Now and Then
When I was a dream-filled teenager in the 1970s, I stayed up after my parents and younger sisters went to bed to watch episodes of the original Star Trek TV show. I remember occasionally calculating how old I’d be in certain futuristic-sounding years—1990, 2000, 2020—and tried to imagine what life would be like then. I often wondered if space travel of the sort on Star Trek would be a thing by then.
As you likely know, William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk, went to the edge of space last week in some rich guy’s rocket. That’s gotta be the coolest perk that landing a role on a low-budget TV show in the mid-nineteen-hundreds ever provided for an actor. You didn’t see Jim Nabors or Penny Marshall on that passenger list, and only half of the reason is because they’re already dead. Shatner’s experience moved him to tears, which is perhaps a sign that his appreciation for the miracle that is existence is deeper than were his acting chops. I like Shatner but can’t help wishing Larry Hagman from I Dream of Jeannie had been with him. How soon we forget that he was a TV astronaut, too.
My parents still live in the same house where I watched those episodes. Being able to visit the family home you grew up in after so many decades seems increasingly rare these days and makes me feel a bit fortunate. For my money, there is no greater mind-fuck than the passage of time and I do enjoy a good mind-fuck.
My apologies if you’re offended by that term but there simply isn’t a good single word in English for the combination of astonishment, confusion, and disorientation that time can hit you between the eyes with. And fucking with your mind is exactly what time does.
If you’re familiar with Asian philosophy in the traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the like, you’re aware that a great deal is made of the idea that the past and future are fabrications of thought since they are never actually happening now. It is undeniably always and forever now, and never the past or the future. When the past was here, it was now; when the future arrives, it, too, will be now. Hence the fairly undeniable assertion that if you can’t be happy NOW, with all of its imperfections, you will never be happy no matter where you go or what you accomplish or attain. I believe that to be true.
You can toss aside this idea of the “eternal now” as something you’ve been aware of all your life and have accepted as another boring fact of reality, or you can think about it and go down a fascinating rabbit hole.
I can’t even recall all of the things that have happened to me at my parent’s house. I left that house for college and returned to it after I dropped out. A year later, I left it with a backpack to roam around Europe for a few months. When I came back, I got an apartment across town but I was still a regular feature of that house: doing laundry, enjoying Mom’s home-cooking, watching football with Dad. In that house, I told my parents I was getting married. When I had kids, I brought them to visit their grandparents there. I moved around, had different jobs and careers, I got divorced, married again, moved across the country, my kids went to college, I got divorced again, moved across country again, got married again, moved to Mexico. For four decades, visits to that house were perhaps the only consistent backdrop.
In retrospect, these chapters in my life feel like very different lives and different people living them. If you’re over a certain age, I know you know what I mean by that. And in a very real way, it’s actually true. Basic biology holds that every single cell in my body (and everyone’s) was different during all of those stages. Yet somehow, my consciousness inhabited all of those separate people.
My parent’s home, which was also my home from the ages of 12 to 19 and which I’ve visited several times each year for nearly half a century, was the one consistent setting through it all. When I’m there, I am in the same place where so many different aspects of my different lives took place. We recently had a big family gathering there with my three siblings and their families and kids, and kids’ kids. Together, in that same Star Trek living room, we looked through a dozen or more family photo albums and it was wonderful, but also nothing short of freaky.
…“Here’s a picture of me in my 7th-grade football uniform; I posed for that picture right over by that window. Here’s one of me sitting on the couch opening presents when I graduated high school in 1976; that happened right over there against that wall. Here’s a photo of my first wife and I when we were first dating; we were standing right over there in front of that fireplace. Here’s a section with photos of my kids and nieces and nephews when they were toddlers; this is the floor where they were playing. They’re all in their 30s and 40s now and their kids are crawling around that same floor.”
I look around and realize that everyone in these photos who is here today is older, shorter, and fatter, but still recognizable even though every one of their cells has been replaced numerous times. Time and gravity have had their way with us all, as they always do.
But what are time and gravity—these powerful forces that compress, widen, and weaken us throughout our lives?
I’m not smart enough to answer that and I suspect physicists are a little unsure themselves. They used to say gravity was a “force” somehow generated by matter but now realize that’s not exactly true. Both time and space seem to be a function of objects moving in relationship to each other—a year is one revolution of Earth around the sun. If it suddenly took 19 months to make a complete revolution around the sun, what would that do to time? And if that movement stopped altogether, we’d float away from the Earth and time would cease to function. Or would it? Our squishy mammal brains have a hard time getting a grip on how all this works but it’s been proven that people orbiting the earth in space stations age more slowly than people on earth—what the hell is that about?
So here we are a good way into the 21st century and we’re still not going “where no man has gone before,” but somehow we always feel like we’re right on the precipice. Sure, if rocket rides became safe, routine, and affordable, I’d love to see the earth from space or visit another planet (briefly). But there are other things I’d much rather we put our science efforts into like finding ways to live on this planet without destroying it and each other.
Space travel is exciting and alluring, for sure, but if we’re going to aim for making something from Star Trek’s version of the future come to fruition, I’d prefer it be something that improves life on earth. I’d like to see us get the transporter working before figuring out the rocket thing. If I could go from North America to Europe or Asia without putting up with the ludicrous rubber glove theater of the TSA and sitting crammed into a tiny airplane seat all day with a mask over my breathing hole, I’d be one happy time traveler. If I had my way, Buck Rogers would have to wait a while longer to start wars with other planets.
But that was then, this is now. And now is when we check out Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week. Enjoy it now, before we relegate it to the past, which no longer exists!
When I was a stand-up comic, “accidental exposure” was my closer.
This is the second genie in a bottle reference in this post. (I Dream of Jeannie, mentioned above in the essay part that almost no one reads.) I wonder if there will be more.
I wonder if cannibal couples had this same problem?
Somebody wrote to me this week to tell me that in the American South, a business with three conspicuous Ks in its name is code for being Klan-friendly. This person wondered if that’s what we were signaling here. Yeah, right. We’re willing to risk our careers and livelihoods to publicly announce that we’re pinheaded bigots. This tenuous grasp of likely realities is what leads to believing in conspiracy theories.
Or maybe I only think that because I’m being controlled by the microchip that was injected with the Covid vaccine. Who can say?
As a white male in the U.S. who attended Catholic school, I’m far more afraid of nuns than cops. Sadly, I fully realize that if I were dark-skinned, that would be far less likely to be true.
I’ve trained my dog to attack people and other dogs when she hears the word “friendly”. I know it’s wrong but I get a big kick out of it.
That signals the end of today’s post and, NO, I absolutely have not trained my dog to attack anyone. If I could train my dogs to do anything, it would be to sleep late, bathe themselves, and learn the difference between an actual threat to our lives and another dog walking down our street.
Thanks for stopping by, Jazz Pickles! We deeply appreciate your readership. Wayno’s weekly blog posts are always a delight (and not nearly as long-winded as mine!) and this week is worth a read, as usual. I’m really digging the Ernie Bushmiller pipe pic and this week’s music selection.
Until next time, be friendly and keep your hands out of the mouths of dogs you do not know personally.
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