An Attitude of Altoids At Altitude

Another character sketch filed into the morgue. This current book under wraps, under revision, in consideration, not a book that wants to tell a story easily. Deadends. Dead characters. Ghosts. Apparitions. Appellations.

While traveling the heavily conservative backroads of the not-so-common wealth of Virginia, passing through the burg of Lynch, host to the university-level learning dedicated to liberty, I found myself remembering my youth.

4-H Club trips. Popeyes/pdiddles - one-eyed cars (a missing or burned-out headlight) that add to kisses. Counting cows and losing your total when you pass a cemetery/graveyard. Hiking Mt. Rogers and Whitetop Mountain with my future wife, other fellow summer campers, Boy Scouts and Explorer Scouts.

Soon, all will feel different. A new smell in the air. Methane. Cow gas. Chicken droppings. Farm land as far as the eye can see from the road. Corn. Soybeans. Sorghum. Cotton.

The land of make-believe. Bales of hay rolling down the hill. Old barns propped on arthritic elbows, their time timed out.

Drinking beer in a German restaurant near Abingdon, where my father worked in a room in the Martha Washington Inn, now a luxury hotel suite, once home to the Virginia Tech Extension Office.

We remember well those we well remember. Mr. Douglas. A cute girl who went to Emory & Henry. 'Tis sweet to be remembered, isn't it?

How do we define living? With these words? Not at all. With the argument about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Hardly.

We cannot define living. Living defines us. We do not think. We react. We shake, rattle and roll into the next second.

These. Thebes. Thesis.

If you want to live forever, then don't pay attention to time. Pay attention to change. Phases. Shifts. Movement. You have a limited number of heart muscle movements before you die - count on it. To live forever, you must lose heart.

While traveling, I lost contact with my friend the inventor. This afternoon, snugly secure in my portable cocoon, I checked in on my friend's progress. On my friend's website was the sign, "Out To Launch." Huh? So I checked email where my friend detailed the reason for being unavailable. Turns out my friend's invention is a miniaturised rocket ship. Or rather, a rocket ship that miniaturises you and takes you where you want to go. Even using the phrase rocket ship is incorrect but best to describe the vehicle or transportation device.

I haven't seen this thing yet myself so the simplified version is all I can offer you. You, or what you think of as you, enter a chamber. Inside the chamber, a set of instruments record your vital signs, determining your physical health. Upon meeting the health status criteria my friend has set forth, you and all the states of energy passing through you at the moment are temporarily slowed down and measured for how they react to one another. After measurement, the chamber transforms the interacting states of energy into a compressed version of themselves ("zipped up" in computer parlance), creating a smaller, boxed-up version of yourself. That version is then scanned and saved and stored in the "rocket ship." Every version stored on the rocket ship merges with all the other versions, which become part of the rocket ship, too.

The rocket ship has a propulsion system but I'm not smart enough to describe it to you. When (or if) my friend returns from a test trip, I'll get my friend to tell you more about how the rocket ship travels. My friend has claimed in the past that we need not worry about escaping Earth's gravitational pull if we construct a device that simply disappears, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, I sit here and watch us child-like bipeds think we're grownups just because we can accumulate facts, trinkets and wealth. Soon we'll find out just how young we truly are. Like infants. And after that, seven billion people will have a single goal in mind after all. Amazing, isn't it, looking back at our brief foray into the ebb and flow of civilisation creation and seeing how many mistakes we let become central facts of our existence?

I hope I can find my friend and let you know what I'm talking about. If not...well, in that case, carry on. Most of you won't know the difference, anyway. I almost didn't and it would have let me pursue a "normal" life in our intertwined societies, always worrying about the price of eggs in China or a barrel of oil in Saudi Arabia. Now, I don't worry. I laugh. I explore. I feed my curiosity, knowing how much more there is to discover than what one mere planet can offer. Some of you already know what I'm talking about. Some of you, like me, celebrate. Some of you try to stifle the truth. Some try to take advantage of their fellow species. The truth won't set you free - the truth simply makes you more like yourself, good, bad, or diffident.