Crit

“2001” in 2024

LET’S TAKE IT FROM THE top, shall we?

– Earth-orbiting weapons: check.
– Commercial spaceflight: check.
– “Shirtsleeve” space environments: check.
– Seatback videoscreens: check. (Legal pad-sized portable videoscreens: check.)
– Spaceflight stewardesses: not to my knowledge.
– Zero-G pens: check.
– Zero-G toilets: check.
– Space station: check. (Commercial space station, with hotel: in development.)
– Voiceprint identification: check.
– Inexpensive picturephones: check.
– Pasty space food: check. (Actually, we’re now well beyond the “pasty” stage, so double-check.)
– Lunar base: in development.
– Fashionable spacesuits: check.
– Crewed deep-space mission: in development.
– Voice-interactive, slightly sinister AI: check.
– Tint-adjustable glass: check.
– Solar-powered alien transmitter buried millions of years ago beneath the Moon’s most conspicuous crater: Dear God, I hope so.

Writ

Free Verse: “And God Said”

SEEK ME, EACH OF YOU,
in your own way.
And when you find Me?
Prove it:
Leave each other
the hell alone.

originally published: 2011.06.04

Life

5 Thoughts: Make. BELIEVE.

0. READ CAREFULLY — THERE WILL BE a test later on.

1. In the book of Exodus, Moses tells the Children of Israel that G?d wants to enter into a contract with them. With one voice, and without knowing the details, the people reply, “Na’aseh v’nishma” — literally, “We will do, and we will hear/understand!”

2. Many people may argue that the formulation is backwards. How can you do something unless you first hear and/or understand it? But the Torah is imparting a great truth: that one can understand certain things only by doing them.

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Crit, Life

Sales Experience Necessary

IT HAS LONG BEEN PROPOSED in some circles that, in order to build a better class of citizens, we need some sort of national-service program along the lines of an in-house Peace Corps or revamped Works Progress Administration. “Give people the tools to literally build the country they live in,” goes the argument, “and they will obtain a greater sense of national ownership, pride, and responsibility.”

Not a bad idea, that. Here’s another:

“Everyone should work retail for a year. Especially during the holiday rush.”

I’m not joking.

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We’re all just raindrops on a windshield.”
— Jerry Seinfeld, to Michael Richards in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”

Life

Let’s Get Real

ON THIS DAY EIGHT YEARS ago, I stepped out from under the shadow of a decades-long cannabis addiction. And I haven’t been the same man since.

Thank God.

What brought me to that point was twofold: I decided that 1) I was being selfish to the ones I most love by robbing them of my alert and unaltered presence, and 2) I just didn’t like feeling stupid all the time anymore.

Looking back, I realize that cannabis had structured my existence in some scary ways. I planned my life around it, spent my money on it, self-sabotaged with it, and turned into a raving jerk when I was deprived of it. What I didn’t know at the time was that these behaviors are all symptomatic of addiction.

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Life, Torah

One Another

THE SCENE: LAST WEEK AT a medical office.

It was a strictly routine matter, but one which involved removing my cabbie cap and disclosing my kippah.

“How was your Chanukah?” the technician asked.

“It was good,” I replied. “Lots of light in a very dark time.”

His eyes held mine. “Tell me about it. I celebrate Chanukah too.”