Update, and Notes on "The Shuttle Sleeps Alone Tonight"

Hello! How have YOU been. Good, good. Glad to hear it. I hope that little thing with the whatnot cleared up. The salve helped? I thought it might.

Me? Oh, you know, this and that. Mostly this. Probably less that than I reasonably should.

Well, in case you remain unswallowed by the hydra of social media, I should probably mention my story "The Shuttle Sleeps Alone Tonight" published by the wonderful, friendly, and understanding folks at Devilfish Review.

It's a little elegy to the space program, written when they were moving the Space Shuttle Enterprise onto the Intrepid, and it revolves around something I heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson say to the effect that, should we attempt to return to the moon in this day and age, we'd have to reinvent much of the technology from the Apollo program, because many of the people that got us to the lunar surface in the first place are now old and/or dead, and we kept inadequate records of their creations. The confluence of these two ideas (a de-prioritizing of sending men into space, coupled with the evaporation of knowledge), together with the decommissioning of the ship that was supposed to make travel into space a daily occurrence, created a feeling close to what I imagine is meant when the Japanese speak of mono no aware AKA the "Pathos of Things." There's a sense in everyday objects (and, for a while, the Space Shuttle was an everyday object for me, as familiar and as homey as a toaster) of the passing of time, and the transience of all things. I wanted to capture that sense of loss, to talk about the hopes and dreams of humanity that still awaken in us when we look into the sky at night. To hopefully revive, by showing where we've fallen short, the vision of the future that once was, that might still be again.