Error Budget

So in the same week that I'm subbing long term alone in a class with 18 rapscallion 8 year olds, I also went with Emma to meet an astrophysicist in Monrovia.

A lot of the time I don't know where I'm going because I'm just the driver on someone else's journey. There was alot of laundry, but it was Saturday and the Monrovia trip sounded better than teaching 3rd grade. Monrovia, as my brother told me years ago, "Not the end of the world, but if you stand on a box, you can see it from here."

Emma likee da math, especially the star kind, so we go meet the guy and the guy zoomed in to park next to us at what to me looked like an unmarked abandoned warehouse and then jumped out with his Australian (although he was British) accent and told us to come on in.

Inside the "lab," we waited for a handful of other star junkie people and he showed us what looked like the world's most boring objects in this lofty high ceilinged lab. There was like a giant metal plate. A round scaffolding type thing. Some stacked up metal boxes with some neatly wrapped wires coming out of it. A humming machine inside of a refrigerator. It's like if you shrunk down and could walk around ankle deep inside the mushy mechanical workings of your brain and its functional, no nonsense wiring. It's like backstage at a magic show if there was no magic invented yet. Like if you went to Magic Mountain and none of the rides were there. In fact all the magic is erased and it's just a parking lot in Valencia.

But as the people straggled in (the whitest teenager who ever lived with his parents - his sharp shoulder blades sticking out the back of him, the biggest things on him; a star trek nerd child molester whose teeth aimed down into his mouth like he'd been gulping fish in a strong current; a fat English astronomer for whom the word mirth was invented) into this dry white room full of haphazard metal leftover from a Chrysler Assembly Line Christmas Party, I realized that the magic of the stars wasn't the junk you had to build to see the stars. As we talked to Hank the guy we had come to meet, who loved science and the stars so much he bounced in his tennis shoes as he talked,  I realized that the magic of the stars is in all the questions.

Hank explained happily that for the last 14 years he's been working on the biggest telescope ever, a thirty meter one they're hoping to set up in Hawaii. The biggest ones we have now are 8 meters. He said you'd be able to point the laser and take a picture of a dot of space the size of-- well a dot, like a period - and inside that dot there are 400,000 galaxies. (pause. 4. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. In that period right there.) This telescope would help us be able to see layers of space we can't see now. We are blind. If all goes well it's only ten more years until the thing will be working and he will be dead just kidding. Except the people of Hawaii juuuust decided they don't want the world's biggest camera on their volcano so now unless you own a tall mountain it might end up strapped to Hank's car but at least it will be built. So they're gonna keep building it. Hope for the best.

It works with 400 mirrors, and all the mirrors are being built by us and Canada and Japan and India, and then polished in Rochester NY at the Canon lab (because who needs cameras anymore) and he said there they have to polish it mechanically until the concavity is exactly right because otherwise the pictures won't be clear. He said they can make them almost perfectly smooth but that on the project as a whole there is an Error Budget. Every piece of the telescope will still work even if in each piece there are tiny defects, as long as all the errors accumulated are contained within the error budget.

I'm thinking dammit I didn't know we could have an error budget. 

Here I am walking around the lab looking at the pieces of what looks like King Kong's handcuffs, or somebody's robotic team project suddenly abandoned for pizza at Shakey's, and he's talking about all the bunches of people who are figuring out the rivets and the weights and the dynamics of things and all I'm thinking about is man I want to spill my water all over these wires.

Also, I got a free bagel sandwich on the way in because the lady at the bagel place knows my family and I'm thinking, YES, I want to know all about the stars and feel confounded by the immensity of all we don't know but YES I also think a free bagel is its own kind of miracle.

My error budget is so high.

So I took back all my questions to my little class of 8 year olds where they are asteroids whizzing around me and crashing into me and just getting them to OPEN A BOOK IN A TIMELY MANNER is every bit as difficult as the little guy making the metal plate that holds the telescope at the precise angle and earthquake resistant springiness - YES but have you ever tried to get 8 year olds to STAND IN A QUIET LINE

For some reason I am in this life that is sloshing around me and over me and there is Emma leading me down this what is this science math path and the telescope warehouse had such high ceilings and why do high ceilings make you feel better

And the guy said if aliens were looking down at our earth they'd see that something was weird there because the atmosphere is unique and that is because we have so much oxygen here and that is not normal and all the other planets we have found don't have oxygen and I said but Hank why do we have oxygen and he said because we have trees

But why don't they have trees. Hank.

Why are we alone

So I let the kids in my class read in the closet and under the tables. Because in 5th grade when I was a kid I had a teacher who said reading should be fun, and comfortable, and she let us do that. So I prayed the principal didn't walk in and I let them do what I got to do, which is read with someone's head on their lap or against the bookshelf, lounging like cats on a rainy day. Because maybe someone, one of these kids, will grow up and remember to encourage another kid to think bigger or differently or sideways. We can get to the same place on a crooked path. It just takes longer.

Nothin to See

You guys should look at my Momish post. That's usually where I write about horses and farm related stuff.  It's at www.gomomish.blogspot.com

Really all I'm trying to do these days is what all of us are trying to do. Stay in shape. Play. Stay ahead.

I did have a colonoscopy and jury duty all in the same week. Once you've sprayed watery green jello out of you, you have a certain respect for the work your intestines quietly do every day for your whole life.

I feel sort of the same way about jury duty, where I had to wear closed toed shoes in summer, and luckily didn't have to serve and got to leave after an hour.

The most important thing right now is how much granola and celery I can eat.

Writers and Water and Summer Still

When the moon is out sometimes I forget who I am and I just become the shape.

At this yoga class Emma and I have been trying, she sort of reminds us to forgive everything, and let everything sink into the earth, like the earth can take it. The earth is holding up everyone we know. I am not very bendy.

This summer I never really felt like it started and now it's ending and I'm not good with the endings of things, because I like everything so much.  I don't even like to go in at night until it's too dark to see because have you seen the light on the trees and there's still moonlight, we can still stay out

Just don't want anything to be over. Each day longer I get to live, the more I love everything.

I was reading Mark Twain in the pool, floating around, between all the talking people in my house, and the kids playing on the raft, Mark Twain said to let yourself wander like a brook, even if you curve around and end up sort of where you started, it doesn't matter, isn't that funny even, you thought you were getting somewhere. Definitely not the where to, just the babbling that makes sense.

I guess I'm seeing that as a writer you walk in the creek, and you write about what you feel. All that feeling isn't just hippie, it's important cause if you feel it you can tell it. Not everyone can tell it, which I don't understand. Maybe that's how the pro surfer feels, like just get on a board man. Anyone can do it.

Mark Twain isn't even a guy, just like maybe Shakespeare wasn't. Mark Twain is a measurement for steamboats, a certain depth of water. He named himself after something he just heard, every day, working on the boats. Because it came into his ears, and he recognized himself, and the water is romantic, and the measuring of water- ridiculous?

The creek bends back to where it started, and that's funny.

Sometimes I see the shapes in my life as image without the sound, like looking in the window and seeing Barry talking to the people he gathered today to talk about the theater they used to run and travel with - just the outline of him standing and gesturing, while I'm out in a wet towel from the pool. Or watching the girls frolic in the pool and not picking up my phone or a book just watching them wrestle each other off the steps and fall into the water and do it over and over and laugh, like the way summer is unending like that, with nothing else to do, and there's popsicles and you're 12.

I'm in bed and my toes are not asleep. The moon is making me laugh.

Paradise

  (a new short story by Juliet Johnson)

I drove up to Napa and stopped at Harris Ranch because of the grass fed beef steak, delicious. It's the halfway mark. I didn't want to drive the rest of the way because I'm heading into the funeral, into the family that is the closest I have to family and the little one is dead because of alcohol and drugs.

I don't have to charge the car anymore because I got a new one at Galpin Ford, Jesse gets me a new deal everytime, this is an upgrade, but I can afford it and the gas mileage savings wasn't that great anyway with a hybrid so I'm back to this car for awhile and it's functional, it's a good deal, it's new and I like it.

He wasn't a baby, wasn't really little actually, he was 47. It's just when it's your godson, or the brother of your godson, and you've seen him born and grow up, he's still the baby of the family. Even though he's caused his parents and everyone heartache for years, with his addictions and his rehabs and his promises of quitting and his starting over and his stealing and his car accidents, and then his mother finding him dead sitting in a chair dressed for work after being fired from one job for being constantly late, and somehow miraculously three days later finding another job, a new one that would give him a chance and then coffee sitting cold in the mug and he's sitting at the apartment kitchen table dead. And sweet Sarah says oh it must have been a heart attack, and he was peaceful, because as a mom finding a son like that who has tortured himself and herself, even though she did everything for him, she was president of the PTA, she fed him organic food. No he had a heart attack. He's all done fighting the demons now. She felt relief, on top of her complete, bitter and annihilating depression, devastation. And disappointment.

I get to their house and there are tears, this is the journey with all the tears, I know it will be that because there is no way around it. But I'm in WINE country, and there is joy in the long cool bottles and oh my god, that is a 1963 cabernet and the cork slides out and I feel the wine's breath on the inside of my cheeks and I smile at Nick and Sarah and feel the gloss in my throat and it doesn't matter, the wealth, I become a better man for them.

It's three days of crying, a large group of us, only one day where we have to put his urn in the ground and the daughter of my godson is standing under a tree in her sixteenth year, reading a poem of a Bob Dylan song and then reading Goodnight Moon like he used to read to her when he wasn't loaded and this makes me choke far into the fat back of my head because this is not how it's supposed to be, out under the tree with the spiky oak leaves that poke through your shoes and make your feet bleed, out in this bleached California valley where everything's supposed to grow on vines. Where a few months ago there was a huge fire up the hill that completely wiped out an old town called Paradise. Wiped out, like gone. The vineyards, the old folks home, the trailer park. The little houses in the woods. People burned to death. People were staggering out covered in white ashes as their town disappeared, burning up the empty road behind them, all on a Saturday.

Back in the twilight kitchen there's a woman laughing so hard, everyone is dressed in casual formal wear, we are on a ranch but we put a child in the ground. Celebrating the life of he, as they say, when really mourning the death of or it's a swirl, the deadliest emotional swirl. She's laughing and I see the wine jolly, the glugging as it's poured like elves coming out of the mines with diamonds, fill my glass up, there's no counting. The colors are so bright, so deep, so red, so expensive, so rare. The connaisseurs all around me are vapid or insipid and rich and I've known these same scattered friends for years, on and off, and they annoy me but we are laughing because there's wine and then we're crying because there's death of death of the family, and then there's cognac, square thick bottle and the room in me stills.

I have wrecked cars. I have woken up in airports in cities I didn't know I was going to. I have lost lovers. I have tried to go forward but this place always gets me, it's that liquid.  My brain is functioning overboard, washed by tumultuous expensive wine and the storm of the boy in the ground, but the wine whipped ocean is steering the ship.

A part of me is hushed silent, there's a place I can't feel because that stuff kills the place in me, all the places in me. It is rare because they are rich and I am not, I used to be but those days are for fuzzy pictures on my Instagram, my prized stag I tote back on the roof of my car and display on Throwback Thursday. Cognac is still happening here, and I better stay away from that stuff. Cognac is poured for them. And then me.

The woman is still laughing and she throws her head back and thinks her bar stool has a back to catch her but it doesn't and she tips off and breaks her arm. There's much scuffling and shouting and I turn to look too quickly and slip and I'm falling and crack my head on the counter and my tooth goes into my lip and my face is covered in blood.

The hubbub of the hobnob still seems to be around the woman and her arm although someone helps me up, I think it's Nick because he is looking at me that way that I don't like, the one where his eyebrows are angry and mixed and it looks like pain, I made more pain, than he already had on his plentiful pained face. On this pained lacking rain lacking one son all these well meaning but sad friends weekend in viney vineyard Napa.

I hobble off to the quaint motor home near the vines where I'm sleeping on the ranch, the sky touches the land here like a wide universe umbrella, a limitless white cover and not comforting. I climb the metal step and get inside and it's only 6 o'clock on my apple watch and put one leg on the couch and I'm gone. There's pounding at the door and are you allright. Mark Fitzpatrick are you allright. He's using my two names so I know he's worried. Sarah is really  mad at you, he's yelling. I hear his feet kicking gravel. Sarah's been mad at me for 30 years, my loud growls back, noticing the blood flakes on the back of my hand. I put my hand to my face. There's blood on my face somehow.

When I get back to L.A., I text my girlfriend and I don't understand what she's talking about, why do I disappear. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere, I text back. That must've been really difficult, she says, I know it was a funeral but why do you drink. Why do you do that.

Nobody got out of control, I write back.