In June I went to see the new Star Trek movie.  When I left the movie theater I went to a roof party in Williamsburg as a thunderstorm was ending.  The sky opened up in all sorts of brilliant colors with terrifying mammatus clouds forming overhead.  The city skyline was cast in shadows as the sun was setting just past the line of clouds.  With those clouds overhead, lightning to the east and the sun to the west there was a real otherworldly sense to the evening – the clouds seemed so unusual and beautiful and the city looked so massive and metallic.  It felt like I could have been on some alien planet but it was just Earth, our beautiful turbulent little pod in the vacuum of space.

Since that day – I’ve been thinking a lot about space, both as a near fictional place where I can project my dreams for myself and humankind but also as the very real wasteland that is at once fantastic radiant gold and cold, dark and airless.  There have been numerous things to keep my interest peeked – the anniversary of the moon landings, the solar eclipse in Asia and a lunar eclipse, the discovery of a comet impact on Jupiter’s surface and the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.  I have space fever.
Much of this fascination is in part nostalgia.  When I was a child space was a constant source of amazement.  I was obsessed with aviation and spaceflight.  I had a mini-planetarium in my room and I loved reading about the space shuttles.  I am sort of reclaiming that wonder but now with the perspective of an adult.  I can sit down and seriously read about the heavens and have a chance at comprehending the vastness and strangeness.  The most strange thing to realize is that WE ARE IN SPACE! Earth is a small point within space and we are not at the center of space.  Reality is infinite and humanity is on some random (if awesome) planet.  It’s very exciting to think about.

I have a copy of the National Audobon Society’s Field Guide to the Night Sky. I’ve moved this book from apartment to apartment and always thought it was a useless task.  Reading it now makes me yearn for an unpolluted night sky to be able to gaze out at the stars.  I was thinking how strange it is to be in this position unable to see the stars.  Our ancestors couldn’t avoid them and often needed them as a means of navigation and of discerning the passing of months and the seasons.  Hopefully our ancestors will be out amongst them.  But we’re in this middle ground, too modern to see stars like our ancestors did and too primitive to really know them.
So I read read read my maps and try to figure out this night sky that I can’t see and pray to whatever’s out that that we make it out there. Our future lies up there in that vault above us – there’s just too much to do and explore up there for us to stay put forever.

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Some people were born utterly driven.  They are tireless.  They are productive.  They never slow down.  I am not one of these people but I was once more ambitious.  I don’t know what eroded that ambition -  defeats along the way, more ambitious competition or complacency – but at some point it felt like I was to comfortable and didn’t have more strive in me.

Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood says “I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed.”  I need to regain my competition.  My father would often watch these huge epics where men walked over the Earth in search of treasure of some sort or another, or would trudge on these vast military campaigns – being pawns in huge global dramas, and he’d say “wouldn’t they have been happier if everyone stayed at home?”

Yes, everyone probably would have been happier if they had all just stayed at home.  Far fewer people certainly would have been hacked to death.  There’s also something to be said for leaving your mark on the world.  It’s hard to get ambition if you don’t got it, but sometimes a small spark can really set off a huge conflagration.  All that dead wood that’s built up in my head and my life over the past few years – I think – will set off a most wondrous era.

Last night I was anxious and feeling underwhelmed when I went to sleep, maybe then it’s not surprising that I suffered a dream that preyed on those feelings.  I don’t know what to think about dream interpretation – I guess some of my dreams have meaning (they’re probably about sex even when they’re not about sex) – others are enjoyably bizarre but this one was not enjoyable but it was exhilarating.

I awoke in a sweat.  I was in a tent.  It was light outside, cool, but not cold.  There was the sound of people working outside in a camp.  I look down to discover two macabre sights.  The first were my hands – they had been severed, leaving stubs that already had had time to heal.  The other was a human head – the head of world’s most famous fugitive: Osama bin Laden.  His body was laying in the tent just a few feet away from me.  I did not know if I was a prisoner or if my presence in the camp was even known.  I just knew I had to get out of there and, for the twenty-five million dollars, I had to get this head out of there with me.  I knew how I arrived there but the memories came only if I thought about it – like remembering some book I had years ago, I don’t remember it now though.  I managed to wrap up the head in a rag with my stubs and hold it between my arm and my body on my left side.  I left the tent and snuck my way out of the camp.  Before I woke up, I remember sitting in an infinite desert wondering how I would make it back to an American Army base without being discovered or mistaken for a terrorist myself.

So I had yet another dream with Johnny Bench in it last night.  He owned a deli on Flatbush Ave near the Fulton St corner and he just got all the paper work done to have a flower stand in front and leased it out to a Ecuadorian guy who only wanted to sell flowers to save up money so that he could work at a marina in the summer and totally live it up.  He had never seen the ocean before so he was really excited.  Johnny Bench was inside trying to figure out which products to stock his store with.  I told him – when in doubt “stock it.” He really got a kick out of that “when in doubt, stock it” he kept saying “man, stock that!” “stock you!” he laughed and laughed.  I laughed too but in a different way.  I left the store on the corner of Flatbush and looked up at a bright pink sky – “red sky in morning; sailors take warning” I saw the Ecuadorian fellow fixing up the flower arrangement and thought of the marinas and walked off into the morning.

I really want to get out of the United States more often in this stage of my life.  It’s true that tuition eats up a lot of my income but I think I can still make it happen and should use my two weeks vacation to further the goal of going abroad.  There’s a lot to be nervous about when traveling however and I thought I should write out a pro and con list of world travel
PROs
1) being able to tell good stories
2) eating strange new and possibly delicious food
3) brushing up on my foreign language skills (I took three years of Russian, four of Spanish and two of Ancient Greek for a reason – right???)
4) seeing wonderful sites
5) meeting new people
6) depending on the situation – helping people  (although my last attempt at volunteering abroad wasn’t so amazing)|

CONs
1) feeling like a tourist
2) having that feeling of shame about being an American (usually experienced when Americans are present – especially when they are high-fiving college kids and or conspicuously dressed missionaries), because I really want to love my country
3) the expense, length and ecological impact of air travel
4) “express” kidnappings
5) deciding whether to purchase international health insurance

So now that I’ve gotten that down I should prioritize where I want to go.  I have a desire to see the United States – besides the Northeastern states, I’ve only ever been to Atlanta, the Rockies and Los Angeles.  I need to road trip and make destinations through my own country, but this is an international travel post.

Top Five Places I Want to Visit
1) Mexico (specifically Mexico City, Oaxaca, Puebla and Vera Cruz)
2) Turkey (Istanbul and the Turkish Aegean)
3) Quebec (I’ve never even been to Canada! Can you believe it?! I must go to Montreal – it’s only six hours away!)
4) Berlin (it’s supposed to be the greatest place on the planet)
5) Hong Kong (maybe it’s the allure of John Woo’s movies, the aroma of Cantonese cooking or maybe it’s the desire for an amazing tailor)

Now I just need travel buddies….