The things I think about: tasty humans

This is an idea I had years ago that I wrote up, but didn’t do anything with.  I think I wanted to do a series of these blogs, but never wrote any more and this just got buried under all my other half-finished blog posts.  I recently discovered it, and figured I might as well use it.

I think this is a really weird idea and someone – possibly me if I ever get around to it – could make a good story out of it.  But here goes.  What if, one day these aliens (We’ll call them Aliens X) show up and announce that after scanning a human with some medical device, they believe these other aliens (Aliens Y) would find humans tasty.  Aliens X would then ask if they could purchase some human meat to sell to Aliens Y to see if they find it pleasant and would like some more.  Now Aliens X are not evil.  They don’t want to gather up humans in their prime and send them to a slaughterhouse, all they are asking for are medical waste and donated corpses.  What I was thinking about, was if Aliens Y do find human a delicacy, would people sign contracts so that when they die, Aliens X would pay their families so many Galactic Credits per pound?  Would there be a market?  Would you sign up for it?

Jim Trump? Donald Jones?

A couple of months ago, when I stopped for gas, I saw that someone had put a sticker on the pump, and someone else had ripped most of it off.  When I saw it, my first thoughts were, Why did someone make a sticker of Jim Jones and stick it on a gas pump?  Then, after a few seconds of thought and with the help of a second sticker that had different parts of it ripped off, I figured out it had been a sticker of Trump as the Terminator saying, “I’ll be back.” I groaned, and pumped my gas.  I didn’t think to get a picture of it.  The last time I got gas, I ended up at that same pump, and I did take a picture of the sticker, with a bit more of it ripped off.

Apparently, unknown to the magats, if you put sunglasses on Trump, he looks like a notorious cult leader.  Of course, Trump without sunglasses is a notorious cult leader.

He is a real cat

I live on the small farm I grew up on, and for the majority of the last forty-some years, we’ve had barn cats.  Basically, we feed them, but we hope they supplement their cat food with mice.  Well, our last cat had died and we’d gone without a barn cat for a year or so, when one night two or three years ago our dog was barking up a tree.  With my flashlight I saw a strange cat up the tree.  I took our dog in and told my dad there was a cat around.  Over the next few weeks we saw it a couple more times, so we started leaving food out for it.  And over a couple of months, it got used to us enough that we could pet it.  My dad managed to pick it up and see it was a boy cat, so my mom gave him the name Tommy.

We don’t know where he came from.  It’s possible someone didn’t want to him anymore so they dumped out in the country, it’s hard to say.  He is friendly, and will rub up against our legs, or our dog, but other times he’ll be real skittish. 

At first, we fed him in the barn, but we eventually moved to feeding him in one of our sheds.  It’s closer to the house and easier to get to in bad weather, not to mention far less drafty than our old barn.  He has some boxes and old pillows to sleep.  We also keep some chicken feed in the shed, and we hoped he’d keep mice out of it, but it turns out he isn’t much of a mouser.

Anyway, around last summer he started disappearing for a day or two.  I figured he was just trying to find a girlfriend.  These disappearances happened maybe once a month or so, and usually only a day or two.  Back around the beginning of December, he was away for three or four days.  I was starting to get a bit worried, when one night I went to get some chicken feed and he was back, but with a bit of a limp.  So I gave him extra food, and hoped he’d stay where it was dry and warm and heal up, especially since we were supposed to get a storm that night.  But the next morning he was gone. 

Some two weeks later, without seeing him at all, I feared the worse.  Well, I think it might have been December 31st, I went to feed our chickens.  But we were very low on chicken feed, and I figured I could stretch it out a couple days with this quarter of a bag of cat food we had no use for.  I got a full scoop of the cat food and went out.  The chickens all gathered around me, so I sprinkled a bit out, then went to throw some potato skins into our compost pile.  When I came back a minute later to put the rest of the cat food in for the chickens, there was Tommy walking across our driveway, without any limp.  I called him and he came running, and I put the food in for him.  As he ate, I told him he must be a real cat: he found out I was giving away his food so he came back.

Later, I found out that my dad had seen him a couple of times in those two weeks.  We don’t know if someone else was feeding him, because he seems a bit fatter, but for some reason he must prefer staying on our farm.

A black and white cat sleeping on a sunny day in the fall.

Random Story – The train snuck up on me

This is just an odd little story from my life.  And there’s a bit of backstory to get to the story.

I grew up on a farm and one of my favorite things to do was to go for a walk around the pasture to just let my mind wander and to think on things.  But I could only do this during the day because, well, pastures can be uneven and filled with things you don’t want to step in.  This wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m also a bit of a night owl, and there are plenty of nights I would have liked to wander and think on things.  So when I went to college, I was happy to find these things called sidewalks.  I would often head out late at night to wander around town.

At one point in my wanderings, I came across this intersection of a couple quiet streets.  The memory of the desk scene from Dead Poets Society came to mind about looking at things from a different perspective.  I had crossed many streets, but I’d never stopped in the middle to look around, or stood in the middle of an intersection.  So I did, and it does give an odd view of the world.  As I said, these were quiet streets, and the few times a car did turn my way, I had plenty of time to get out of the way, so I was never in any danger.

A few years later, I got an apartment in a town I’d never been to before.  A few blocks down from my apartment, there was a train track.  One block over there was a bridge over the track, and a couple of times I managed to be there right when a train went below me, which was interesting in its own way.  Now, this wasn’t a main track, I think it might have just been a sideline that went to a factory, or something, so there was only one or two trains of maybe a dozen cars a week.  Not being a busy train track, they didn’t have gates to block the road.  Meaning, whenever a train came through, it came to a stop, and the police or maybe just the conductor on the train would make sure traffic stopped and then the train would slowly go through the intersection.  I think I only saw how they did it once or twice, and this was over twenty years ago, so my memory on this detail is a little fuzzy.

Anyway, not long after I moved, I went for a walk late at night.  I went over the bridge, and went down a block or so, before turning and heading back up the street my apartment was on.  At some point during this, I remembered standing in the middle of an intersection, and I realized I’d never stood in the intersection of a road and a train track.  Now, this street wasn’t so quiet, so as I walked towards the intersection, I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure no cars were coming.  I walked out into the street, and stopped in the middle of the road and the middle of the train track.  I looked down the street the way I had come for a few seconds, then turned ninety degrees to the right and looked up the tracks.  After a few seconds, I turned ninety degrees and looked up the street.  A few seconds later, I turned ninety degrees and THERE’S A FUCKING TRAIN FIFTY FEET FROM ME!

About thirty seconds later, once my heartbeat had slowed to somewhat normal, I just started laughing.  The train was parked there, it wasn’t going anywhere.  The reason I hadn’t noticed it, walking up the streets, was because I kept checking over my shoulder for cars, and there was a building that blocked just enough of the view that you couldn’t see the train until you were almost at the tracks.

So I got a good laugh out of the train that snuck up on me.  And that’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to giving myself a heart attack.

Random Story – Three quick stories

These are just three, odd little stories from my life.

Serial Killer

Years ago, I showed up to the apartment of the woman I was dating at the time, and she told me that she had been watching some daytime talk show and the topic was something like, “Ten signs your child may grow up to be a serial killer.” She said I had nine of the signs.  I almost asked, “What am I missing?” but I knew better. 

Honestly, this shouldn’t be taken seriously.  First off, I’m a white male, so that’s probably two signs right there.  Not to mention she was the type that once she thought something, just about no amount of evidence would convince her otherwise.  I’m sure if I had asked her what signs I had, probably five or six of them wouldn’t be true or would be taken waaaay out of proportion.

Would you lie to me? 

In my senior year of high school, we got class rings.  (I don’t know if schools still do that or not.  At the time they seemed important, but mine is probably in a box in the attic.  If I had to guess, I’d say the last time I saw it was probably twenty-some years ago when I came across it cleaning.)  Anyway, this one friend of mine would take his ring off in study hall and leave it on his desk.  When he wasn’t looking, another friend would grab it and start passing it around.  I sat at the end of the row, and I usually ended up with it.  This happened day, after day, after day.  One day, our friend snagged the ring and started passing it around, but I DID NOT END UP WITH IT.  But this guy told the teacher that I had his ring.  So she asked, “Steve, do you have Guy’s ring?” I honestly replied, “No.” She then asked, “Would you lie to me?” After a second or so, I honestly answered, “Yeah.” One of our friends – who I think did have the ring – almost fell on the floor laughing.  The teacher wasn’t sure what to say to that. 

Killing time

Over twelve years ago, I worked in a lab for a company that made industrial lubricants.  Sometimes, I’d run tests that took twenty or so minutes to set up, and then they’d run for an hour and there wasn’t anything I could do while they ran.  So I ended up with a lot of free time.  One of the things I’d do to kill time, was go to the store room to “get supplies.”

In the store room there were a bunch of plastic binding strips that had been used on the packaging just laying around.  Out of boredom, I started weaving these into the holes on the metal shelves.  

As you can see, I still have pictures of these.  I did this over several months, and as far as I know nobody ever mentioned it.  I wonder if they’re still there.

Where I stand on things

The idea for this blog began, like, five years ago.  It all started when a guy I used to be friends with and I had arguments on Facebook.  Basically, the way I somewhat jokingly put it, since I didn’t believe the current practice of capitalism wasn’t the bestest, most perfectest thing in the universe, I was just a dirty socialist who wanted to use the dark arts to resurrect Stalin.  At some point I realized that many of our disagreements stemmed from him just assuming my position on matters.  I didn’t agree with him, therefore I must think X, when in reality I’d often think Q.  And I didn’t fully understand his position on matters, but a large part of that was him refusing to tell me, even after I repeatedly asked him to.  Admittedly, part of why I wanted to nail down some of his positions was so I could point out any contradictions I could find.  I figured all of this out about the time he unfriended me.

Of course, part of why my positions on things aren’t easy to understand is because I don’t hold to some grand philosophy which dictates my views.  I know a couple of times he’d call me something like a, Ramsey-style neo-socialist, or something, and I’d have Google that to see what that even meant.  And often, I’d have to look up the explanation to see what it meant.  Decades ago, I noticed that people were rarely just X.  They were often X, subsection 3, paragraph VII, or whatever.  Which isn’t so bad, but often the X, 3, VIIs will see the X, 3 VIs as “The same as Hitler.” It seems so many disagreements – especially amongst those you’d think would be allies – are just battles over minutiae. 

So I’ve pretty much abandoned trying to explain myself in some neat, little box with fourteen layers of description.  Instead, my … ideology I guess, is summed up with stuff that would fit on a bumper sticker.  Which is probably annoying in that instead of having a solution for a specific problem, I’m more likely to wonder why that problem exists in the first place.  Or, I’ll want to solve some other problem that, two or three dominoes later, solves or greatly reduces the original problem. 

I’ve spent some time trying to explain that better, only to get more and more in the weeds or just sounding pretentious, so let’s move on.  These are the bumper sticker sayings that best explain my views on … life in general.

No ideology is perfect.

A sad moment was when I realized my former friend was an ideologue, because I view ideologues as … basically idiots.  The way to defeat an ideologue is to show that their ideology isn’t perfect.  If there was a perfect ideology, it would obviously be perfect and there wouldn’t be any questions about it.  No such perfect ideology exists, therefore, ideologues are defeated.  No matter how great your ideology is, there is a flaw in it that you conveniently overlook.

A year or so ago, I came up with the idea that in the Race of History, backing any ideology – be it capitalism or Catholicism – is backing the wrong horse.  The Racetrack of History is littered with dead ideologies, from feudalism to the Ancient Egyptian religion.  Why should the horses still running have a different fate?  I’d say it’s better to back the racetrack, the bedrock of reality.

And yes, I realize how stupid it is of me to say my ideology is that no ideology is perfect.  That’s the flaw I’m overlooking.

People are people.

I don’t care what skin color, gender identity, sexual identity, whatever identity you have, humans should all be treated like humans.  Admittedly, some humans are assholes, and I do my best to avoid/ignore them.  And while I will say I hate some groups of people, what I mean is I hate their ideology.  If pressed on the matter, what I really am is often just confused and saddened that so many people can’t see how idiotic/repugnant their ideology is: Flat-Earthers and Trump supporters, for example.  If they changed their ideology and stopped being assholes, I’d no longer hate them. 

Meaning is where you find it.

I think it was back in my college years, one day I was thinking about clones and wondering at what point in the cloning process could you “abort” the clone.  My clumsy answer to that evolved my stance on abortion.  I did write a blog a couple years ago with some of my thoughts on abortion, which explains things a bit more.  But the point of this is that my understanding of a real-world issue was changed by me probably thinking about the plot of some mediocre scifi story.  It’s often the little, personal, things that change us the most.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

This is basically my economic philosophy.  Would this policy help the poorest not be as poor?  Good.  Would this policy make the richest even richer?  They don’t fucking need it.

Probably a lot of people readily agree with that, but for those who don’t, let me give you an example.  I’m a writer with ebooks for sale.  For people to buy my ebooks, several dominoes need to fall.  They have to read English, have an interest in the types of stories I’m telling, have access to the internet, and to have enough disposable income to buy my books and enough free time to read them.  The people who have to work 80 hours a week just to buy food, even if they’d love my books, can’t afford to buy them.  So if the minimum wage was raised, that would increase the number of people who could afford to buy my ebooks.  And if I made enough money from my ebooks sales, I could afford to buy things I wanted.  All of which would make for a stronger economy. 

Do not knowingly harm others.

Our technology is evolving faster than our laws that govern the use of that technology.  Thinking about this, I realized that either we’ll continue making more specialized laws that will likely be outdated by the time the politicians get around to voting on them, or we could try simplifying our laws to broadly cover situations.  I wondered what the broadest, most simplistic law there could be, and I came up with: Do not knowingly harm others.  I thought that was a pretty good answer, until I started thinking about it.  What actually counts as harm?  Big things like murder and rape are clearly bad, but what about hurting someone’s feelings?  Years ago, an ex-girlfriend broke my heart.  Yes, that’s a part of life, but she did it in a way that left scars that, honestly, still haven’t healed.  She chose to do some things, even though a reasonable person would know I would be hurt by them.  If this law was in effect, could I take her to court?

Art is never finished, only abandoned. 

That is a line attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci.  And as a writer who’s read a story forty times and will still occasionally find a typo, I think that’s a perfect description of art.

Thoughts on Starship

I typed this up and scheduled it to post just before Starship’s second test flight.

My thoughts on Starship?  Meh.

I was extremely excited in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to put a payload into orbit on their Falcon 1 rocket.  As a big space supporter, I saw this as the first step on the road to the space future I’d been dreaming about.  I figured it was just a matter of maybe a decade or so before we’d see private rockets launching private astronauts to private space stations.  I was super excited for the future.

I was a bit bummed when the Falcon 1 was retired, but the Falcon 9 would be a better rocket to launch people on.  And the first fights were of the cargo Dragon capsules which would lead the way to crewed Dragons.  So I was still super excited.

Now, I know that the space business isn’t known for speed.  That it takes years to design, and build, and test craft long before they even launch.  But even knowing that, there were some unnerving things with SpaceX.  At some point, I read that they had contracts to launch 60 satellites in the next five years, which works out to a launch a month.  At the time, that was a pretty tough launch cadence.  But at the time, they had launched only five or six times in a year.  And sometime in this “They need to speed things up” thinking, they started making changes to the booster and the fueling.  Which is great, but for awhile it seemed about every mission was delayed because they had issues with the densified fuel.  As an armchair rocket person, I wondered why they didn’t just build five or six of the boosters they knew worked to keep launching satellites to get through their backlog, and to give them some time to work on their new boosters on the side.  And I’m sure there are a hundred reasons not to have done it that way, but from the outside looking in it seemed like a missed opportunity to keep the launch cadence up while still experimenting.

Still, these experiments lead to boosters being recovered and launched again, and again.  Reusable rockets are fantastic.  They are a clear necessity to the space future I want.  And yes, now it’s a slow week if only one Falcon 9 launches, but most of the flights are for Starlink.  Don’t get me wrong, space internet is a great idea, but far from the private space stations and moon bases and stuff I’ve been waiting for for … over a decade now. 

And yes, the cargo Dragon got upgraded to a Crew Dragon, and they are flying astronauts to the ISS and to orbit, but I read they stopped building Crew Dragons.  Which I don’t understand.  There are people who will pay to orbit the Earth, and I’m sure there are friendly nations who would love to have missions with their astronauts, and someday there will be private space stations needing craft to carry crew to.  And again, as someone from the outside looking in, it’s like, “You have something that’s working, why aren’t you continuing with it?”

To step back a bit, there’s the Falcon Heavy.  Which, when it was announced, I was thrilled by.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, and surely the Falcon Heavy could land rovers or cargo to start building up a moon base.  But then, it will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  And it finally launched, but then we only had like four launches in five years.  Now, I understand it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse of why build a satellite needing this much lift if a rocket capable of that lift isn’t flying yet.  But we’re coming up on six years since Elon’s car was launched.  And yes, we’ve had four flights this year, with one more scheduled.  But it almost feels like they spent all this time to build this big rocket, and then found it hard to find things to launch with it.  Which seems like a bit of a misstep. 

And now to Starship.  After years of waiting for the Falcon Heavy, I knew not to get too excited for this even bigger, more complex rocket.  And after all this time, I don’t really care.  Like, either it will be like the Falcon Heavy and start to hit its stride four or five years from now, in which case I might be more excited, or it will hit its stride in a year or two by launching Starlinks.  What would get me excited is if they announced a plan to launch Starship with an expendable upper stage so they could put this Skylab type space station up.  That I would like.  But nothing else about Starship seems that exciting.  Yes, there’s the Human Landing System for Artemis 3 and 4, but what happens beyond that?  Will it just be for those missions, or will there be more to build up a private moon base?  You’d think, if they had the systems to land people on the moon, why not continue to do that?  But I’ll point out, they apparently stopped building Crew Dragons.

What is the future of Starship, and of SpaceX?  They’ve pretty much stopped talking about Mars, which I always found annoying.  (I mean, I am the author of The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.) But is their future just … Starlink?  It’s tough to get excited for this big rocket if I don’t really care what it will be used for.  It’s like, even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I don’t really care for the SLS.  Because I want a continual, sustained presence on the moon, and a billion-dollar rocket that launches once a year, maybe, isn’t how you do that.  And I don’t know if Starship will do that.  Honestly, at this point I’m more excited for New Glenn, only because, while I don’t know what they’ll do with it, it doesn’t have as much baggage as Starship or SLS. 

I think all of this comes down to me being tired of waiting.  I think there are to be fourteen missions that will go to or flyby the moon in 2024.  Seven of these will launch on Falcon 9s, two on Falcon Heavies, and one on Starship.  And even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I’m not overly excited.  Probably because for decades I’ve heard plans on moon bases, but all have fallen through.  When the next humans land on the moon, I will be happy, but there will a bit of dread in the back of my mind that it will be another Apollo Program where we stop going after a couple of missions.  I don’t think I’ll feel like the future is finally here until there is a permanently crewed Lunar base.  Will Starship play a role in that?  Who knows.