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| An Epiphany From the Steaming Item Behind The Ice Tray |
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| Whether meteor shower or biologic horror, all signs indicate I'm getting old |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, October 07, 1998. Clearly, a sign I have live too long. The United States Space Command (whose existence I probably had read about but had never emerged from the chaos of my mind for prolonged study), the US Space Command has announced severe meteor activity for next month, the worst in thirty years. Most of the meteors are sand size, but even these are large enough and certainly fast enough to severely influence the longevity of any satellite one might happen upon. On top of the looming Y2K problems, we may have global communication shattered by a rock fall next month. Now, I have enough to worry about, but it strikes me that this is the nub of a problem to which we may not ever become accustomed. Here is a warning about potential disaster for which nothing whatever can be done. It is not like a hurricane, which one can conceivably avoid or weather by known, tried and true methods. But a meteor of several tons cannot be flensed by our radar in time to render predictions, which because of the atmosphere would be a wild gueess anyway. Further, even if we could accurately predict a meteor impact, we are essentially left with an ecological accounting problem, as the location in question and its surrounding area won’t be there any more, and one ecosystem merely turns up in another column heading. There is something eerie about that, having enough science to forcast but none to prevent. I wonder if this almost certainly unimportant event bothers me as a factor of my age? When you get – as President Clinton said – to the point where there are much more yesterdays than tomorrows – one rather instinctively husbands resources, including emotion, for those things for which you care most deeply. I cannot say that I care, in any real sense, for satellites nor do I feel much concern for meteors smashing into Boulder or on me or on anyone. I think it bothers me because I know that part of youth is the emotional resiliance that faces virtually any quagmire and knows with surety that a problem can be solved and its just a question of finding the answer. In youth, you have time. With age you do not, and perhaps this unease at being warned about a currently unsolveable problem annoys me because I know I probably won’t witness its eventual solution. It is therefore another annoying reminder of mortality.Meanwhile, as my contribution to KGNU’s upcoming nine day lean, mean pledge drive, I have come in at 4AM to clean the station’s refrigerator. There are half-eaten candy bars frozen in the frost around the freezer. There is something unpleasant decomposing in that back corner I cannot get to until the ice melts a little more. The is a bottle of green something, inexplicably marked mayonaisse, that is bubbling in the increasing heat.But I know how to do this. I have time. |
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