The Truth Is Out There: A Shoutout To Mulder

It started when i was kid, maybe seven or eight. I was to listening to P.M. Dawn and Belbiv Devoe, loved Kraft dinner and could occupy hours in the presence of Legos. It began: a recurring nightmare that I became a ship, a rocketship, blasting off from this Earthen surface toward the cratered Moon. I would burn through the atmosphere and watch the hue turn blue to black, stars appear like oncoming twilight, and up ahead our lunar companion slowly growing closer. About this time, always the same in each dream, i would realize my trajectory was amiss and that i would pass by the Moon. The overwhelming notion of Newton's Law on my young brain... (and countless sci-fi films like 2001 and Alien and later, X Files) i would float away forever~ same speed, same direction. If the Little Prince had been American...

I would awake heavy each morning following these dreams. The images and feelings summoned by the notion of eternal drifting left me shaken and only by early afternoon would i shrug it. These dreams faded after a sum of years and i happily returned to the innocent filth of youthful fantasy, dreaming of those girls in homeroom in strange places and positions. Then just reaching teen, i awoke one night to find myself curled in a ball and suspended ten feet from my bed (the high ceilings of my room allowing). Fully awake now but unable to render escape, i realized that i was hanging such as the Moon and... that i was the Moon. How lonesome it is, to be the Moon! I began crying out for help until my brother's girlfriend came and saved me. Her flashlight illuminating my room found me lying face down on my bed, eyes wide. We chainsmoked on the porch until i calmed down enough to go back to bed.

This is all to say, my fascination with the cosmos has always been acute and beckoning. I read of the methane seas on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The splintered icy surface of Europa and the thick ocean below it, steadily orbiting Jupiter. The strange hexagon shape at Jupiter's northern pole; the solid geometry holding constant despite heavy storms about it. Water-eroded canals of Mars, its daytime temperatures between 50-60ºF; the erupting volcanoes of Io sending magma into space; or the acid-rain on Venus. And us, the blue planet, a pinprick in the cosmos.

Sometimes when i'm feeling cynical i think about our quiet steady evolution, our false notion of progress. All that we've learned and then relearned cos we'd forgotten. Our population and technology running like seismic waves over a span of countless time. I think about our accepted ideologies and religions, barely matured in a few thousand years. And that only a few centuries ago people believed the world to be flat... (of course, a few thousands years before that... they knew it was round), natural resources infinite, wigs and coursets fashionable. And look how far we've come.

Whenever i'm in a pinch i like to imagine the future, looking backward at a certain moment: a job interview, a breakup, a date, or a bender. It allows me to watch from afar and find the humor in an otherwise awkward, bumbling moment. I imagine the future now and see the obvious discovery of other lifeforms in the systems and galaxies beyond, which will fundamentally crumble our religion, false knowledge and virture. Without our God, our foundations for science and government, where will we be? And that's the humor of it; we'll be in exactly the same place without any difference except the knowledge that certainly... we are not alone.


The volcanoes of Jupiter's Io