Caustically Optimistic

Kianauts

I am happy to report that the United States Government is not the only one wasting tax money.  I heard on NPR (I know, a new-source of ill repute!) that the Government of South Korea had spent money to find a way to make kimchi fit for space-travel.  Apparently, gamma rays in space will mix with the bacteria in the kimchi and making it do something we’d hear from Melody about from a Science Fiction entertainment and kill the cosmonauts and astronauts in the space station.  Either that or it’d do something to the bacteria and it would come back to Earth and kill us all or mutate the humans. 

According to NPR the Koreans cannot live without kimchi.  I think the Koreans need to toughen up but I don’t pay taxes in Korea so who I am to judge?  I just hope they have Hyundai making their spaceship and not Kia; the poor bastard won’t make it to the stratosphere in a Kia and they would have wasted all that money on irradiated cabbages.   Yes that is what they did: they irradiated the kimchi so it wouldn’t have the bacteria that make kimchi, kimchi.  Essentially, they put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and everything was fine.  One of my art professors at the University once said that some of the best things in Art happened on accident and perhaps this is true as well about science – I think he was wrong but he has a classroom and I do not so I’ll keep my opinions to myself.  No, no I won’t. 

I have no idea what you’d call a Korean astronaut or cosmonaut.  I’d call them a Kianaut since that is what I am alleging they’ll be strapped to.  I will delete all the comments that will come flooding in about how people have a Kia and love it or that they’re reliable or safe.  I know that some of them have high safety ratings but those come from the government – the same geniuses that brought us our economic situation, the Iraq war, unmitigated climate change, and a world-class public transportation network.  Okay, we don’t have the last one but I think you’re getting my point: they’re not exactly good what they do, or don’t do. 

Also, you do not love that Kia: you love what you paid for it.  I can’t wait to see you try and trade that bucket in.  I had a Saturn once and I would have told you that I loved it.  I would have sworn up and down that I loved that Saturn, but I am a liar and I was lying then.  I was very happy with the Saturn.  I was very happy that I wasn’t walking. I did not love it.  I wouldn’t want to be strapped to it and ride all the way to Connecticut again or from Connecticut to Arizona and I wouldn’t want to be strapped to it and shot into space.  I am sure the trade-in value of the Saturn directly correlates to the amount of change stuffed in the cushions and their ability to take the tires off the car and put them on another vehicle. 

And I wouldn’t want to go to space anyway, not if there is radiation that could somehow make kimchi worse.  Methinks the Korean government is actually using kimchi to control its people – both in the north and the south, around the world, and if they let it go into space it might lose its opiate qualities and allow the Korean Kianauts to see the truth.  They’d come back to earth and they’d free their enslaved brethren that have hitherto been drugged into believing that their government was good and kimchi was edible.  Don’t laugh, Australia, I know what you’re up to with the vegemite.  I’m very hard to fool.

 I just don’t see the point in going into space: we already have Tang and Velcro.  What else are we going to find in space?  They’re always telling us that we find a lot of inventions in getting ready to go to space and in going to space.  Considering our current situation the time of having so much money to waste on earth meant needing to waste it in space as well are long gone.  Why do we need to go into space?  Do we need to go to Mars?  We don’t need to bring back Martians for day labor or to outsource our jobs to Mars; going to Jupiter would be stupider.  Going to space to say we did it is stupid.  I’ve done a lot of things to do them and to say that I’ve done them and, ‘for science.’ 

Anyone who reads this knows that I do a lot of stupid things and if I am any example to anyone, if I’ve brought anything to the world through the work of my writing it should be this:  I am an idiot.  I do dumb, dumb things.  I am not an example to follow.  So please, lets not send the Kianauts into space, it seems foolhardy at best.  I’m also pretty confident, as confident as I am about anything, that kimchi and Tang being separately disgusting will not mix together very well at all. 

 

a good day to die

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you-Nobody-too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they'd banish us-you know!

How dreary-to be-Somebody!
How public-like a Frog-
To tell your name-the livelong June
To an admiring Bog!

Emily Dickinson

Sarah had a delightfully moderate response to my shock at Emily Dickinson’s complicity in her brother’s extramarital affair, “We don’t know their circumstances so we can’t judge.” As you are all well aware: Sarah and I are not here to help; we are here to observe and pass judgment.

I learned this while participating in the Emily Dickinson Death Day Toast at her grave in Amherst, Massachusetts while joining a troupe of traveling literary scholars led by my undergraduate advisor (and good friend) from my university.

It was the perfect day for such an outing – the weather was dreary and it rained all day. CNN reports that Senator Kennedy was struck by lightening while flying over us – he is safe but it would have been more fitting if he had crashed into our van or had caused our van to go careening into a lake, “We forgot Tiffany was in the back! Was she pregnant?”

It was not a bad day, despite the fact that in the Berkshires the only song on the radio all day was Daniel Powter’s Bad Day. There was a moment where we were sure we were lost or had taken a wrong turn on our way to a Shaker Village when Melissa Potter appeared to us in a vision and told us that we were not lost as long as we were still in Massachusetts. We arrived at the Shaker Village after taking the scenic tour of the greater Pittsfield area.

The Shakers were strange industrious folk. Their whole religion was based on hard work and no sex. This is what many people are doing right now – working all the time and not dating – but that does not mean that people are going to sign up for a lifetime of assiduous celibacy. This austere lifestyle would not go very far when the cults of today’s selling points are sex, cool aide, and free tennis shoes.

I accidentally stepped into a “Discovery Center” which had the draw of newborn chickens – we call them nuggets in the profession – when it was a craft and coloring room for children where I was waylaid by John Kerry’s grandfather with an undergraduate as he told us about the ceramic cow and how they had it harnessed in a much more humane setting then when it was in the barn. I learned a lot about cows – the butter content of their milk and the coloring of their flesh – but the big draw was a glass beehive. I am daft enough to have watched that beehive all day long, but we were on a schedule.

We traveled to Amherst to see the home of Emily Dickinson, her brother’s home and participate in the Death Day March around Amherst after we were finished with the Shakers. The march around Amherst in honor of Emily Dickinson was punctuated with readings and recitations of her poems by her ardent followers. Poetry was read in a parking lot and to a recycling dumpster as well as the train station and her home.

There were unintentionally funny moments, but for the participants this was a very serious occasion like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. I appreciated their religious fervor for Miss Dickinson so I did not point out that we were briefly joined on this cold and blustery day by a man wearing tiny orange shorts or that the man who seemed to be leading the march kept picking his nose.

This whole process culminated at Emily Dickinson’s grave where people recited their favorite poems, tears in the eyes and Miss Dickinson was toasted with ginger ale and mineral water. I hope years after my death that people notice me gone and miss me, too. I am not sure that I want excerpts from my short stories read to garbage receptacles – who am I kidding. If my death is celebrated, I want it done in a very absurd way. Also, if it is on a miserably cold, wet day that people be invited into my historic home and offered something hot to drink.

We had dinner at Wendy’s and parted ways. I was sure, however, that I was going to die on the way home. I had no directions but had no trouble finding my way back to the Interstate and then home, having familiarized myself with the area for an hour and a half earlier in the day. However, with our without directions I find myself lost and finding myself home without incident can only mean that I have entered an alternate dimension.

In the next installment
Sarah and I prepare for our documentary – the Seven Wonders of Nebraska.