Art's world of the weird and wonderful

capthook - Nope, not Vandalay.

My mentor is a go-getter, take charge kinda guy. I'm a laid back, let the hard chargers charge away kinda guy. So, we get along., but I need to step up and start jumping on things before he does, and he needs to step back from his usual modus operandi and let me.

I've found it hard to sleep at times, but that's more to do with the schedule and body clock. I've driven long distances before, 20+ hrs straight, so recognize fatigue symptoms well. Eyes-won't-focus, borderline microsleeps, etc...
I tend to fight through it and catch a second wind, but that's not the safest thing to do. If/when your body decides to collapse, you won't have time to catch it, you'll just be in a ditch.

I try to limit myself to 1 smoke/hour - any more and the nicotine makes things worse. Coffee/caffeine is a kinda iffy thing too. Seems like it hurts as often as it helps. Of course at some point, you just need to stop, rest, stretch, etc...

Otherwise, I'm learning a lot about detention pay, weekend slack times, and how spoiled Californian's are for scenery.

 

Life at 62 mph often consists of vast stretches of the ordinary, interspersed with short bursts of the new and unfamiliar, and the occasional moments of recognition of things that lurk just below the threshold of awareness.

When I was little tyke, unbuckled and hopping over the seats in the station wagon, every highway exit held the promise of a McDonald's. A Holiday Inn with a swimming pool. A Texaco station with a bottled pop machine out front.

Those vast stretches of nothingness grow smaller every year. Now, it's a given to have at least one, if not two, mini-supermarkets at every exit, complete with your choice of everything from express tacos to pizza-to-go. Ten different versions of coffee, as opposed to a pot of Sanka at the Country Kitchen. Folks back then stopped and sat down out of necessity rather than by choice. A motel with 20 rooms was a Godsend.

But rolling slowly through towns, I came across one particular category of artifacts that I believed had gone the way of glass bottles and diners:

Rockets.

Are you too young to remember, or old enough to have forgotten, or, like me, were born in the space age and just sort of always took space travel for granted?

Rockets. Tall, shiny, sexy things that rumbled and shook and took off into the sky like a drawn-out, 30 minute orgasm.

Rockets. Missiles topped not with a nuke, but with a team of our best.

Not actual rockets, mind you, but real enough replicas to convince a toddler that he/she was climbing up into one to reach the slide at the top. Real enough to lift your town up from Bupkuss, Indiana to space age hip. Real enough to sell cars at the dealership.

Before the Space Shuttle made it mundane (mostly), rockets symbolized awe and risk and a can-do attitude we haven't seen since... "Top Gun".
Rockets were our "Born to Run" before Bruce Springsteen.
Little town ripping the bones from your back? Climb on, strap in, and shoot off. Or so we dreamed.

We couldn't know we'd not only not get astronauts beyond the moon, but not even get back TO the moon for the next forty years. Just having gotten that far made us believe we could do anything... anything... anything... echo... echo...

Major Tom is still sitting in his tin can. Rocket Man is holding Gabby's hand waiting for the last shuttle flight. What was a symbol of the future is now a symbol of the past, like roadside diners and glass pop bottles.

But just look at that thing. That almost skyscraper-tall, phallic-looking thing. Just waiting for you to countdown, light the fuse, and blast off to somewhere, anywhere but here. Any time but now. Whoosh.