I went today to Huntsville, or rather Marshall Space Flight Center. Today is the three year anniversary, if one can call it that, of the Columbia accident. They didn't have anything to mark the occassion, though. But I went anyway. Going down there is my way of marking it, and remembering.

I saw Magnificent Desolation, the IMAX movie Tom Hanks did about the Apollo Moon landings. It was amazing, and very moving for me. There's this thing that I get when I see things like that. Something in me just wails silently, no words and no reason, like something somewhere inside me reaches desperately for that life, those moments, that place. The Moon. Sometimes for Mars. That is where I am meant to be. That is where I'm supposed to be. But I'm not. My imagination is a wonderful and fantastic thing, I can imagine myself there. I can take other people into my delusions to such an extent that they swear they feel like they've been there. I envy them, because it will never be real to me. It will never be my reality, to stand on the plains of Serenatatis or Tranquilitatis and look up on a world I never have to walk upon again. So I'm lost here, with no way home. I walk around in this gravity under all this atmosphere like I'm walking on the bottom of a fishbowl, suffocating. I'm not supposed to be here. I belong out there. Up there. The Moon.

Me and my delusions of grandeur, I guess. But it still hurts, to want something so badly and not ever be capable of reaching it.

They're restoring the Saturn 5 now, but I still got to walk the length of it like I do every time I go down there.

I learned something else too, that Dr. Von Braun won a Hugo! They had it on his desk in the Von Braun display. I saw a silver spaceship, then I saw the card beside it and my jaw nearly hit the floor. He got it for his book Conquest of the Moon, which is non-fiction but he won a retro Hugo for it because it contributed to science-fiction. So on top of it all he won a Hugo too. Oy. Build a few spacecraft, send a few guys to the Moon and back, and in your spare time design space stations and win science-fiction awards. They also had a very nice picture of Dr. Von Braun with Dr. Clarke, which was nice.

They had a new display of the solar sail technology too, with Les Johnson talking about it on a video loop.

I stood and stared at the Moon rock for quite some time. A piece of my world, encased in a double-walled plexiglass box.

An unsubtle reminder, perhaps, of what can happen to freaks like me.

Sometimes it's just too much trouble to be human.


My first three copies of MO are on the way. I probably won't be pleased with them, but I'm not passing absolute judgment until I have them in my hands. The text and the front and back covers are all right, it's the spine that still irks me. Grr.... I tell myself not to sweat the small stuff, but I'm a perfectionist about my books.


I need to be writing again. I miss it so much. But until something gives at work and we knock off with the overtime every day I can't. Usually when I get home I'm so tired I only have enough energy to read fanfic. And my arms really need the rest by then too. I'd go to the doctor but they'd only tell me the punchline from Daddy's old joke: "If it hurts when you do that, don't do that." I'd be happy to not do that, but I don't have any choice in the matter. Certain royally ticked off portions of my brain would be only too happy to walk out and never see that place ever again as long as I live. During times like this I dream of converted school buses and writers' colonies in Arizona.