Link.

(via Billboard)

(via Open Culture)

The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal.

You must be at peace with not knowing, they tell me. That is how you get through outer space, and find your way back home.

The thing about this thing, or, at least, this first week of this thing, is how it takes you out there to the cold planet again and again and again, when you aren’t expecting it. Long, undulating waves of fear pull you out to where you are alone and unreachable, even by words sent from the strongest satellite.

The thing that brings you back is love.

As someone who’s admired Xeni for a long time, my thoughts are with her, wishing her the very best recovery.

 I [remember[ lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

The instruments by which [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty.

The sun setting over a Wisconsin farm.

EARLY IN THE MORNING there is only the sound of the wind in the trees. Soon the birds will sing. You may hear the horn of a passing train, just loud enough to wake you.

I am at my parents’ cabin in Buffalo City, Wisconsin, a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River on the southern edge of Lake Pepin. Their cabin sits in the middle of town about 5 blocks from the river and about a mile from the Burlington Northern train tracks. As the day progresses, the quiet, tranquil morning is replaced by the sound of lawn mowers and outboard motors, kids playing and dogs barking across streets and backyards. The sounds are somehow less irritating here than in the city; they feel, instead, as if they’re part of the normal flow of everyday life.

Farther north on the river, the highway bends between the steep bluffs and the wide river below. Eagles circle overhead. This year’s wet summer means everything is even more green than usual. Groups of decked out bikers pass by on either side of the two lane highway. I am reminded of Neil Young’s classic album, Harvest Moon.

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair
Flyin’ in the wind
She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with
The very air she breathes
The air she breathes.

To the Moon and Back

On clear nights in the country the stars seem much closer in the sky — somehow bigger, brighter. From the too-dark inside of your car you look out and the moon looms large overhead, illuminating the river. Maybe you think of the Apollo missions and think to yourself that that was one Michael Jordan-sized leap. In Chris Jones’ Out of Orbit he makes the point that people in pursuit of space are from open places, but he doesn’t mention maybe the greatest pursuant of all, Carl Sagan. Who grew up in Brooklyn. But the point is well taken: space seems both closer and more intensely vast out here. You can see how young men and women might fall in love.

The small towns along the river — old river and railroad towns from the 19th century — are quiet except for when a train goes through and rattles and shakes and makes a horn sound that earplugs don’t stand a chance against. The quiet has been replaced by something else. Something foreign. An hourly wake up call. You still here? Good.

But mostly there is just the quiet. The towns, far enough away from the Twin Cities, missed the big freeway-enabled big-box store developments of the late 20th century so they seem almost untouched by modernity. There are plenty of boutique shops, cafés, antique stores, and now even wineries to cater to the weekend crowd. It’s a lot like the Pacific Coast highway, without the hordes of people. Mostly, though, they’re just wonderfully old river towns — Alma’s downtown district is on the National Register of Historic Places — squeezed between the river on one side and the bluffs on the other.

If you’re lucky in life, there are moments in every day or week where you’re reminded — like the astronauts of Expedition Six when they finally landed in Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz space capsule after having been circling the Earth for 161 days — that we’re, all of us, actually living in paradise. Right now.

I think I have more of those moments here than anywhere else I’ve been to in the world.

I know so many people who think they can do it alone
They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones

Now what can you tell them
And what can you say that won’t make them defensive

I know there’s an answer
I know now but I have to find it by myself

They come on like they’re peaceful
But inside they’re so uptight
They trip through their day
And waste all their thoughts at night

Now how can I come on
And tell them the way that they live could be better

I know there’s an answer
I know now but I have to find it by myself

Now how can I come on
And tell them the way that they live could be better

I know there’s an answer
I know now but I have to find it by myself
– Beach Boys “I Know There’s An Answer” (Wilson/Sachen/Love)

Sometimes I forget just how good Pet Sounds is. Every time I hear it I’m blown away.

If Wikipedia is to be believed the lyrics and title to “I Know There’s An Answer” were changed after concerns it would be too controversial as it reflected an LSD trip. In any case, the resulting lyrics go a long way to describing the struggle that a lot of people face–myself included–with social anxiety. Social anxiety–in my experience anyway–is partly about letting self-centeredness get in the way of real connections with other people.

Oh yeah, and it’s a gorgeous song.