Five Million Miles Away From Home

First item on the agenda: rumour of the day. Now that the fire ant nest has been disrupted, the fire ants are busy cleaning house and then they're on the march, looking not for hostages to take home but for vengeance. Killings home and abroad. Prisons are meant to keep people in so how many people does it take to break people out, especially along the border, to show that power is as mobile as the Peacekeeper or other intercontinental treaty trickers? I learned a long time ago that you don't stuff your mattress full of dough because the doughboys want all 200+ pieces of your pie. Best invest. Anybody want an overpriced piece of "art" now that the Windy City deal went bust as predicted?

Who sings the old song best, The Brothers Four, Bobby Bare, the Hooters, Nick Cave, or a different take by the Proclaimers?

Today's a popular day for allegories among the poplars. The Story of the Falling Tree Seed. The Time that Lightning Felled the Old Oak up the Hill. The Gully Washer of the Ages.

Folk songs. Easy lyrics. Simple melodies. On a bright, sunny morning, everyone sitting around the campfire, waiting on the breakfast to warm up, we sing a few tunes appropriate for the day. Kumbaya. Sing 'til the power of the Lord comes down. Scarborough Fair. He's Got the Whole World. Blowing in the Wind. Day by Day. Michael Row the Boat Ashore. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Waltzing Matilda. It's a Small World. Make New Friends. Gaelic Blessing.

One day we'll be sitting on Mars, gathered around the solar-powered heating system, eating our flavoured algae breakfast. Will we look up at the sky and shout with joy? Will be reminisce about the good ol' days on Earth? Will someone sing a revised version of being 500 miles away from home?

A journey of over 500 days begins with the thought that you're one of the chosen few to take the long ride across the chasm, no wagon trail, no dual carriageway, just you and a few companions. I would like to be one of you but I won't be. Envy is my companion. I'll sing a campfire song or two in your honour, whoever you end up being, whenever you decide to sign up for the adventure. The military forces of my country are always advertising their Earthbound adventures. Wouldn't it be more exciting to say you went where no one has gone before? Or even to have been a technician who worked on the equipment that went where our species had never laid foot?

Back in the 1980s, I worked on a contract for a company called Rocketdyne (I was a subcontractor working directly for a firm named Bizbing Enterprises/Butler Services). My job description included working on a CAD system because of my recent associate's degree that had an emphasis on CAD (this is back in the days of AutoCAD 1.o on desktop PCs, meaning my work at Rocketdyne in the basement of a Marshall Space Flight Center building was actually in a cold room on an Intergraph system loaded on a DEC mainframe VAX computer).

At the time, Rocketdyne was analysing the logic of the code in the space shuttle main engine controller because of the recent catastrophic accident of the Challenger and every company's scrutiny of their possible contribution to the accident. My job was relatively simple: take the handwritten logic flow diagrams from the engineers and draw them in CAD. Based on the skill set developed during my days with my secondary schoolmate when we handbuilt computers in our basement using the Intel 8080/8085 and RCA 1802 CPUs in the 1970s, I personally reviewed the logic as I drew the logic blocks, pointing out to the engineering manager the places where the logic didn't make sense to me. Also, because of my quick typing skills, I typed up engineering reports of the analysis, making grammar and formatting changes on the fly, leaving the concepts and ideas in place.

Have I ever flown on the space shuttle? Of course not. I'm not a pilot or a mission specialist. I'm just this regular guy who grew up in the suburban mazes of the southeastern portion of a political entity called the United States of America. Somewhere in the code in the box attached near the main engine of the space shuttle there might still remain the equivalent of an if...then statement I drew or pointed out was misplaced. That code has orbited the Earth countless times. My workmates designed the box for space hardness and wrote the code to control valves.

Happiness is what you make of what you do or have done. I am not a genius. I am not a trendsetter. I am me. I am happy to see the sunshine today and feel the solar heat on this cool day. I am happy to smell the burning wood of a campfire. I am happy to eat burnt toast and runny breakfast goo. I am happy to know I'll have a stiff neck and back from sleeping on the ground.

Somebody out there wants to be part of the space program, somebody in the Mongolian desert, somebody in the Australian outback, somebody in the Amazon forest, African plains, European forests and American suburbs. Life is about working together to accomplish goals beyond what any one of us can do.

I challenge anyone who might run into this blog to think about what you're doing. Are you caught up in the political gossip or rumourmonging or are you reaching outside of your insular life and asking others what we're doing?

Our species has accomplished goals unimaginable a century ago. We have so much more to accomplish than border squabbles or drug wars. But it takes every single one of us to make progress. Learn to laugh off your troubles. Or pray for guidance, if you need to. Whatever it takes to see we're the same species with a wide variety of individual lifestyles.

A part of me, in one form or the other, has circled the planet in near-Earth orbit. I hope that many of you get to see yourselves reach destinations that I can barely imagine, just like those who worked on the Voyager spacecraft never hoped their work would take them to the outer limits of the solar system.