U F O

Piloting my red space cruiser across the green galaxy, I traveled in rhythmic, separate, repeating lines. Scouring the cosmos with exacting purpose, but it was too large. It continued on and on.  

That's what I let my imagination slip into for a little while. The reality was I was cutting my grass with my gas-powered lawnmower.  The relativity of my yard is annoying to me.  Partly because of the relativity itself, and also how dull and trifling a yard is. When I want to have people over, or throw a ball, or run around with my dog, it's so small. Painfully small, like an animal shelter cage. When I want to mow it, however, it may as well never end. You had to drive the mower slowly and deliberately to cut efficiently.  I was barely finished with half the yard, and the second half was hanging over me like the shadow of a raincloud. I stood still for a couple seconds, but didn't want to start the mower again, so I let it run loudly while I gathered myself.  The yard may have been small, but somehow it continued on and on.

There is a sense of peace nestled in with the minuscule accomplishment felt when I finish mowing the lawn. The roar of the mower quiets down, my muscles can relax, and the yard has a fresh haircut.  My laziness surpasses my work ethic at this point, so the mower tracks clippings across the driveway and into the garage. All to make myself feel less guilty about spending the next hour, or longer, sitting in a lawn chair in my yard. My brain gives me a gold star for the day, and that's enough to convince myself. 

It was one of those wonderful summer nights I remember from when I was a kid. The sun was beginning to set, but it would still be bright for a long while yet.  The sky was a dull, baby blue, cloudless, stretching below the horizon and mixing up, into the stratosphere.  I could hear cars driving a few street away, but couldn't see any. There must be children playing a game, perhaps jumping into a kiddie pool, a few houses down, from the sounds of it. The more distinct memories I have of nights like these involved me with Fourth of July sparklers, or arriving home dirty from sports, or simply sitting, like I am now, but with my mom and dad and my sister.  Nostalgia is funny that way, where I am enjoying the moment now, while longing for a similar one from the past. It is it's own emotion entirely. A combination feeling of desire, yearning, and comfort.  A new memory is about to be made, that will both encompass and eclipse these.

In the current technological age, I make a concerted effort to not access my phone for long periods of time if I can. I hate myself for making a habit of reaching into my pocket to check my phone for notifications when I have a lapse in activity.  Here, I take it out of my pocket and place it on the ground next to me, deliberately dropping it into soft grass without leaning out of my comfortable position in the chair, to reinforce the idea that getting it will disturb my position.  The beer I placed in the chair's cup holder earlier is so soaked with condensation that it slips out of my hand and stays down at first grasp.  The tab pops the lid open loudly and crisply, and the first freezing gulp whelms my taste buds, but acts as a palate cleanser for my mental state. It signifies the transition from phoned to un-phoned.  In a form of meditation I don't even realize I am doing, I take a few deep breaths as I gaze at my surroundings. The old, rotted, wooden fence separating my neighbor's yard and mine. Scattered clumps of dust, rock, some garbage, and what I assume is dirt, skirting the fringes of my lawn, a sort of wave of suburban detritus.  I let the thought creep into my head for but a moment that I should clean that sidewalk up before I continue my assessment.  The big, empty field catty-corner to my house. I can't glance at it without thinking of all the backyard sports, snowball fights, rock throwing, and laying down I have done there for years growing up. Those moments are a maelstrom of memories that pass by in a flash. What a joy it is, to a child, to have a grassy field.  Down the block, a smattering of houses, similar to mine in every way except for the persons living there. Some butted up against one another, some separated by a yard or a fence or a little dividing alleyway, but identical in spirit and purpose. They blend together into a single area, "the houses," and I move on. I can almost see the top of the hill at the end of the street I live on. It creeps up and up and crests at the perfect angle to block my sight. I know there is a small playground and a basketball court up there, even though I can't see it.

The other direction has more houses, with a hospital sitting behind them.  From my position, the center, I am home plate and the hospital is the center field stands. The outfield is many homes.  I can't see beyond my neighbor's house and fence to the left, so that's my entire sight line. I know there is a train station behind me, and behind that further, a small forest, with giant mounds of rocks, even though I refuse to turn my body to look.  The mounds of rocks had always intrigued me. They are not one rock, like your typical mountain. It looks like there are hundreds of thousands of individual rocks piled on top of some black dirt, or silt, or something. I honestly have no clue. I've always wondered what it was back there. When I was a kid, I never questioned it. We just climbed up it and then threw the rocks. Now, I question it, but feel too  adult to ask.  "Hey what is that stuff back there, like a dirt mine or something?" I've tried once or twice before and nobody seems to care.  

I center back on myself and take another sip. I sink down deeper into my chair to get into a more comfortable position.  My legs stretch out in front of me, and I cross my ankles over each other.  My left arm hangs limp over the armrest, and my right holds my beer firmly in it. I have entered this position many times before, so I know I'll be comfy this way for quite a while. I settle in for a bit of a haul and gaze up at the sky, thoughtlessly.  

I don't know exactly when it entered my field of view.  Had it been creeping along while I was surveying other things at eye-level, or had it jumped into position suddenly? Was my awareness that low? Was it just so foreign that I could not fathom to take stock of it until it was more apparent?  One of many things I learned I will never know. 

A large, dark orb floated across the sky. It was massive, large enough to immediately be frightening. It wasn't careening towards us, at least I don't think, because it wasn't getting larger. Once it caught my attention, I stared, mouth agape, for what could have been seconds, minutes, or hours. Completely transfixed, I didn't dare look at anything else, just in case. In case of what? I was never even sure. I wanted to be prepared in case it adjusted course, as if it wasn't fully in control. A "just in case" attitude doesn't work on something so obtuse, so large, so foreign to my senses. Moments like these you cannot prepare for, and you don't realize until it's over that you are nothing more than a helpless observer. I've quickly realized I know nothing and I control even less.  I was ready to activate flight, to run, to find some form of protection or defense. Against what? My fear overtook me.  Yet the orb felt nothing towards me. As I stared, a husk of a man, I began to realize it was moving. It continued on and on.

It was traveling across the sky. To me, in my perception, at quite a slow rate. I could tell it was moving, but it was going so slowly that I needed a frame of reference to notice.  

In these summer nights, another memory, which I didn't perceive until now, was the moon. When you are a child and you see the moon out in the day, it is a wondrous thing. The large, gray ball, hanging delicately in the blue sky, almost translucent, surely majestic.  There is an intrinsic and shared joy to seeing the overlord of the night grace us in the daytime. But now, this fortuitous sighting intriguingly became my earthly shackle.  As the mysterious black sphere moved in front of the moon, it gave an even greater fear. I now had a reference for it's size, it's shape, it's speed. In a matter of seconds it had blocked out the moon entirely. Now we had a new moon, a dark and ominous one; unfamiliar and unwelcome.  As quickly as it blocked out our satellite, it allowed it to appear again. It continued on and on.  My grip was tight on both the arm of the chair and my beer.  I hadn't even realized I had been squeezing them both for dear life as if I were on a roller coaster.  As this massive thing crept across the twilight sky, I forced myself to relax.  The power it displayed unfathomable, I acquiesced to it's demands.  Hope had left me.  For if this thing wanted destruction, I was to become dust myself.

It continued on and on.  Then, as eerily and hastily as it has appeared to me, it began to vanish. It wasn't getting smaller, but further away.  It was leaving.  Without warning, everything and everyone returned to what we were doing, whether we liked it or not, by virtue of the interloper departing.  Changed, yet unchanged.  Different now, yet not in a quantifiable way.  A communal witnessing, and nothing else.  It was as if the sky had become a drive-in movie for the entire globe.  We watched, jointly captivated, summarily enchanted.   All we could do was watch.  Then the movie ended abruptly and we were left staring at an empty screen.  

Weeks have gone by but there is no more information. Plenty of news about it, all speculation. Months go by and people start to forget, to care a little bit less. A year goes by and time has made fools of us all.  Memories are funny that way. There is a deep nostalgia lingering in me.  Brought on only by a brief sight, a simple glance.  A moment of scent sends a flood of recall in the form of emotions. I relive moments in my past just by being in an area I've been in before. Yet as we distance ourselves from this visitor, and as it becomes more and more distant, it, too, becomes forgotten. The government agencies said they were unable to track it. Not when it was arriving and not after it had gone. It was there, it passed by, then it left.  A blink in time. A light bulb flickering off for a moment before maintaining it's shine. Ships in the night and all that.  No different than me watching a bird overhead.  We pass by each other this way in daily life constantly, but we pay it no mind. And soon, nobody will pay mind to this as well.  

Five years pass.  It's summer again and I've finished my yard work. I sip a beer, I sit in my chair. I scan the horizon, the blue sky, the zenith.  I no longer think of my childhood. My eyes crave the sight of the orb like a desert oasis.  Have new memories formed in this area in the meantime? The thought never enters my mind. Life has gone back to normal for everyone, it seems. Yet I have become fanatical. I miss the traveler. The unknown.  There is nothing I want more. Upon first seeing it I was struck with fear, held in place by dread.  Now I have a form of bravery brought on by my anguished thirst for an answer. A second meeting. 

Once, I was in the present, but tied to the past. A vessel for nostalgia.  Now I'm gripped by a longing for the anagogic, the abstruse.  Either way life was passing me by.  It continued on and on.

The kinds of relativity that interests me

 There are many things that qualify for the subject: I don't quite understand and nobody can explain it to me.  I often wonder why Giants in fiction move at such a slow rate.  First we must dissect the relativity of speed.  Ants, humans, and elephants all exist, and they are each fast in their own regards, yet the difference in scale changes how we understand that.  Elephants are much larger than humans, and have been clocked running faster than most, at up to 25 miles per hour.  How many miles per hour can an ant move?  When I asked myself that was when I realized, at least colloquially, that we measure speed not in parameters of speed itself, but of how quickly a distance is traveled.  If an ant were scaled up to be similar to a human, would it be faster, similar, or slower than ourselves?  I do not have the faintest clue of how to figure that out.  When the question of fictional Giants is introduced, it becomes even more difficult.  We see Godzilla trudge through Tokyo, the size of a skyscraper.  Menacing, imposing, but also able to step several blocks at a time due to his size alone.  I have to imagine his size alone allows him to travel at least 50 miles an hour at a walking pace.  Is he faster than humans or just bigger?

Either way, my initial query is about their motor function.  In depictions of the Titans from Greek mythology in popular culture that I have seen, they are positively enormous.  Yet they will throw a punch or try to stomp on someone, and it is an unbearably slow, telegraphed, and laborious process.  They will lift their foot and groan like a zombie, as humans underfoot simply run away before they can get stepped on.   More questions spring up. Loads and loads of questions that either nobody cares to explain or doesn't know.  Why would it not be more comparable to myself stepping on an ant?  If I went to step on an ant, I wouldn't raise my knee to my chest and then slowly drop my foot over the course of an entire minute.  I'd riverdance upon the ant with gusto and be on with it.  Why, then, does every iteration of Giants have them be slow, lumbering buffoons when they would be enormous, destructive, terrors? Is it all bad writing, bad storytelling? A horrid understanding of their mechanics? Deliberate misdirection or depictions made unscientifically? 

Something I have speculated, quietly in my own head where nobody can make fun of me, is that time is also relative to size.  By that I mean that maybe an ant sees us like we depict fictional Giants.  Far-fetched, I know, as there is no real way to test or understand this, and the basis for the idea comes from fiction.  Nevertheless, it is interesting to think about, and fake-reason about, as far as speed and size go.  Many problems arise from that.  I am still able to stomp the ant.  If they experience time differently, and I look like I am moving slow to them, then there is a disconnect between our different time dilations.  I look slow and pedestrian, but the foot drops nevertheless, crushing them.  So they are not actually moving slower in time, only the appearance of time moves slow. 

Extrapolate this to anything else.  What if the smaller you are, the longer time lasts? What if the larger you are, the quicker it flashes by?  At least in the sense of how time feels.  Well that would mean the universe feels like it could be just days old, at least to itself.  Ants feel like they've been around longer than time has, in their own ant minds.  This only brings more questions, namely the concept of "feeling" itself, and the very concept of relativity.  Both of these being human created concepts.  The universe doesnt feel anything.  So if there is an unfeeling entity also experiencing time, it cannot interpret it differently.  A mountain doesn't feel like humans are slow moving and itself is quick, for it is un-emotive, un-alive (in the interest of discussion this will not be discussed currently), and uncaring.  It simply is a mountain, existing throughout.  The Earth as a planet does not feel as if the mountains on it are changing faster than the humans.  There is a clear timeline of those events. 

I'd like to backpedal to the nature of Giants in the first place.  The scale we created is still rather small.  Imagine a Giant so big, that it floats in space and the Earth seems like a soccer ball to it.  Would it not be able to dribble us like Ronaldo and kick us into the sun?  Humans cannot comprehend or imagine this type of speed.  If it were ever depicted in fiction, each dribble would last for hours as we slowly drifted across space and the foot connected again for another bounce.  This depiction constrains our thoughts and encourages us to think slowly.  Everything is faster than we think, so fast we don't have words or ideas for them.

This disparity that defines relativity itself is also but a question. While scientific studies are not popular culture, I have to imagine there is a formula somewhere that encompasses what I am saying. But maybe there isn't. There are a multitude of factors that go along with size, some probably will remain questions forever. First and foremost, could something that large even exist? Godzilla-esque or larger. Probably not, based on meal consumption alone. It would have to eat a church full of people twice a day to sustain itself. Anything bigger wouldn't be able to live very long. BUT! What if it could? Are there theoretical devices to see how they could move? 

That's too many questions. I already have an answer. This Giant would move quickly, deftly. If it wanted to be deadly we would be at it's mercy. To a Giant, a monstrous, planet-sized space demon, we are smaller than the pesky ants. Poor ants. They are the first thing we think of when we imagine something very small. They are constantly stepped on just for existing where our feet are.  Let's leave them out of this. My theoretical Giant would blast us across the cosmos like a child throwing a bouncy ball as high as it can in the air for fun.  We'd careen through space, dead as fuck, an empty planet, slam-dunked further into the universe. 

I stopped caring about relativity when I realized it doesn't matter. Somewhere along the way I started feeling bad for the ants. I hope the cosmic giant who finds has the same compassion. 

The space of a blink

     As I sat in my car after just starting it, I had that feeling where you walk into a room and forget where you're going. Temporary amnesia. You sit aloof and ponderous, briefly stuck in a state of idiotic bliss.  Exiting my womb, I came to the realization I had saliva in my mouth. I gathered it up and spat it right into the windshield. That brought me back to reality faster than an alarm yanking me from dreamland. The clear, new spit hung tight on the window, as I tried to wrap my simple mind around what just happened. I was unprepared for the mess I'd made so I pulled my coat sleeve up over my fist and wiped at it awkwardly. The angle of the window and the length of my jacket's arm made it difficult to get entirely, and so I disembarked with a new window slime and an appreciation for a clear view.

     I got to my cousin's house late. Thinking about how I might explain this lapse of thought to anyone who might encounter the result consumed what was left of my mental resources and caused me to drive past the turn for his house and 4 blocks further still until my body once again caught up to my brain and rectified the situation. For a while I contemplated not even going. A few seconds in the wrong direction and I was already caving in to doubt. Doubt was always on the edge of my thoughts, sliming up the perimeter and greasing the causeway. Then a monotonous hammer of infinitesimal inconvenience breaks down the fragile neural wall my brain aggravatingly just fixed. Even still, a wall several times rebuilt is as strong as it's most recent erection. This one was structurally defective.

     I decided not to go. I wouldn't even make up a lie. I parked and texted my cousin I wouldn't be over. Faced with a now overwhelming amount of free time, I pondered my options. I went with the old classic. Listen to music on my bed with the lights off. It was around 5 pm, but it was raining, so the natural shine creeping in the windows was few and gray. Concise beams of cloudy sun made pretty shapes that had never been made before. I got lost in the sounds of the chords and the rhythm of the light. Almost 3 hours had passed before the light disappeared entirely and left me in a deep shade.  The only light now was the LED glow of my phone. It was so drowningly dark and I loved it. Even the sound was darkened. I couldn't rightfully explain it but I felt at home in the darkness. Concealed, hidden, and safe. The deep blue artificial beep of my phone's glowing notification indicator briefly illuminated parts of my room to my focused eyes. I was a spy on a secret mission, deep in enemy territory, looking over my surroundings for strengths and weaknesses. I was a spectre surveying his shadow kingdom, in tune with the very essence of the air and connecting with it in an ethereal way. I was a young boy, lost and alone on a distant planet, with only a faint unfamiliar light to guide his way. I was a teenager sprawled out on his bed.

I remembered I had somewhere to be at this precise moment. I rolled over and closed my eyes.

Movers and Shakers

The experiment started at a Christmas party last June. After moving around so much for my whole life I decided to not. I made this decision without any forethought and plopped my buttocks down in the middle of my neighbor's couch and that was that. Parties are interesting when they are happening all around you. My eyes picked up all the laughs, some frowns, the awkward body language, the group love. My nose was less fortunate with it's sensing. The party ended late. After two AM, but I couldn't see the rest of the clock from where I was seated. I remained seated even after the lights went out and everyone had gone. It's March now, and this couch has become my pedestal, atop which I gaze upon my subjects. The rug, the walls, the dust, the cushions, the TV, the ceiling, the lights. All loyal to me throughout. They paid service to me in sights and sounds, keeping my senses busy in my new motionless life.   We had a scenic kingdom together without animation. It was good.

I would have stayed there much longer if it wasn't for Hurricane Ferdinand. It was states away, but hearing about a hurricane every day on TV made me think it was my fault. The Earth was balancing out my stillness by pushing wind around wildly. The world wasn't used to having people not walk on it. Apparently, people were supposed to move. So I got up and left my people. There was no uproar, but I could tell they would miss me. If you could tell such a thing, I certainly could.

I was going to walk. Do that walking thing; kick my shoes across the country, but people walk all the time and that's stupid. Walking is possibly the least enjoyable and definitely the most annoying thing a human can do. I had to brainstorm a while. I resigned myself to a walker for the time being. I would climb a tree but I didn't want the monkeys to resent me. Spent some time in a pond, but I didn't want to become water myself. I was a door for a while. Life was good. Finally I landed on my destiny. I was sitting on top of my brother's house, pretending to be a satellite dish, when I saw a shooting star. That would be nice, to be a star. So I did. I stowed away in a space shuttle. It was surprisingly easy. There aren't really people trying to stop you going to space, so I just walked on. They handed me a suit, and with my three co-pilots we left our planet. They had different intentions than I, but we were all spacemen together. The time came for a space walk and I did what I do best. I stepped into the airlock without a suit and haphazardly ejected myself into the cold black of eternity. I regret it sometimes. Being a star. Don't get me wrong, it's the best decision I ever made, but I miss my neighbor's room. I find myself wondering if the lamp is thinking about me, as I think of her. I hope she doesn't mind I'm making natural light now. I pushed the thought out of my mind and went back to my new lifestyle. Let's see the Earth balance this out.