A Toy Life

Upon what do you focus your thoughts? This morning I finished reading the Maya Angelou book I bought the other day, having completed E.M. Cioran's book a day or so ago. In the news this morning I saw that Frank McCourt died during the weekend.

Right now, I charge a pack of NiMH batteries to use in a remote-controlled, electric-motor powered, RTF (Ready To Fly) glider that can climb close to 1000 m. I flew the glider often many years ago, letting the winds aloft and the loss of remote control drift the plane far away so I'd have to search for it - something in me wanted to give the plane a life and set it free, I guess. One day, I flew the plane as high as I could get it with the controller and let it go, determined not to look for it. A few weeks later, while flying a second plane, a man returned my plane to me - it just couldn't get free.

At the time that I and others played with these "park flyers," I created a website, Research Park Flyers, which will disappear in October per news from Yahoo that Geocities will close down in the fall.

These days, kids are playing with indoor sport flyers that can hover, twist, make box turns and carve other creative flying patterns that take virtuality out of video gaming and place it in your hands. The military, too, takes RC flying to other playing fields, launching UAVs to observe and participate in wargames, using technology beyond my budgetary dreams.

So, while new development makes hobbies smaller and cheaper, with battery packs changing from NiMH to LiPo to ???, I pull out my old early 21st century flying gear to be a grownup kid again on this relatively cool summer day in mid-July.

I saw a moving picture show a while back in which a man transformed from his humble middle-class life to the life of a wealthy man who owned a collection of rare, vintage automobiles. The man still carried his humble dreams in his head so he built a plastic model of one of the antique cars he owned. His wife and/or his butler didn't understand why he got more pleasure from assembling the scale model than from driving the real thing.

I suppose many of us are made of plastic, aren't we, with our toys and our humble dreams? I've concluded that's what separates me from others, in that the dreams I mold are just as good or even better than reality. My imaginary worlds have more richness, less dirt, more fun, less boredom, easier fixes, fewer ambiguities, and reversible time. I don't have to wait for consensus to be made, committees to form or arguments to be settled. I can be young or old, healthy or sick, everything all at once or nothing. I can be a materialistic, nihilistic futurist and a bifurcating combinationalist, if I want.

I don't know what or if any of that has to do with putting food on the table, perhaps contributing to why I'm as frugal (or cheap) as I tend to be. However, I am a toy man, pliable and poseable, living in a toy world. It's a wonderful toy life. Time to play!