you are failing the law. To me, it seems like the absolute pinnacle of irrationality to even consider that anyone, from a scientist to a preacher to a judge, would ever truly achieve impartial overwatch of their own existence, let alone that of other people. That senator was being very stupid and irrational, and I found his authority a little worrisome.

That a senator would be incapable of understanding fairly simple truths related to the human condition was hardly my epiphany, though. It was this:

If we can only fail at impartiality, then justice is a flawed concept and totally nonexistent.

This bothers me. I have an ache in the deepest reaches of my psyche for justice. The unfairness of this world hurts me physically. It makes me sick to see failures inside the legal systems to fairly dole out justice, without regard to station, race, religion, etc. But nothing can be done.

It is a fundamental failure inside the human that destroys justice as any more that some nebulous Platonic ideal.

I guess the only solution is to kill all humans.

Luckily, I am a robot.

Anyone else?

In Blood

We stood across from each other in a stranger’s house.  Her eyes were glossing over and starting to shed a little.  Slight and blond and fragile.

And I swore to her.  To have. To hold.  Wealth, sickness, poverty, life, and death, all to her and through her until such time as I got a reprieve and was laid low in the cold.  All that I was, then.  All that I had, then.  It was all to be hers, and in exchange, I could take the same.  It was an oath, proctored by a Justice of the Peace a few days before I got on a C-130 and rumbled and screamed so far away.

We had dated each other a month.  It seemed so reasonable at the time.

And there was the other oath I took, standing at some approximation of attention, staring not into anyone’s eyes, but at a wood paneled wall covered in flags.  The flag of a nation I had never seen east of Oklahoma.  The flag of my Colorado.  The flags of services.  With one hand up, instead of one hand in hers, I swore to support and defend the Constitution, a document American children were at one time taught to revere as holy writ.  And I swore to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.  I would stand proudly and recite creeds and oaths, always hard faced and stoic and believing.  To support freedom and democracy around the world, like those gone before.  So pretentious and arrogant, but I was well suited to both.

And the object of the one oath, the sacred feminine and the love of whatever life I had then, was not worth it.  I knew as I was offering myself that it was not a transaction but a sacrifice.  Because that’s what men do.  They fight, they suffer, they are heroic.  And I knew as I was saying the words that she would let me down. I knew she would never live up to who I offered.  And in that, I was pretentious and arrogant.

But I stood there, and swore.  And someday, when all the world falls away and if there is in reckoning in the next world I create for myself, I can take pride, as humans do, in my self-inflicted suffering.  And when I am carried off by the last anoxic gray clouds of my body failing, I will find myself in some great hall of all my own stupidity and I may believe that anything I ever did was worth it.

But for now, it just makes me sad.

Until mile six.  And by mile seven, I forget about her.  Around mile eight, I forget about the other love who let me down, the bullshit administrative function of a nation. It’s just me and the trail and a set of broken in Brooks.  And I swear an oath to myself with every stride.  I offer upon the altar of all that I am that I will give the next step, the next mile, the next year, to myself.  To use or abuse or discard without thought.

So I breath the sun and rain and the blood of Jesus and John Henry in and push one more hill.  One more sprint. Until I am all that’s left in this world and my only obligation is that I stay alive long enough to wring every possible moment out of a life I don’t deserve and didn’t earn.

Then the beer.

Management

Wait, how long has it been since you guys put out a post?

About two weeks, but there were a few in queue.

So, no new content in two weeks?

About that.

About that?  How long has it been?

Three weeks.  Ish.

Ish.  Tell you what.  I’m going to seriously reevaluate your program, and you should warn your people that heads will roll.

Look, I know it seems like we’ve been less productive, but it’s hard to bring people into this style scheme.

Style scheme? Hyperbolous sentence fragments? Describing sage brush for three paragraphs? That’s a difficult style?

Well, there’s the over wrought metaphor and confusing dialog punctuation…

What dialog punctuation?!

I know!

Look.  It isn’t just you, I’m about to go light a fire under the comment leaving team.  We haven’t done more than peruse Google Reader in months.  This whole organization is in bad shape. Shit is rolling downhill and corporate wants to know that effort is being made in every one of those rathole cubicles down on the floor.  We need production.  This is not high literary art. This is a goddamn blog.  Not even a real blog.  There’s no news, there’s no gossip, there’s no current events of any kind.  It is just esoteric ramble and obscurata.  Get on it.  Or I’ll find someone who will.

Yes, sir.

Clear outta here, I have a meeting scheduled with Murray from the Flickr update department. That one isn’t going to be pretty either.

Yes, sir.

Hey.

Yeah?

You know I’m just doing my job getting on you, right?

I know, sir.

Knock that sir stuff off. We’re all just trying to keep our jobs. Make sure your people know that, OK?

Ok.

Lunch this week, sound good?

Yes, sir.

Good.