103018 here it is whatever time it is and i’m a doing my thing. my face stares back out at me from the black of the computer screen. so what. it’s a black mirror. remember when we used to use black legos as mirrors in our lego houses? because they were shiny and the most reflective of all legos? I think it was Chris’s idea but it may have been Bryan’s. I didn’t get it at first; I was like, black? For a mirror? But that’s stupid! Mirrors are like the opposite of black! And so they are; and so maybe that’s why they work. Oooooooh, deeeeeeep. Symbolism or something. She wears a pink hat. OK I get it, it’s symbolism. But anyway. Do you see how easy it is to veer away from anything meaningful, genuine, scary, vulnerable, painful, thoughtful, emotional, or real? Yes. Veer veer veer. We’re all taught how to veer as kids. Girls or boys, we all get veering lessons sooner or later. Boys are taught to veer by driving their metal yellow Tonka trucks over the gravel, away across the yard to somewhere where they can just hang out, swim in the grasshopper puddle under some wildflowers and weeds, hang out, have a juice with your buddies and talk shit about your old man. Girls are taught to veer by carefully constructing a doll house version of the real deep scary things we’re all veering away from, and then making the dolls deal with it. Right? No, that’s too stupid. It’s not that simple, this gender disparity thing. What is this, 1953? Trucks and dolls, really? That’s the best you can come up with? Yeah, I know. I was just messing around. But still. There may be some truth to it. And that’s good enough folks! In this “day and age,” “there may be some truth to it” is all we get; it’s all that passes for science or humanities or literature or-- medicine, even? But not space exploration. That’s one thing that might still happen, because our weird globalist-capitalist-nationalist feudalism has given birth to a handful of weird hyper-rich guys that have the keys to the spaceships, and they’re testing them out even now. My question is, who’s going to be invited? Who’s going to be included? When it was NASA and the government and JFK and all this unity and school spirit and stuff, we all at least got party favors from the moon. But this new way? There’s no regulations. There’s no promises except, “let’s see what happens when insanely rich guys with more money than sense get to build hobby rockets big enough to carry people right the fuck out of the solar system.” Let’s just see what happens. We have little choice but to place our faith (assuming that faith is associated with space exploration, which I mean if it isn’t, then what the hell *is?)* in the random vicissitudes of unpredictable outsider genius capitalist hero-gods, and just “see what happens.” OK. OK. OK. I guess I’m OK with that. I’ll just be chillin alongside Broadway in my plywood shack--hey, I got REAL NAILS holding this shit together, can you imagine!--watching the streaks of the rockets trail balzin orange and red magenta and black as a bruise across the sky. Good old fashioned ingenuity and hubris, lashing the sky into welts, leaving stripes like a good top, fuck consent; does the atmosphere need to give enthusiastic consent? Does Mars have a safe word? No one’s safe from us mad genius apes; not even ourselves. Yeah so me and my buds we’ll just be kickin back here on the sidewalk right outside my plywood shack, drinkin a juice and listenin to the grasshoppers in the empty field across the street where the movie theatre used to be. I’m a little, hey did you know that I’m actually a little bit of a celebrity around these parts, myself! Yeah, I’m like one of the few people who’s actually got a domicile made of something semi-permanent, in a location that the cops haven’t been bored enough to come into and smash everything up yet. So my buds, me peeps, we tend to hang out here. You can come too. You’re just in time for the launch. Here, you can have my chair. Watch out cuz the left armrest is broken, so hold your drink with your right hand. Man, look around you, breathe it in! Once you step up from cardboard and plastic tarps, man, you never wanna look back! Any minute now, that crazy mother fucker’s gonna ride his newest biggest rocket across the pale blue sky. He’s gonna whip the SHIT outta that sky, man! We gonna sit here and watch as he rides that badass motherfucker right across the skyline, out over the bay; we gonna see him straddling that motherfucker, holdin on with one hand and wavin his big old cowboy hat with the other, goin WOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! and there he goes! Look, man, put down that pipe and fuckin look at this shit, would you! There he goes! There we go! There goes humanity! Man, we are something else! Ain’t nobody nowhere safe from us! Look out galaxy, here we come! Look, man, I’m tearing up a little here; would you just LOOK at what we can accomplish when we put our minds to it. Hey man, is there any place to take a shit around here? I mean there’s a porta potty around the corner by the demolition site, but last I checked it was pretty nasty. You’re not gonna wanna go in there unless you’re TRULY desperate, know what I’m sayin?