Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?

SCENE: It's the middle of the night. A man and woman are sitting on a low brick porch with an iron railing, in cheap folding chairs. HE holds a 32-oz. cup full of whiskey and water, and he chain-smokes. SHE holds a can of beer, and there’s a cat asleep among the empty cans under her chair. It’s a hot night but there’s a misting rain that cools them and makes everything shine, even in the low light. Both are slightly drunk and laughing.

SHE: We’re going to Hell.

HE: ‘Sno such place.

SHE: No. But, pretend. Just to keep the conversation going.

HE: Okay. There’s a Hell. (drinks) Just the one?

SHE: As many as you like.

HE: Really?

SHE: Sure. How many do you expect to need?

HE: Ummm…fourteen.

SHE: Okay. Fourteen hells, then. And we’re going.

HE: Now?

SHE: Eventually.

HE: To which?

SHE: All of them. We’ll split ‘em. Fourteen hells…that’s seven apiece.

HE: Wait, we aren’t gonna share hells? ‘Cause, love, if I can’t hang around with you, I’m not going.

SHE: Well, you can come visit, I guess.

HE: Okay. We’ll build a subway connecting them all, like the boroughs in New York.

SHE: Won’t that be expensive?

HE: I don’t know from infrastructure. And anyway, will there even be money in Hell?

SHE: Well, it’s the root of all evil. I had just assumed, I guess…

HE: Maybe I’ll hitchhike, then.

SHE: Good for you. Though I’m guessing that in Hell, you have to be careful who you take a ride from. If Ted Bundy pulls up in his little blue Bug…

HE: Not a problem. Serial killers lose a lot of their mystique if you’re already dead.

SHE: I suppose that’s true.

HE: I’m gonna taunt ‘em. I’m gonna walk up to Jack the Ripper and just point and giggle. Their eternal punishment will be me making fun of them. It’ll be a blast.

SHE: Looking forward to it, are you?

HE: Hell? Oh, sure. I mean, who wants to go to Heaven? Singing hymns and praising God and all that, sounds kinda boring to me. And it’s forever, remember. A little bit of boring is gonna go an awful long way. Hell seems like it would suit us better.

SHE: You know, you’re right. The things we’re going to Hell for, those are the things we enjoy, right? So maybe in Hell we'll be surrounded by the things we love. We'll bring our taste for illicit substances and lewd entertainment with us...

HE: ...we'll have a few drinks, smoke a little pot, get in the odd barfight, fool around a bit...

SHE: ...an eternity of sex, drugs, and John Waters movies, huh?

HE: It'll be divine.

SHE: So to speak.

Dancing with the Moon

Months are getting shorter. This is happening so slowly that you can’t really tell unless you use very precise measurements and careful observation, but it IS happening. Back when folks first started to look at the sky and try to keep track of the rate at which things happened, months were approximately 40 days long. Now, as I expect everyone knows, they’re about 28 days long.

The reason for this is the gravitational effect that our blue planet and its moon have on each other. The tides she creates on our surface are very gradually slowing down our rate of rotation. And the pull we exert on her is speeding up her orbit.

To which you’re saying, “So what? I didn’t come to the blog today for an astronomy lesson.” Well, okay, but keep listening.

You know how the moon always shows the same face to us? Her rotation has synchronized itself so that she always faces the center of her orbit. It turns out that that’s natural; any two objects in orbit around each other will eventually do that. They start off like they’re next to each other in a mosh pit, swinging around each other and spinning crazily and looking every-which-way, but little by little they come together and start doing a waltz, locked in an embrace, gazing into each other’s eyes. That waltz, and not the slam dance, is the natural order of things, the result towards which our mutual orbit is drawing us.

So someday, about 20,000 years from now, we will reach a point beyond which we will always show the same face to her, just as she does to us now. Which means that she will, from that moment on forever, hang always over the same spot on the Earth.

And what I’m thinking is this: I want to find out what spot that’s going to be. And then, when I know, I’m gonna move there. And if I happen not to live for 20,000 more years (‘cause, you know, accidents happen), then when I die, that’s where my remains are gonna be stored. Wherever she’s gonna be, I wanna be there, too.