His Last Day In The Desert

Wouldn't this be a drag?

Part 21 of 31

They Found Another Body

There’s something about the human mind, always thirsting for knowledge, always exploring, looking to see what’s beyond the next horizon. Which I discovered a long time ago when we were out horizon hunting; what’s over the next horizon is always the next horizon. Nature has ‘em lined up as far as the eye can see, then farther. Everywhere you go it’s the same old thing, underwater, cross country, interstellar space. In space it’s freaky, you get somewhere, take a couple pictures, then you’re off to the next place, 4 million years in the future. I can only imagine the deep depression of people spending multiple generations -- a thousand generations! -- in a spaceship. Heading light-years away, how horrible.

Crawling through the desert would be like that, and even though that's an earthly thing it's still beyond what I’d allow for myself. Daily life is bad enough, I don’t want it any worse, putting the pedal to the metal of desperation, crawling like a baby across the hot sands, watching like a hawk for the albatross or whatever's out there just waiting to pick the meat off your bones. The best thing you could do is get on one side of a big rock, then let the shadows give you some shade. Keep a rock between yourself and the sun, hopefully with a canteen to sip from every few minutes so you wouldn’t have to die till tomorrow. Then traveling at night. In this scene he seems to have collapsed on top of a rock, maybe the hottest spot there is. And perished. Just as well, unless he just missed civilization by a bit.

Death is an interesting thing. It’s always watching for us at the extremes of life, then it springs like a trap. This guy in the desert, he thought he was up for real adventure, something to tell his grandchildren about. Or it could’ve been he wanted to write an article for an outdoors magazine about how to survive the unsurvivable! I’ve listened to enough warnings about the sun and a summer day and hydration and sunscreen, and on and on and on … that I know the real purpose of life is this, hide somewhere where the weather’s perfect lest you die.

So I stay in a lot. We used to worry whether we had a tan, all that. No more. The house is shut up, the fans are on, sometimes the AC. If it weren’t for dogs not knowing how to use the bathroom we’d never leave. You can have your groceries delivered now, which they did 100 years ago but we got away from it until relatively recently. But we always want to go outside. I don’t know why entirely. Gives us a little break from the same four walls probably. Just like being in prison. If you were in prison, you’d say, “O to crawl across that field!” And that would indeed be a pleasant break. “Or that desert. How much better my crime would’ve been to make a heist on a plane, then parachuted into an endless hot desert!” Just the ticket.

Another thing I don’t know about life is how long it takes to die in the desert. We’ve seen so many cartoons of the guy crawling across the desert, but they never answer the questions we’re really interested in. We always see skeleton heads as one of the desert props, but we don’t know the timetable on death and becoming nothing more than a skeleton head. They could’ve covered that in school but they didn’t know either.

They Blew Up Outer Space

No. 14 of 30 -- Psycho Squad

At this point it’s only science fiction. And if I and the Psycho Squad have anything to say about it, that’s the way it’ll stay. They don't call me Kibosh for nothing. But, friends, even I might need your help. There have been few other catastrophes affect me this deeply, the terrible feeling that all things could be wiped out in my lifetime. I used to play at the city dump, bashing in the screens of old TVs and shooting rats with a bow and arrow. The town shut the whole thing down and told us to get the hell out. This is like that, traumatic.

So here it is, this dreaded limbo of threats and negotiations with every eye on space. Just thank your lucky stars nothing's happened yet. And I hope to hang an alien that’s how it stays. But the threat is real, and actually has every indication of not being aliens but our own species. It's ridiculous, Earthlings that far off the beam?! Haven’t they learned at some point in their pathetic lives “Live and let live”? Anyone that far off the beam, where are their values?

Certainly we must not put anything past them. One, a destructive urge like that is pathological. With my training, I should know; I aced the Destructive Urges test, not because I’m destructive — I’m not — I’m so anti-destructive I could spit. Complete destruction is never called for, with perhaps the sole exception of destroying anyone who would dare attempt it. Only then are destructive urges warranted. Because there can be no tolerance. We must declare it the highest priority and seal the deal for our existence, the planets, the stars, etc., with no mercy for those who'd threaten the system, our system, solar, stellar, or whatever.

Just thinking of someone like that, so far gone... I'll expound on it. What a craven urge! These are psychos that should not be helped, only destroyed. And no one will hold me back! Unless — and this is theoretical — they could be somehow captured and brought to justice, the sternest judgment, perhaps the death penalty or dealt with therapeutically. But let's say the situation is literally as portrayed above, where they’ve already destroyed the stars and half the sun. They themselves would need to be blown out of space. We would have to act preemptively, long before they unleashed more chaos than we could sweep up.

The Psycho Squad will never advocate for anyone that far gone. Maybe, yes, theoretically we’re sworn to help. But that far gone? No! That's beyond the pale, no hope. Just write them off. If they'd cause that much misery, that much destruction, they’re gone, history, out of here. I don’t shock easily — I like easy days, and fatalities per se don't bother me — but this level of wickedness, these depths of depravity sap the last of my tolerance. It's gone in a heartbeat.

First, though, and I hope this puts things in a more optimistic light, there seems to be some bluster at hand. We don't know how many stars there are precisely, but it's in the billions. And they’re pretty far scattered. No one could destroy all the stars except Nature itself if they all just collapsed on each other. And whether it’d be possible to destroy half the sun, I also don't know that for sure. It sounds far fetched. It'd have to be a perfect hit to destroy half, a payload right down the shute, boom! Instant half of a black hole. 

So there's some hope. But any psychos that attempt such a thing — whether humans in space or some other scurrilous alien breed — need to be dispatched. The local chapter of the Psycho Squad, for which I speak authoritatively, decries all such threats, plans, and deeds. We offer only censure and condemnation to the perpetrators.

Trash-Talking The Sun

I got on this kick against the sun a few years ago, after a friend and I were airing our grievances about life. He thought he was big and tough because he personally hated nearly everything, asparagus, broccoli, elephants, and pinochle. At that time I had a few of the ordinary grievances to match him -- decks of cards missing the jokers, squash, reruns, and anyone named Lipfshitz. There's something wrong there.

In terms of who hated stuff the most, it was fairly even. Till I pulled out the wildcard, which was, "Despite our many years of deep, warm friendship -- we've been there for each other through thick and thin, good times and bad, trouble and blessing -- I've come to a conclusion that I feel it's safe to announce -- to confess, if you will -- that I think YOU suck, and probably always have. We became 'friends,' of a sort. But there was always something about you that stuck in my craw. Now I've dislodged it and can tell you without further explanation or equivocation, that, as of this moment (and probably at some level for the whole time I've known you), I hate you." He took back his little stack of DVDs, he dropped off my pup tent, and that's been it. Giving me another reason to despise squash, because it's his favorite food -- his mom still makes her old recipe on his birthday, I've heard.

After I lost his friendship, you could say I spiraled out of control. Like a pinball in a pinball machine -- that's an accurate image -- I bounced from one thing to another, never able to settle on any one thing. With a hatred of life in general so vast, so profound, so definitely spelled out that even the sight-deprived could read it clearly. There were interventions, attempted, all of which I rejected, by then acting in complete spite, but digging my own ditch deeper and deeper yet, till I was so deep and alone all I could glimpse was sunlight itself. Showing nothing, illuminating nothing, except the walls of that trench, or ditch, if you will.

There in the ditch, trench, or pit -- it was sort of like the pictures you see from World War I, men in a ditch, trench, pit, or hole. Doing whatever. Well, guess what. Looking at the sunlight, I came to hate it too. It'd pass overhead quickly, but slowly enough that I could shake my fist and essentially tell it it had low marks in my book. I'd see it in the summer months more, in the winter months not as much. It started my thought processes to make sense of it. What's supposedly 'bigger and badder' than the sun?; we've all heard that. But it couldn't hold its own against winter?

Now I had something bigger to hate, the stinking sun. And I let it know. In no uncertain terms. Don't get on my bad side or you'll live to regret it. Everyday I had another complaint. "You're the almighty sun, but you can't dispel a few clouds on earth?" "You're the sun, but what? You feel like burning us to a crisp? Well, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And you've got a day of judgment a'coming, and we'll deal with you!"

Just think it over. You could probably add your own jibes against the sun. Did it burn you when you were a kid, when you didn't know any better? I remember one of my cousins getting such a sunburn, it was terrible. Then he told his parents that he'd had his shirt on all day. They couldn't figure out what happened, since he never lied, they thought. But his butt wasn't burnt at all. So they thought the cloth on his shirts must have been at fault. So they made all of his clothes out of underpants and threw away the others. He never burnt again. They hated the sun because of all the trouble it put them through. And my cousin was no fan of underpants, so he also hated the sun.

Anyway, back to me in my trench or gutter, whetting my appetite for insults when I perceived the sun was nearly overhead: "Somehow you also give night and day on Pluto, a totally worthless task since scientists tell us the chances of life on Pluto are less than one in a million!" I gave it a left jab, a right hook, insults literally to beat the band, and I kept right on punching -- usually connecting, sometimes flailing and missing -- until the sun got the message: "You no good, buster," and after that it quit coming around (Good!), and I've found I still have all the light I need with light bulbs, candles, and my phone.

The Sun Will Be A Red Giant

It's another scorcher today. Temps in the low 100's, Fahrenheit. Very toasty.

One of my questions, and I keep forgetting to look it up, is since our body temperature is already 98.6, why does it feel warm when it's 98.6 outside? Whatever the reason may be for that, I can't wait because it's even hotter today.

I was downtown and getting way too much sun. I've been wearing a hat for the last few months. My doctor told me I needed to because of the sun. Still, there's all the sun on my arms and neck. So I walk faster and maybe I can outrun it.

I was watching a show one day about the sun, a good scientific show that showed how the heat makes its way up from the middle of the sun to the surface, then of course it streams through space and ends up on me. It was pretty interesting, but it seems like I had a couple calls, then someone was at the door, so I never saw the whole thing, and essentially aren't able to recall what I saw very well. But I think about that show when I'm out in the yard. All those sunbeams, working like the devil to get from the middle of the sun to the surface; it takes forever. Then six minutes later it's in my backyard!

I don't know which show it was -- I think there's been more than one -- where I saw the interesting news that the sun someday is going to become a red giant and destroy everything on the earth. That's quite an awesome thought to me. The idea that everything on earth will be consumed in flames and that no one will be around anymore is mind-blowing. This includes the Mona Lisa, Beatles records, all the great movies, and even the archives of this blog. I'd like to think it's immortal, but that's just a fantasy.

So it's going to become a red giant. There's something about the sun's dying process that will make it get bigger. You'd think dying would make it shrink up, and actually it will shrink but only after it first expands. And once all this happens, a few billion years from now, that'll be it for earth.

My guess is something else is going to kill off everyone before 5 billion years passes. I'm not naturally pessimistic, but seriously, billions of years is a long time for humanity or any species to continue on. Especially when you're as self-destructive as us!