not all heroes wear capes
Take two minutes, for you, because you deserve it.
the glint of light on broken glass
This is one of my earliest childhood memories.
It is long before I had any siblings.
I’m probably three years-old. It is the autumn of 1975.
I live in the northwestern San Fernando Valley, on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, just a couple of miles south of Spahn Ranch. The Valley is largely undeveloped where we live, and what is developed is mostly farmland. In the 90s, I will be that guy who says “When I lived here, this was all farmland…” while he sweeps his hand across the view of endless development. I will be that guy every time I drive down Topanga. I will spend the rest of my life missing the quiet simplicity and wide open space that I took for granted as a child, while also accepting that taking things for granted is what children do best.
So it is in the early evening. The air is warm, but a hint of a chill occasionally swirls around us on a light breeze that barely moves the dry air. I’m standing between my parents, my mother holds my left hand, my father holds my right hand. We are in the yard that separates our little house — a chicken coop that had been converted into a home — from the big farm house that my great grandparents live in. It is their backyard, our frontyard, and my entire world. I will spend hundreds hours on that lawn, listening to Star Trek Power records on my portable plastic record player, in a tee pee that my dad makes for me out of blankets and broomsticks. It will be every planet in our solar system, and every planet I create in my imagination.
We are next to the walnut tree that will be struck by lightning in a few months. That tree will split in two, catch fire, and the part that falls to the ground will narrowly miss destroying our home. The fire will be extinguished by the rain before the fire department arrives. We stand there, the three of us, beneath the bare branches of that tree, its crisp leaves crunching beneath our feet. We look to the eastern horizon, and we look at the moon.
The moon is as big as the entire sky. It covers the entire horizon, impossibly big. It is yellow and the seas and craters are so big, they look like continents. The moon is so big and so bright, it frightens me, but my father soothes me, tells me that it’s far away, in space, and that we are safe. We stand there, my parents both younger than my children are now, and we marvel at an optical illusion that I will never forget, and never experience again in my life.
That was the moment that I fell in love with space. That was the moment that the moon stopped being a thing in the sky and became a place I could maybe touch one day. From that moment, I wanted to learn everything I could about space. I would read Let’s Go To The Moon with my grandmother as often as she would allow it. I would make rockets out of everything I could get my hands on, and imagine riding them into space. When Star Wars came out a few years later, I wanted to see it because it was about people who lived in space. When I finally got to work on Star Trek, even the longest day with the worst dialog in the first season was amazing to me, whenever I stood on a set and looked out through a window into a fake starfield, because I got to pretend that I, too, lived in space.
I grew up. A lot of things changed in my life, but I never stopped loving space. I never stopped looking up into the dark sky and imagining that, someday, maybe I’d go there and come back.
Today, I found out that I kind of get to be in space and live right here on Earth … because an asteroid has been named after me. It’s asteroid 391257, and it’s currently in Canis Minor. As soon as it gets dark here, I’m going to walk out into my backyard, look up into the sky, just a little above Sirius, and know that, even though I can’t see it with my naked eye, it’s out there, and it’s named after me.
I think it’s time for a reboot check-in
I had decided that I wasn’t going to do these after a year, but since I’m still committed to the changes I made a little over a year ago, and I need to post something today, to keep the chain unbroken, I’m going to check in and see how I’m doing. I haven’t actually thought about these things until now, so when I give myself a grade today, it’ll be an honest grade, based on where I am right now.
If this is your first time hearing about the reboot, here’s what you need to know:
Just about one year ago, I took an honest look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. I needed to reset a lot of habits, make some significant changes to the way I approached just about everything in my life, and keep working at it, even when it was hard.
I can’t even believe that it’s already been a year, and that it’s only been a year, because time feels like that when you’re 44, I guess.
Here are the things I decided to address:
- Drink less beer.
- Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
- Write more.
- Watch more movies.
- Get better sleep.
- Eat better food.
- Exercise more.
Every month, I wrote a post that looked into each of those things I decided to change, and examined how I was doing with them. That was a helpful part of the exercise, because it made me look at myself and my choices honestly and fearlessly. At times, it motivated me to work harder, and at other times it encouraged me by making me realize that I was doing better than I thought.
This time around, since I haven’t done a public check-in since October, I’m going to give myself two grades on each point. One will be the overall since last time, and one will be for January. Here we go.
We have come so far, America, yet we have so far to go
Last night, while looking for a movie to watch, I said to Anne, “How about Selma? It’s timely.”
It’s one of those movies that we’d both been intending to see since it came out, but never got around to. I tracked it down and we settled in. It is a powerful, moving, beautiful film that at least one Fascist who is about to become an illegitimate president should watch.
When the film was over, I sat on the couch, and wept for several minutes. This isn’t ancient history. This isn’t fiction. This is something that happened less than a decade before I was born, and the kind of systemic racism it reveals is still happening today from Ferguson to Baltimore to towns all across America that never make the news. And now we are about to have an illegitimate president who would look at George Wallace and think he was the hero of this story.
It’s appalling to me that our SCOTUS threw out the voting rights act that Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and so many other civil rights leaders fought so hard to bring into law. It’s even more appalling that, half a century later, our country still needs it. It’s disgusting and sickening that the idiot who is about to become the least popular president in history doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, about the people who fought so hard (some giving up their lives) to ensure that their fellow Americans were allowed to exercise the rights given to them in our country’s Constitution.
I went to a hockey game today. At one point in the second period, a picture of Dr. King was put on the jumbotron with an excerpt from his famous “I have a dream” speech printed next to him. There was no announcement, there was no attention drawn to it, to him, to his sacrifices and to the entire reason today is a federal holiday. I think I was one of maybe half a dozen people in the Staples Center who applauded. I’m pretty sure I was the only one (at least in my section) who stood up. That made me feel ashamed for my country, and so disappointed in my fellow citizens. More attention was paid to the kiss cam, than to the memory of the man who we are meant to honor and remember today.
We have come so far, America, yet we have so far to go.