Disturbing / Celebrity Dreams:

I had a dream that I was working at a big urban high school. For some reason, Ben Affleck was a hit man who'd been hired to kill me, and his arrival was imminent. I knew he was coming, so I carried a gun with me every day. When he arrived, we had a long protracted pursuit in and around the school that ended when both of our guns jammed. Relieved, I threw mine on the ground and returned to my classroom. Ben ran away. Later, I was teaching in my classroom when I heard screams outside. I looked out the window and saw a boy shooting other students. I immediately thought that it might be my discarded gun he was using, and thought about the legal ramifications for me if it was. Then I was ashamed for being so self-interested at such a time. The boy shot one student twice in the head at point blank, then turned the gun on himself. At this point, I turned around and saw one of the girls in my own classroom with a gun in her own mouth. I started shouting no, somebody stop her. I kept shouting no! until I was saying it aloud in my sleep, at which point I woke up.

Clearly, this dream is a subconscious manifestation of my attitude towards gun control, which is the same as any rational person: we need less gun control, not more. Situations like those described in my dream would never occur if more people were allowed to carry guns. It's the liberal whackjobs in Congress with their seven-day waiting periods, trigger locks, and automatic weapons restrictions who are indirectly responsible for the slaughter of innocents every day. The logic is clear: more guns means less violence. This dream was a clear signal that I should stop procrastinating and join the NRA now.

(I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your sense of sarcasm is not terribly sharp, you probably shouldn't be visiting this site.)

The other night, Jenn and I did this:

We used all the letters.

From The War Against Silence:

We go into space because to not do so would be suicide. We will use this planet up; we will need to get off it; to be ready to get off when we will have to, we will need to have started trying long ago. Our long ago is now. We go into space because we believe our lives are not futile. We do things that we know might cost our lives, because we know some things are worth that much.

When the Challenger slipped past this life, while trying to get off the Earth, it was neither a disaster nor a tragedy. Seven people cannot be a disaster, not when the planet can twitch and bring down cities. Nor can any death we've trained for be tragic. It will cost countless lives to save our kind of animal, by the time we are saved. The price of our survival is, eventually and inevitably, all of our lives. Survival is exactly the process of dying. Noble survival is dying well. Those seven people knew their lives might be the next seven paid. Investigation and blame and correction are real and necessary, but spaceships are going to blow up. They push our capabilities past the real limits of our control. We fly until we crash; that is how we do most things, at every order of magnitude. Every shuttle crew that took off after Challenger knew, a thousand times more vividly than before but exactly as surely, that they might die in seconds.

Columbia came apart in the sky over Texas, minutes from home. Every crew after this will know, as they knew already, that they are never safe. Not over Texas, not over Florida, not driving away with their families, not awake or asleep. We are not safe. Every time our hearts contract, we risk everything. Why else would we bother?

Eventually, they will figure out what destroyed Columbia. Like every other setback, it will slow our progress but not stop it. The space program will continue. Anybody who thinks seven or fourteen deaths mean that we must give up on our species' future had better be prepared to argue for the complete abolition of every other mode of mechanized transport, all of which kill more people while producing less durable benefit. After a few days, some other horrible thing will distract the news. If we are still stupid enough creatures to fight a war anywhere on this planet, many sevens of people will die. If we are not, earthquakes and mudslides will get them.

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