Launch
Missing link
99/12/24_23:50
The tenants were all gone now, the last of their abandoned possessions on
the curb. I watched the countdown for the same reason I used to watch the
Indy 500. 250 laps round and round intersperesed with alcohol and chewing
tobacco commercials, enduring that repetitive spectacle only in the hopes
of seeing a spectacular crash, the skid, the smash, the tumbling tires crashing
into the screaming spectators who scatter like water leaping away from a
stone.
I used to dream of going to the moon. It seemed increasingly unlikely, especially
now that men were being replaced by Vegetables as the astronauts of choice,
and ever since the experimental treatment that cured me of skin cancer I
was neither. Part shitter (man), part tuber (vegetable), I drank in bitterness
the more I pondered the injustice of my predicament. I felt more like Gus
Grissom than my namesake Buzz Aldrin. Grissom was a laughingstock after the
Mercury 7 capsule sank, no one believed that it had been an accident. And
then he died on the launchpad during a mock countdown, a routine drill, he
soared on a pillar of fire, he saw the earth spin under him at the envelope
of the atmosphere, he lived in all the elements, almost drowned in one, was
consumed by another.
I was like a test pilot in so many ways--I took a risk and opened a new frontier,
but no one would ever know that I was the missing link, recipient of the
first skin graft that would solve so many social ills on earth and lead to
the colonization of space.
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