It will be, I fear, the thudding sound of your hitting a bottom you thought you had hit some time ago . . .
But hadn't, as it turns out.
Will this bottom, then, be it, the last one?
Stay tuned . . .
And keep a bag packed.
But then there's the problem, almost instantly obvious to me as I watch the YouTube Whittle has referenced, that I do not speak - see, hear or understand - quantum.
Not a little.
Not at all.
I think, each time I encounter my own intellectual limitations, that I can overcome them if only I will try hard enough, concentrate, take my time, moving on only when I have mastered each proposition stated.
It never works.
And hasn't now.
For the last couple of days I've been thinking about how little I understand of the ways in which sound - musical sound - acts on my mind, my soul, to move me, sometimes to very real tears.
Something like this, for example:
Or to remind me of days past, brought back to the present, by some biochemistry wholly unknown to me.
This hymn was, at his written request, played at my dad's memorial service 38 years ago this year.
To this day, I cannot hear it without summoning so many thoughts of him, without tears coming to my eyes, with a catch in my throat that will, I know full well, make speech impossible for a short while even after the music has faded away.
Maybe from another dimension?
Can there be any doubt of it?
I wonder . . . not.
We summon Bill Whittle to this page whenever we can.
Which, thanks to the diligence of those whose websites I read faithfully, day-by-day, and who keep an eye out for his work, is not difficult to do.
Update:
To complete the thought - yeah, right - here's the YouTube that Whittle mentions, Imagining The Tenth Dimension.
In case, you know, you were tempted to think, if only momentarily, that your existence had any importance at all.
Laughing at that thought, we move along into our day.
Or at least I think we do.
And not sorry about it, either.
I know that divers fear getting caught up in the rapture of the deep - well, I don't know that, but I am so informed - because it can kill them, softly but surely.
I would not be at all surprised to be told that there is a similar phenomenon in the skies, for those who fly above the clouds.
Position: Approaching MMZO (Manzanillo, Mexico)
Altitude: 9,200 feet and descending
Indicated Air Speed: 250 knots
Equipment: A319
Pax-on-Board: 112
Airborne . . . The beach and (probably) my favorite Mexican runway in our twelve o'clock and a couple miles.
This is what flying is all about right here, right now. A superb 319 with two powerful engines inhaling the cool Pacific winds, a co-pilot with exceptional ability, and an efficient, take-care-of-business, no-whine flight attendant crew.
Wait, let me pinch myself . . .
Yep, I am awake.
The electronic tether to Mother snapped out of 20,000 feet . . . We are temporarily out of touch. Not even email . . .
Tell me it's not true.
What's a pilot to do?
It gets even better . . . We are out of radar contact, too. The tower controller at MMZO asked us to report twenty miles northwest of the airport.
Heaven!
Want to know what it's like up there? Captain Dave is there to tell you, when he can get the time to write, which, all of his readers repeatedly say, is nowhere near often enough.
Rapture is kind of like that, I suppose; you can never get quite enough of it.
When I was a little kid, and people flew in DC-3's and thought they were, well, in heaven, I wanted nothing more than a life in the clouds. For reasons that are, I confess, obscure to me even now, I never followed up on those dreams. I push the subject aside by thinking that well before I could have gotten far into the realization of my ambitions, failing eyesight - not too bad, but likely bad enough - would have grounded me anyway, and maybe that's right.
I tried, twice, to start down the road to getting a private pilot's license, but both times circumstances - my dad's sudden death bringing unusual responsibilities to my surviving mom, a life insurance issue with premiums to triple if I insisted on being so foolhardy as to go for the pilot's license - intervened, not immediately but close enough, yet far enough so that I could get at least a small taste of how wonderful it was to have the ability to break the bounds of earth, if only for a few hours rather than, off and on, for a lifetime.
I read Captain Dave whenever I find him, and I thank him for giving me back my childhood dreams, if only for a little while, if only sometimes.
Rapture of the skies?
No doubt it's there, waiting patiently, maybe even for me in my twelve o'clock.
Sometime, drawing closer . . .
If not above any immediate horizon.
Where you are usually advised to keep it, no matter what the "it" may be.
Not always possible, evidently.
Did you know that you can now buy chocolate cream cheese to go on your morning bagel?
I sure didn't.
And now, having been introduced to it by TLOML, who found it in the supermarket yesterday . . .
I sure do.
WOW!
Indeed.
Try it, my Mikeys.
You'll like it.
An Evening Mutter:
Interesting that. and a new stealth feature of the 'net, apparently.
Images taken properly from Google Images have a way of vanishing during the hours after their posting here.
In this case, this image:
So, I'm doubling down here.
The cream cheese folks?
We'll see.
Ready or not, here they come.
Again.
Wicked good.
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